The post If Restaurants Serve Up Climate Education, Will Diners Pay Attention? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The PLNT Impact Tracker on PLNT Burger’s website wants you to think about what you’re eating. The tracker, which appears on the website of this East Coast vegan chain and on its ordering app, estimates the amounts of water, land, CO2, and oil saved by eating vegan burgers. The numbers—14.4 kg of CO2 saved per burger, for instance—are derived from the 2022 environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report of the vegan brand Beyond Meat, from which PLNT Burger gets its patties.
These numbers are largely hypothetical. The most accurate measure of land or CO2 “saved” by ordering a PLNT Burger is only attained if you’d originally planned to order a fast-food beef burger instead. And of course, it’s not like for every PLNT Burger sold, a factory farm gives up five acres of land, or releases a cow from the slaughter line—actually meaningful solutions to the factory meat problem. Nor has eating plant-based meat made a significant impact on beef production, according to a 2023 report.
The PLNT Impact Tracker on PLNT Burger’s website.
But the numbers still count for something: They provide a tangible incentive to address an oft-intangible problem. “In the app, we calculate your resource savings as an individual consumer, and then we share that with our community as encouragement,” says PLNT Burger co-founder Jonah Goldman. This ideally reinforces the connection in the customer’s brain between their everyday choices and the resulting impacts on the environment.
“You’ve saved so many gallons of water, you’ve saved so many square meters of land and emissions and energy,” as Goldman says. “Congratulations. Thank you.” PLNT Burger further incentivizes plant-based purchases by turning that data into a loyalty program, rewarding customers with free food for amounts of water or land “saved.”
However, if you were to walk into one of PLNT Burger’s dozen-plus locations, you won’t find a deluge of information about the environmental impact of eating meat. Instead, you’ll see signage about the health benefits of plant-based eating—the “primary drivers of consumer choice are personal benefit,” says Goldman—and the menu board, designed like any one in other fast-food chains. Goldman says that though employees are trained to speak on the environmental benefits of plant-based eating, “it’s not as embedded in our cashier training or our interactions with consumers, because we really are focused on positive guest experience.” The environmental mission can come later.
Climate change has marked effects on the restaurant industry. Changing temperatures and weather patterns mean ingredients that were once common are now harder to come by, and sourcing ingredients from sustainable farms can often be more expensive. Some restaurateurs hope that by championing things like locally sourced produce and sustainable seafood, diners will understand what a climate-friendly diet looks like.
But while speaking about the environment is important, “preaching,” as Goldman puts it, is a turn-off, especially in hospitality, an industry that consumers rely on to provide, among other things, a good time . . . without interruptions. This puts restaurateurs in a precarious position of having to communicate choices and challenges without sullying the fun of eating out. Climate messaging can’t work if customers are too put off to walk through the door once, let alone habitually.
Climate Action and Climate Messaging
Yang’s Kitchen, which Chris Yang opened in Los Angeles with his wife in 2019, has always focused on quality ingredients, like locally milled flour for its scallion pancakes and produce from Food Roots, which distributes locally grown Asian fruits and vegetables. On its website, the restaurant describes itself as a place that “strives to source local, sustainable and organic when possible,” and lists its farmers on the menu. Initially, the priority was on quality and flavor, not necessarily environmental impact. But when COVID hit, Yang says it clarified the bigger picture. “I realized if we, as a society, are going to handle COVID so poorly—it worried me about what would happen when climate change really takes effect,” he says.
Chris Yang opened Yang’s Kitchen in Los Angeles with his wife, Maggie Ho, in 2019. (Photo credit, left: Jennifer Chong) At right, Yang’s Kitchen Arroz Caldo. (Photo credit: Yang’s Kitchen)
So, he took action. He worked on getting even more supply from local farms, and at a time when there were seemingly constant grocery shortages, he connected customers directly to the farms where he was getting his eggs and produce. He focused on finding suppliers that engaged in regenerative farming, and partnered with Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit that helps restaurants contribute to sustainable farming initiatives, often by adding a fee to every check that can be removed upon request. ZFP then distributes those funds, via grants, to farmers for regenerative farming projects.
“As I looked up more about regenerative farming, Zero Foodprint popped up,” says Yang. “I saw these chefs and these restaurants are already involved in doing this.” The bottom of the Yang’s Kitchen menu included this note to diners: “We are working with Zero Foodprint to restore the planet.”
Restaurants that care about the climate have a number of resources at their disposal to both help with and certify their commitments. Crave Fishbar, for instance, advertises itself as New York’s “first 100 percent sustainable seafood restaurant” by doing things like following the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s sustainable seafood recommendations, composting leftover food with Afterlife Ag, which uses the compost to grow mushrooms (which they then use in cooking), and giving leftover oyster shells to the Billion Oyster Project.
Crave Fishbar is also a B Corp-certified restaurant, recognized for its social impact along with several other criteria, including environmental impact. These are just a few of many designations—like the Michelin Green Star and the Green Restaurant Award—that use different criteria to affirm a restaurant’s adherence to or engagement with sustainability standards.
The proliferation of third-party certifications gives restaurants a shorthand way to flaunt their environmental bona fides in a manner that might be more palatable to customers: Seeing a certificate on a restaurant’s wall or posted on its Instagram account assures diners that someone else has done the work of making sure a restaurant is environmentally friendly, so they can skip researching it themselves.
Often, restaurants eschew the language of climate impact for the more euphemistic term “sustainability,” focusing on the benefits of their sourcing and other practices rather than categorically revealing the harms of practices like factory farming. Climate change feels heavy, so the idea is to point out smaller-scale decisions in the hopes that customers are inspired to make the jump to a larger cause.
Owner Brian Owens says that at his recently opened Crave Sushi Bar—a spinoff of Fishbar, also in Manhattan—customers are sometimes surprised to see that bluefin tuna, a sushi staple, isn’t on the menu. That’s because it happens to be critically endangered. “We get specific,” he says of the need to keep the diner informed of intentional menu substitutions and choices. “We call it out. You know where it’s from. We actually have sourcing and mission statements on our menus,” he says, which state that the restaurant serves “only wild caught, sustainable & responsibly farmed seafood.”
Photos courtesy of Crave Fishbar.
Crave also has an item on the menu called “Save the Reef” for $4, a direct donation to the Billion Oyster Project that anyone can add to their bill. Combined with the sourcing information, this language helps guests understand why they’re seeing seafood like steelhead trout from the Hudson Valley on a sushi menu.
While these goals and initiatives are printed on the menu and posted online, they’re not explicitly spoken about through the course of the meal unless the customer inquires—and according to Owens, they typically don’t ask. “We are not trying to preach, we’re not trying to take up too much space,” he says. “Because I don’t know how many people care. They just want to have something really delicious.” Customers who are attracted to sustainable eating “come find us because of our sourcing,” he adds, but “there’s only so many places we can communicate that.”
Sometimes, even adding information to the menu is too much. “I could be sourcing herbs or scallions from a certain farmer, but at some point, it’s excessive to call out” every single source, says Yang. Customers might at first be intrigued by seeing a list of suppliers on a menu, but get bored halfway through reading it. “It just becomes too verbose.” Yang sometimes spotlights local suppliers on Instagram, where people can dig deeper if they want. But at the restaurant counter, the focus is on what the diner is ordering, not the “ethical, sustainable, additive-free” products that make up the food.
Yang agrees with Owens that once customers are in the restaurant, they don’t really ask about sourcing, mission, or climate change impact. There are customers who are self-educated and seek out certain restaurants because of their practices, and those for whom sourcing and intention are incidental. “People don’t really ask,” says Yang. It’s a pattern he’s become intimately familiar with: “They either know, or they just don’t care.”
The Toughest Customer Conversation
For many sustainable restaurants, the greater challenge is educating diners on the idea that necessary interventions in the face of climate change, like supporting small farms and sustainable projects, are worth paying for. Even though it’s become more common, sustainability costs more than conventional food production.
Government subsidies of industrial farming—to the tune of $38 billion per year, writes Alicia Kennedy in Mold—mean that commercial produce and meat shipped thousands of miles is usually the cheaper option for restaurants and diners; no amount of careful menu planning can change the fact that a chicken grown in a small, sustainable operation will cost more than a chicken confined in a factory farm.
Often, a restaurant or chef’s personal commitment runs up against that economic reality. Adding a Zero Foodprint–suggested contribution to diners’ checks is one direct way to call out climate change in every interaction—and invite support for fighting it—but unfortunately, the initiative wound up being unsustainable for Yang, who ended the partnership earlier this year after four years.
“We were anticipating [California’s] restaurant service charge bill to take effect, and there was a lot of backlash from customers about having service fees,” he says. And this was on top of general griping about his restaurant’s high prices compared to other Asian restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, says Yang.
More consumers than ever expect restaurants to pursue environmentally conscious practices. However, a recent survey says only 34 percent are willing to pay more for them when given the choice. Customers might care about sustainability goals, but adding a fee to every check, on top of higher prices for climate-friendlier ingredients, seems like too much at a time when even regular groceries are so expensive.
“Climate has always been in the back of my mind, but it’s never been something that I communicated to customers in such a direct way until now.”
Preparing customers for higher prices requires initiating an explicit conversation the customer usually won’t start. Firetype Chocolate used to offer free pieces of chocolate as part of a birthday program at its home within Thornes Marketplace in Northampton, Massachusetts. “Every year we gave away over 1,200 free truffles, caramels, honeycombs, and more for people’s birthdays—no purchase required, no email signup, no catch,” said one of its Instagram posts.
But recently, Firetype had to announce the ending of that perk. “We’re ordering larger quantities than ever before, but six pounds of chocolate that cost us $72 in 2021 is now $129 thanks to climate, crop disease, and market speculators.” Handing out over a thousand chocolates a year no longer adds up.
Owner Dan McKinney had previously boasted when ingredients were sourced locally or organically, or what was made in-house, and over the last few years switched from using corn syrup to ingredients like organic tapioca. But recent years have seen poor harvests of cocoa in West Africa, where most of the world’s chocolate is grown, due to bad weather and tree disease. McKinney, who uses Valrhona chocolate, says he was recently told chocolate prices would increase by 40 percent in the fall because of the smaller harvests.
“We had been at $2.50 a piece, and now we’re up to around $2.65. But I’m running out of tricks in the toolbox,” says McKinney. “Climate has always been in the back of my mind, but it’s never been something that I communicated to customers in such a direct way until now,” he says. “I’m going to feel even sillier asking people for [almost] $3 for one bite.”
‘This Is Not Some Far-Off Thing’
Experts largely agree that if our agricultural systems are going to be sustainable for the environment, they have to get local and stay small. Eating locally and seasonally from non-factory farms means fewer emissions and water use, healthier soil, and often a more symbiotic relationship between humans and animals.
But if saving the planet were as easy as buying the right things and eating at the right restaurants, most diners would have done it already. And even those who are dining out at climate-conscious restaurants often don’t want to hear overt climate messaging. That leaves restaurateurs to essentially only bring it up in an emergency, as a caveat about high pricing or the lack of certain ingredients, not as a positive part of the hospitality experience. Which enforces the idea that talking about the environment at all in a dining setting is a drag, a detriment to the joy of eating out.
Even if sustainable efforts stayed mostly in the background of restaurant operations, most people cannot afford to dine exclusively at sustainable restaurants (or any restaurant) for every meal. And even if we could, doing so won’t grant us the overarching agency or control that so many unrestrained, greenwashed fantasies advertise: Dining at one climate-conscious restaurant does not make the broader restaurant industry sustainable.
“This is hitting you right now in a way that you didn’t think it would.”
Diners, who are likely aware of these issues, perhaps become more aware through restaurant messaging, but rarely are they given anything more to do about it beyond a menu choice. They are told that the decision they’ve already made is the right one and that’s it, leaving them to stew in the malaise that results from feeling like they’re eating the last pasture-raised, holistically grazed, locally sourced chicken on the Titanic.
Any further impact happens outside the restaurants themselves. Perhaps messaging around sourcing or climate change will galvanize diners to encourage their representatives to endorse environmentally friendly legislation, or maybe it will spur them to buy more produce from local farms or give up factory-farmed meat. Industry organizations like the James Beard Foundation are creating spaces to “raise awareness” of climate change among chefs.
Although the success of one sustainable restaurant won’t automatically make the restaurant next door follow the same practices, Owens, of Crave, says things are changing. “Ten years ago, 12 years ago, there were a lot fewer people doing this. There are more people now that do care,” he says. “My responsibility is to continue those conversations.” For now, Owens and other restaurateurs still see value in walking the razor’s edge between self-indulgence and climate-conscious urgency.
One thing this communication can do is remind people that the effects of climate change are not just prescient but happening now. “This is a 1:1 link to crops not coming out good. And I think people need to wrap their heads around that this is not some far-off thing,” says McKinney. “This is hitting you right now in a way that you didn’t think it would.” Even if your menu doesn’t say it, everything on it is affected by climate. The restaurants most vocal about the issue just understand we can no longer afford the luxury of not knowing.
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This article was produced in partnership with Eater.
When the pandemic hit the United States in March 2020, acclaimed Chicago restaurant Fat Rice told workers it would be closed only temporarily. It laid off around 70 employees and in April pivoted to donating grocery boxes, eventually operating as Super Fat Rice Mart, a general store offering $100 meal kits. But employees were left guessing as to when Fat Rice would reopen, what that would look like, and whether they would have jobs when it did. By June, though, they had their answer: After a wave of accusations that owner Abe Conlon berated female employees, treated Black employees differently from white ones, and even made English the official language of the kitchen, Conlon announced that Fat Rice would close permanently.
The pandemic was already revealing the cracks in the restaurant industry, making employees question whether this sort of work was worth the health risk and reminding those outside the industry that restaurant workers on the front lines are rarely provided with paid sick leave or fair wages. But when protests about the murder of George Floyd began to spread across the country and public conversations turned to issues of white supremacy, police brutality, and racism, many restaurant workers were pushed to the edge. Last summer, workers took to social media to speak about racism and discrimination in the kitchen, low wages, hypocritical chefs and managers, and cultural appropriation. While the #MeToo movement shined a light on long-standing issues like sexism and abuse, the industry as a whole remained a toxic environment. Maybe this time, things would change.
Joey Pham, who is now a baker and spiritual coach at their own business Flavor Supreme, started working at Fat Rice in 2014 as a line cook and says they were eventually driven away by Conlon’s bullying. “I knew I was going to be driven to physical exhaustion because of the general nature of kitchen jobs, but I did not know I would be driven to an emotional and mental deficit, which is what led me to leave,” they said. Like at many restaurants, Conlon’s behavior initially seemed to his workers as par for the course in the restaurant industry.
Former employee Taylor Rae Botticelli says they were initially attracted to Fat Rice in Chicago ironically because it had a reputation as being worker-focused, offering things like full health care to all employees. And while they heard from other workers, “Oh, this chef is a huge asshole. He screams at everybody. He makes people cry,” they said it was easy to brush it off as just what restaurant life is like.
According to Botticelli, Conlon initially maintained that Fat Rice would reopen. But in June, Pham began speaking out against Fat Rice on social media. “I found it odd that there was no acknowledgment of the uprising in a time where everyone was being called to respond, and instead, they were just continuing with business as usual, which was centered around capitalizing on cultures that are not theirs,” they told Eater. After Pham spoke out, more than 200 people wound up sharing stories with them and with the press. This outpouring ultimately led to former employees posting a letter on Fat Rice’s door about Conlon’s behavior and the restaurant’s overall toxicity. “So many people have reached out earnestly to try to help you,” said the letter, which accused Fat Rice of squandering the opportunity to be better.
Soon after that, Conlon announced that Fat Rice would be closing permanently, as would Super Fat Rice Mart, so that he and co-owner Adrienne Lo could take time and reflect on their actions. “I have participated in and upheld a system that needs to fall,” Conlon wrote in a statement at the time. “If Fat Rice needs to fall along with that system, I am ready for that.”
In 2018, food writer Helen Rosner tweeted, “Restaurants close ALL THE TIME for astonishingly stupid reasons, so I really don’t see why it’s so appalling for them to close for actually really good reasons.” She posted it in the wake of reports about restaurateur Ken Friedman’s ongoing sexual harassment of employees, specifically at his restaurant the Spotted Pig (which did indeed shut down). The idea was that no meal is so good that it can be served in a breeding ground of abuse. It’s a seemingly straightforward solution: Keep the harmful people from profiting, and let the workers go somewhere with hopefully a better boss.
On the surface, this is the “good reason” behind why Fat Rice in Chicago closed. But some employees said that by closing, Conlon was skirting a bigger responsibility. “It felt like a cop-out,” Botticelli said. Speaking to Block Club Chicago, former employee Molly Pachay said, “An apology doesn’t mean anything if there’s no change. I need to see follow-through. I wanted to see what they’re going to do for this movement. I want to see that Abe is going to go to therapy and work on himself. I want to see them donate money. I want to see them donate their time to feeding protesters on the South and West sides.” Instead, Conlon walked away, and the employees were left to figure out the future on their own.
What Does a ‘Better’ Restaurant Look Like?
Many restaurants that stood accused of racism and toxic environments last summer vowed to be better. But there’s little consensus on what “better” even means or how to measure when a restaurant has succeeded.
In June 2020, employees of Tatte Bakery, a small bakery chain that opened in Boston in 2007 but now also has locations in Washington, D.C., published a Change.org petition demanding that Tatte put its money where its mouth was when it came to diversity. “We have seen Tatte’s supposed stance on Instagram as a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement but unfortunately, we have yet to see tangible actions made by the corporation,” the petition said, detailing how there were no people of color in the bakery’s executive team and how Tatte leadership didn’t address instances of “racially charged or insensitive behaviors or statements from those in leadership positions at Tatte.”
The petition made three demands: match employee donations to Black Lives Matter, diversify the executive team, and donate leftover food to protesters. Though he was not part of writing the petition, Matthew Waxman, who is now the Bread Team supervisor at Tatte Bakery, says he signed it, saying, “I want Tatte’s actions to be consistent with the values that they publicly express.”
Former employee Tamaryn Watzman said she was drawn to the “family feeling” Tatte espoused. But soon she began noticing things—employees who deserved raises or recognition but weren’t getting them, a disconnect between the higher-ups and the rest of the staff, and the managers’ commitment to a certain white, Instagram-y aesthetic over all else—that, in the wake of the George Floyd killing, felt dissonant with the company’s public calls to support Black Lives Matter.
Waxman also recalled witnessing numerous explicit instances of racism, including a white manager making fun of people who couldn’t speak English well. Another former employee brought up founder Tzurit Or’s decision to board up the windows of the store in reaction to Black Lives Matter protests despite claiming support for the protests. “The reaction of our supposed ‘leader’ to the Black Lives Matter movement and its work is disturbing, and blatantly racist and anti-Black,” the former employee said in a resignation letter.
In a joint statement to Eater, Or and CEO Chuck Chapman said the petition gave them “the opportunity to reflect, learn, and grow based on the feedback we received.” According to their statement, Tatte launched a diversity training program, formalized processes for reporting concerns to HR, promoted and hired people of color to leadership roles, and “prioritized wage and benefit improvements” to hourly workers—almost everything workers asked for. As a cafe and bakery, Tatte could pivot a bit more easily during the pandemic, offering pickup for online orders in March and then reopening some locations as early as May 2020. Which meant that, when they implemented these changes, they could see whether or not they were working.
Waxman said he’s been impressed with the changes, and while day-to-day things feel the same, there are better institutional guards in place to protect against toxic and racist behavior. “From my perspective as a worker, it’s like they did everything that they could do within the constraints of the system that we live in,” Waxman said. “Short of dismantling capitalism, I mean.”
Submarine Hospitality, the restaurant group behind Ava Gene’s and Tusk in Portland, Oregon, has not been able to see if its myriad changes actually work, as its restaurants have not yet reopened for dine-in service. But the changes appear plentiful, and it’s hopeful. The group, which was founded by Luke Dirks and Joshua McFadden, was accused in July 2020 of fostering a toxic work environment across its restaurants. Accusations, which spawned on social media in response to chef Maya Lovelace’s open call for stories of toxicity in the Portland restaurant scene, included pay disparity, protecting white male employees after numerous HR reports, and McFadden being a “racist, transphobic, misogynistic piece of trash.” At the time, McFadden said in a statement to Eater, “I take full responsibility for Submarine’s past and its future. As such, the restaurants have been closed for a period of time and I am putting the work in, in person, with the team to start to chart a path forward.” And on July 13, Dirks stepped down.
Those left at Submarine Hospitality, including McFadden, saw the shutdown and the public call-out as an opportunity to change. On its website, the group exhaustively outlines everything it’s doing to be better, in the sort of progressive-ish, jargon-y language that signals it either knows what it’s talking about or knows how to sound like it does. It acknowledges that the restaurant industry is “full of disparity and inequality, inequity and patriarchy.” It dives in to pledge that it has completely restructured into a “mission-led organization rather than a vision-driven company” and that “no longer is there any one person in complete control of decisions that affect everyone.”
It has hired Justin Garcidiaz, previously a bartender and restaurant manager for Submarine, into the role of HR and cultural advocate “to hold management accountable when it comes to following through on these changes.” It says it is committed to providing better benefits and pay for employees, hiring a more diverse workforce, and “addressing the problem of tipping.” And, rather than just change some internal processes, it says it will be overhauling the ownership structure of the company, with some of the senior executives becoming equity-share ownership partners.
In an interview with multiple directors at Submarine, they acknowledged that the issues that arose last summer, while shocking to the public, were unfortunately de rigueur in the restaurant industry, which is perhaps why there wasn’t an urgency to address them until allegations were made public. But COVID-19 also provided them with an opportunity. “I don’t think any restaurant is going to thank COVID for the past year,” said Shelbey Campbell Lett, Submarine’s director of design and development. “But we never would have been able to take the time to do this and focus solely on how to change such fundamental things about our company without it.” Submarine Hospitality also currently has just 14 employees—the vast majority were laid off at the beginning of the pandemic—which Alex Basler, director of finance and benefits, said made it easier for everyone to engage in conversation about what to do to rebuild a new work culture.
Submarine teamed up with Apron Equity, an equity and inclusion consulting firm focused on the hospitality industry, to create a survey for employees, asking about everything from daily schedules to witnessing harassment. The results of the survey were used to craft new employee training, which includes such topics as racism and bystander preparedness. But overall, the goal was to create a more collaborative culture in which the focus isn’t on a single creative person’s vision at the expense of everyone lower down but on the wellness of the whole team.
On Submarine’s website, it says “our operations, culinary, and creative teams work together daily to ensure that major decisions work for everyone. There are a lot more meetings, but a lot less uncertainty.” Which, according to Garcidiaz, is a prime example of accountability. “It’s not enough for us to go out and make an apology tour as a company,” he says. “What’s most important is that we’re taking the time to actually build out systems and a culture that addresses those past problems.”
Part of that is not just changing the training and the culture but the actual structure of the restaurant. Not only will some senior executives become equity-share owners, but Submarine, in a statement, said it’s “hoping to implement and work on the details of creating a true profit-sharing model for all of our employees.” The goal ensures that any subsequent directors and owners keep the same mission and all this work isn’t undone the second an executive wants to take things in a new direction.
While Submarine Hospitality has positioned itself to be a leader in equity in the hospitality industry, none of this has been officially implemented yet, so it’s impossible to know what the practical difference will be between a senior executive and an equity-share ownership partner or whether being a “mission-led organization” will meaningfully impact a waiter’s life. And a collaborative decision-making system looks a lot different when you have hundreds of employees instead of 14. Which leads some to be skeptical.
“[Everyone] I know who has worked for Submarine that has seen that website is just like, ‘This is a literal joke,’” said a former Submarine Hospitality employee who wished to remain anonymous. While the people now at the top of Submarine may not have been executives before, the former employee says they are “the same exact people that have been there since the beginning” and feels that, essentially, this is all for show, especially given McFadden’s continued involvement with the company. “The power structure exists, and it’s not going to change.”
Portland Monthly also rescinded some early praise of Submarine’s new plan. After publishing a gushing story about McFadden and everything Submarine has been implementing, editor-in-chief Marty Patail took the story down. He replaced it with a statement, apologizing for “giving air to mere promises of change” without proof that change has actually happened. “Six months to a year from now, a story centered on the voices of employees and observers, instead of those of the company’s leadership, will be better able to evaluate how those changes had been implemented,” he wrote. “But now is far too soon for that.”
The Long Road Ahead to Real Change
It’s difficult to say what the summer of restaurant reckonings has actually accomplished. “It takes more than a few months, or even a few years, to hold someone accountable for their harm and allow them the opportunity to understand how their actions impact others,” Pham said. “I am imagining what it would look like if Fat Rice had reopened, and it makes me think of this quote: ‘You cannot heal in the same environment that made you sick.’”
There is largely a consensus on what a better, more sustainable restaurant industry would look like—equal, living wages, including a dismantling of the tipped pay system, health care, reliable schedules so workers can actually have a work-life balance, and zero tolerance for bullying or abuse. No more excuses for sexist or racist chefs who happen to have a brilliant mind for food, and no more throwing workers under the bus in the name of customer-is-always-right hospitality.
Whether that must come through better HR departments, collective ownership or unionization, or something else, creating a better restaurant industry will ultimately require a massive restructuring of how it has been run. And the looming question around all these attempts at rebuilding the industry is whether we can trust the people who built this to be the ones to dismantle it, while at the same time not making it the job of marginalized people to fix a system that disproportionately oppresses them.
But there is still no consensus on how to bring that about. Closing a restaurant might free workers from a stressful and abusive job, but it means workers are out of a job, and it risks letting abusive owners off the hook. And while restaurants like Tatte have shown they can improve, it is often still at the whims of an individual owner to decide to change. And it seems like unless they were directly and publicly accused, many restaurants are operating the same as they always have. Which, now that they’re hiring again, has led workers to question whether they even want to return to the restaurant industry if returning means the same low wages, lack of benefits, and unsafe working conditions that are still widely the norm.
A year after these calls for justice, there is proof that change is possible. But it took a pandemic, a national call for racial equity, and hundreds of restaurant workers speaking out about the abuses they have faced just for a handful of restaurants to even attempt to address these issues. If that’s what needs to happen for some restaurants to give workers diversity, equity, and inclusion training and slightly higher wages, what will it take for systemic, lasting change to happen?
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