Author: Adam Reiner

If you need a reminder of how easy it is for the restaurant industry to revert to its old, nasty habits, follow Chef Eric Rivera’s Twitter feed. Rivera was recently anointed one of Food & Wine Magazine’s “25 Game Changers” in the restaurant world, but he often behaves more like the game’s umpire. The industry has never given much concern to policing itself, so Rivera’s voice sometimes comes across more combative than it really is. The truth hurts even more when you’re not accustomed to hearing it on a regular basis.

Rivera has been consistently vocal in his criticism of celebrity restaurant owners who rushed to open their dining rooms in the early days of the pandemic. He’s also one of the few chefs that kept his restaurant, Addo in Seattle, closed for dine-in service until vaccines were widely distributed. He acknowledges that his scorched earth approach might burn some bridges, but those bridges were unstable in the first place. “I’d rather end up with nothing and the ability to say everything I want,” he tweeted recently.

Rivera routinely sounds the alarm when big-name chefs that cried poverty at the beginning of the pandemic announce new openings before they’ve even resumed service at the restaurants they closed. He revels in exposing the hypocrisy, but his heart is always with the millions of restaurant workers whose livelihoods are in limbo.

Meanwhile, the food media can’t help itself from swooning over the latest projects, especially ones that are spearheaded by notable white, male chefs. Andrew Carmellini’s Carne Mare, which just opened in New York City on Pier 17 in the Seaport District, is an unapologetic retread of at least three different restaurants that have opened in the last five years—TAK Room, The Grill, and 4 Charles Prime Rib. Is it really possible for critics to praise another chef for his Wedge Salad and one-pound slice of spit-roasted Prime Rib? You bet your rump roast it is.

Instead of going it alone in reviewing Daniel Humm’s $335-a-head tasting menu at the Eleven Madison Park Vegan reboot, Adam Platt of New York Magazine invited a colleague with Vegan sympathies along for his latest review. EMP has been open less than a month and already other prominent restaurant critics like Kate Krader at Bloomberg have filed reviews. Even a global pandemic that’s killed over a half a million Americans cannot stop food media FOMO.

Platt was furloughed for an entire year during lockdown, and, without missing a beat, he’s back to pontificating about high-tone Jalapeño Poppers like the pandemic never happened. He concludes that Humm’s miniature dosas (that look like a bodega display of plastic Bic lighters) were “a brilliant idea.” It’s difficult to tell when he’s being snarky and when he’s being serious. His propensity for othering Veganism impedes his ability to judge the restaurant impartially. “Ask me about some of my most memorable Vegan meals,” he quips to his colleague, Rachel Sugar. When she asks, he pauses and without irony says, “There aren’t any.” This might have been funny before the pandemic, but now when he jokes about eating a whole chicken earlier in the day to prepare for his twelve courses of vegetables, he sounds painfully anachronistic.

Speaking of out-of-touch critics, Steve Cuozzo, the populist food critic for the New York Post, told naysayers to “Eat it And Weep” in a piece where he triumphantly declares rumors of the restaurant industry’s demise greatly exaggerated. He assures us that the industry is alive and well because he can’t get an 8pm reservation at his favorite mediocre midtown Manhattan restaurants anymore. Cuozzo, like many Trump-loving, conservative-leaning Post readers, believes that a return to past glory is what will make the restaurant industry great again. But that also means glossing over the obvious devastation that the pandemic has wrought on so many small businesses in NYC, not to mention the continued exclusion of BIPOC chefs and restaurateurs from sharing the prosperity.

Tejal Rao, one of the few restaurant critics of color to write for a major newspaper in the U.S., surprised readers this past week when she chose to review Nobu in Malibu for the New York Times. Rao covers the food scene in Los Angeles, and, to the dismay of many readers, her byline is considerably less prominent than her colleague Pete Wells. In a city filled with endless culinary traditions, why would the Times editorial staff decide that Nobu, essentially a global chain restaurant, merits this kind of attention?

Even if the restaurant turns out to still be surprisingly good, there have to be more exciting surprises in a city whose foodways have been ignored for so long. When Rao was announced as the West Coast critic, it’s hard to imagine that anyone, including maybe Rao herself, would’ve imagined she’d be wasting her time eating at the L.A. branch of Nobu. Maybe Rao or her colleagues could’ve reported on why the parent company of Nobu took in $28 million dollars in PPP loans in 2020? But perhaps that might have cast a buzz-killing shadow on the picturesque Malibu sunset that Rao found so intoxicating while she was gawking over celebrities and their lookalikes.

Big NYC restaurant groups colonizing other cities isn’t something to celebrate. I made this same argument recently when Helen Rosner used precious New Yorker real estate to dissect the mystique around scoring a Carbone reservation. Carbone is well on its way to becoming the Italian-American Nobu with locations in Hong Kong, Las Vegas, Miami, and another branch soon to open in Dallas. While it’s obvious that many New Yorker readers belong to the proud 1% who faithfully patronize Carbone and its affiliates, ultimately it’s the responsibility of Rosner and her editors to fight the urge to reconstitute the same tired narratives around the status of “getting in” that proliferated before the industry shutdown. The New Yorker only recently added a staff writer dedicated to food and restaurants. In the past, its only coverage of the industry has been through short-form reviews for its Tables For Two column. Using the platform to give “chef bros” more attention is a squandered precious opportunity. Carbone doesn’t need another hype man.

What the industry needs is to start redefining what normal is. It’s lazy to justify writing about these restaurants because affluent readers want to stay informed about the latest projects by big-name chefs and industry trends. The dining public has been inundated with these narratives for so long, they don’t know any better. Most of those storylines are driven by powerful PR firms, and there’s insufficient transparency when it comes to valuable media placement.

The shamefulness of this brand of shilling seems to land differently now. Robb Report just published a glowing write-up in its Food & Drink section of Delilah, a new “Supper Club” in the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas from “accomplished” executive chef Josh Smith. The writer, Andy Wang, admiringly describes the chef’s whimsical decision to turn a whole roasted chicken into “an upscale version of a TV dinner.” (Insert pain emoji) Wang’s softball approach feels cut-and-pasted from the restaurant’s press release. In case anyone was remotely skeptical of Chef Smith’s prowess, the article quotes another white, male chef to assure us of Smith’s greatness: “He’s just the best fucking all-around chef in Vegas,” James Trees, who runs Esther’s Kitchen and others, tells Wang. (Insert eye roll emoji)

At the end of the day, editors need to be more judicious about which restaurants they assign for review and what narratives they choose to center. If the critics themselves have true autonomy, then it’s up to them to manage the subject matter in a way that leaves behind old methodology. Buzzy new restaurants by big-name celebrity chefs, invariably white and innumerably male, can wait. The latest Keith McNally brasserie or Danny Meyer’s new vegetable-forward concept will be busy no matter what Pete Wells says about it. But it’s irresponsible to continue trotting out the same pre-pandemic storylines as though nothing’s changed in the restaurant industry. It has changed, a lot, and getting back to normal is a giant step backward.

After months of anticipation, the post-pandemic economic revival finally appears within reach. The desperate tango of trying to get into our favorite restaurants is back, but we’re all so excited to dine out again that even being denied a reservation feels oddly affirming. It’s easy to assume that restaurants are on the road to recovery when they’re too busy to accommodate us, but restaurant profits and losses are never so linear. Restaurant people understand these delicate economics all too well, which is why we don’t need outsiders diagnosing our health.

A massive year-long drought can’t be undone by turning on a few sprinklers. Even as demand swells, sales metrics can’t accurately measure the current state of the restaurant industry. The truth is that, during the pandemic, much of the damage to the restaurant economy has occurred beneath the surface.

As restaurant professionals we learn to conceal our infirmities so that guests don’t feel uncomfortable, often martyring ourselves at the cost of our own sanity. But this time we can’t afford to put guests’ welfare ahead of our own. Recovery should be something we approach holistically and on our own terms. We can’t just “play through it.” If we do, we almost certainly risk more permanent injury.

There are still plenty of reasons to be optimistic that the worst may be over. If the stock market is any gauge of confidence, Wall Street expects unprecedented pent-up demand for dining out throughout the rest of 2021. The parent companies of multinational chains like Olive Garden and Applebee’s are trading at or near all-time highs, riding the tailwinds of a potential V-shaped recovery. Investors assume—with the spigot of government stimulus continuing to flow—that the American economy is poised to relive another “Roaring Twenties.”

Unfortunately, the economic challenges of running a restaurant haven’t changed. Rents have dropped marginally in urban areas hit hardest by the pandemic, but real estate costs still remain prohibitive. Independent restaurants can’t adjust to fluctuating market conditions as nimbly as corporations can. Inflation is inching upward as the labor market tightens, and commodity prices are soaring in the face of increasing demand. Input costs are rising faster than restaurant owners can afford to raise prices.

Medical professionals already predict, with new variants circulating and lingering skepticism toward vaccines, that we should expect strains of the virus to flare up again in the Fall and Winter. If this happens, it’s hard to imagine the public going along with another round of government-imposed lockdowns.

It’s wrong-minded, but uniquely American, to think we can spend our way out of every mess. The pandemic has exposed the restaurant industry as a house of cards. By May of last year, almost six million restaurant workers had already lost their jobs, two-thirds of the entire workforce. Over 100,000 businesses closed their doors, many permanently.

A year later, the media continues to expose bad actors and cultural problems endemic to the restaurant workplace, reporting on the seemingly endless stream of notable chefs that double as chronic abusers. Rampant labor shortages are a byproduct of workers’ apprehensiveness about returning to an environment with so many inherent health risks but also an industry that has so many lingering systemic problems.

We should ask ourselves why restaurants have become such highly-pressured environments in the first place. The answer is simple: Money. When people spend more in a restaurant, they expect more than just good food. While feeding oneself is a matter of life and death, having someone provide you sustenance should be joyful and calming. Instead, high-end dining feeds people’s hunger for status. As menu prices rise, the guests’ status goes up and the servers’ status goes down. Exorbitant spending created this backward dynamic, it’s wrong to think that it can help reverse it.

The restaurant industry as a whole is not monolithic, which makes it difficult to set parameters about how to define recovery. One way we can rebuild the structure of our business is by building a stronger foundation for permanent employment. Historically, restaurant work has been transient nature, but momentum was building toward it becoming a more viable career path before the pandemic hit. The hasty decisions so many employers made to cut bait with their staff during lockdown sidetracked that progress and caused a massive, and perhaps irreplaceable, drain on the talent pool. While the rest of the world has adapted to working remotely, restaurant workers have no such digital life raft. You can’t cook and serve food over Zoom.

In the near term, restaurants need to make it clear—assertively when necessary—that we don’t exist purely to facilitate post-pandemic euphoria. It’s not something we’re programmed to do, but we have to be firmer about enforcing boundaries. As guests have continually raised their expectations of us, we need to start raising our expectations of them.

Asking guests to return their table in a timely manner, for example, once taboo, shouldn’t be considered an affront anymore. It should be acceptable to refuse parties another round of drinks after dessert because the table is rebooked. Drunkenness or boorish behavior should be dealt with authoritatively. No more visits from sweet-talking managers.

Changing our approach to the way we manage guests’ behavior requires reimagining how we administer hospitality. Our spaces are sanctuaries and should be treated with the same deference. When we assert ourselves with disruptive or disrespectful guests going forward, we shouldn’t feel the need to genuflect, we should demand courtesy.

Here’s how we should NOT define recovery: 

1) Convincing ourselves that rich people splurging in restaurants again equates to recovery.  2) Prioritizing food tourism instead of continuing to nurture the neighborhood patronage that sustained us through the most difficult months. 3) Celebrating big-name chefs expanding the footprints of their businesses and colonizing cities outside of their home turf. 4) Assuming that government stimulus will rescue the hordes of struggling restaurant businesses.

To truly gauge the integrity of the recovery, we should be paying as much attention to dormant restaurant spaces as we do restaurants that survived the pandemic. The magnitude of the economic loss, though it pales in comparison with the human toll, is staggering. Much in the same way society has avoided processing the grief of the millions of Covid-19 deaths, it’s still in denial about the long-term devastation the pandemic has wrought on so many sectors of our economy like the food and beverage industry. 

Now that life is returning to some semblance of normal, it’s not uncommon to hear people pass a crowded restaurant and proclaim their city “back.” “Nature is healing,” they’ll say. But the truth is that nature has always been a restaurant’s greatest adversary. The physical spaces that restaurants inhabit erode from constant exposure to the elements. Inclement weather can turn a prosperous night into a calamity. Acts of God like hurricanes or floods destroy businesses that took years to build, sometimes in the blink of an eye. Even just the Earth’s relentless gravitational pull causes every restaurant worker’s feet to hurt. Nature doesn’t sustain us; we survive in spite of nature. True to form, nature will also provide a constant, nagging headwind while restaurants pick up the pieces. Healing takes time, and nature can be stingy about providing that too.