Want restaurant culture to survive?
Whether we're diners, owners or staff, we all have an essential part to play. Plus readings/ watchings/ listenings and more.
My apologies for the long publishing hiatus. Since my last missive back in late March, the restaurant business has come roaring back — sort of! — and as a result, my consulting business has kept me insanely busy. It’s a fancy problem, and one for which I’m deeply grateful.
Unfortunately, the industry itself has problems that are not at all fancy, problems that may actually imperil dining culture as we know it.
Now that much of the public feels safer dining at restaurants — whether indoors or outdoors — its desire to do so seems ravenous. But is it? Here in Dallas, it very much depends on the night of the week. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, dining rooms are packed. Sunday through Wednesday? Not so much. This reflects what I’m hearing from friends in cities all over the country.
In other words, “roaring back” may be something of an illusion. Although cities everywhere seem giddy with debuts, only 44% of restaurants nationally were operating at maximum indoor dining capacity as of mid-September, according to a National Restaurant Association COVID-19 Restaurant Impact Survey. The reasons: “Not enough employees to adequately staff the restaurant,” “Too soon from a public health perspective,” “Uncertainty about future lockdowns or restrictions” and “Not enough customers to justify reopening,” in that order.
A large majority (81%) of full-service restaurant operators attributed sluggish customer demand to the Delta variant — which I suspect is what’s behind the weeknight dining vacuum. Monday through Wednesday, prudence prevails, and we dine in the safety of our own homes. Come Thursday, pent-up cravings to be out among people explode, and restaurant dining rooms fill up.
Sure, if you’re going to eat out once during a week — which is completely reasonable, and actually luxurious — it’s easy to understand why you’d want it to be on the weekend. But that lopsidedness is exacerbating the staffing vacuum confounding restaurateurs. Imagine the difficulty of keeping waitstaff, who only earn money when there are butts in seats.
A Covid-age giant sucking sound
Staffing had already been a serious challenge for the industry before the pandemic; the urgency of having a public conversation about it was one of the reasons Seth Brammer, Josh Sutcliff and I launched a live-events series called The Food Talk in the fall of 2019, about six months in advance of COVID-19. So it’s not like it’s a new problem. But it has become dire: 71% of respondents to the NRA survey cite being understaffed as the most significant reason they’re not operating at full capacity.
Meanwhile, we the dining public seem to be forgetting some of the lessons we learned during the height of the pandemic: that we need to be kinder patrons, that servers are not servants and service is not due to us, that restaurant profit margins are razor-thin, so it’s difficult running an establishment even in the best of times.
Lauren Drewe Daniels, who became food editor of the alt-weekly Dallas Observer in April, published an excellent cover story last week about the challenges faced by the industry and what patrons can do to help. “The Fractured State of Post-Covid Dining in Dallas and How to Mend it” is focused on Dallas, but it applies to dining scenes across the country. The takeaways for diners who want to continue enjoying the pleasures of dining out: Don’t make reservations you don’t intend to respect (cancelling at the last minute is almost as uncool as just not showing up), try to be understanding about rising prices and treat restaurant staff with respect. Daniels interviewed me for the story, highlighting my point that if you only dine out on Fridays and Saturdays, your favorite restaurants may not survive. But I’d like to add here that as insiders know, dining out on weeknights also happens to be the way to get the best experiences.
Then yesterday, another Dallas journalist bit off another chunk of the “how to save dining” main course. Brian Reinhart, a contributing columnist for The Dallas Morning News, characterizes the labor crisis as “a symptom of a bigger, deeper problem: America’s income inequality.” In case you hit a paywall, his essay points out that middle-class diners earn less than they did 40 years ago, but “we pay more for lunch.” As food, labor, fuel and materials costs and menu prices rise, dining out becomes less accessible to the middle class — it’s a luxury reserved for the wealthy.
That’s true, but it ignores the fact that the middle class seems to be flush enough to buy goods (and real estate) like they’re going out of style. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman pointed out in his New York Times column on Friday, “the U.S. economy is experiencing a very old-fashioned bout of inflation, with too much money chasing too few goods.” The fact that Americans aren’t eating out as much may not be entirely about not being able to afford it. The way Krugman puts it: “Consumers who were afraid to buy services — to eat out, to go to the gym — compensated by buying lots of stuff . . .” The logistical system “couldn’t handle the demand” and the supply chain broke down, resulting in inflation. Which makes restaurant prices more expensive.
But hell, we love our restaurants. Legions of people are tired of cooking. We all love dining out. So what to do? Diners and owners can throw up their hands and say there’s no solution, but that’s not going to get us very far.
Thinking out of the take-out box
Early in the pandemic, I started meeting weekly on Zoom with two super-smart friends — a brilliant, design-thinking architect in Boulder, CO and a James Beard Award-winning chef-turned restaurant consultant in New York City — to talk about what we all felt was going to be imperative: a reinvention of restaurants. Lots of like-minded people we knew also wanted to talk about this, and we launched a monthly live-event series to do so: The Communal Table Talks. I told you about the first few in this newsletter; you can see all six at our YouTube channel.
Our special guests over the course of 6 episodes included Nancy Silverton, L.A.’s master of reinvention, and Benjamin Calleja, the visionary CEO of Livit Design, which has creating fascinating experimental restaurants in Sweden and L.A. that hold invaluable lessons for reinvention.
One of our most interesting guests was Alice Cheng, founder of Culinary Agents — an online resource for cultivating culinary talent. Cheng spoke with us about how becoming a better employer can help attract the best employees (and keep them!). She walked us through strategies for how to market the positions you’re trying to fill, how to market your restaurant to prospective employees, how to assess what differentiates you as an employer. Maybe you’re too small to offer medical insurance, but are you known for on-the-job-training? For bringing young talent up through the ranks? For opening in other markets and providing interesting opportunities that way? For stellar family meals?
And what if you can’t think of any interesting differentiators — does that perhaps indicate a need for some self-examination as an employer?
If you’re a restaurant owner or manager struggling to attract staff or keep staff, I highly recommend tuning into our conversation — I can almost guarantee you’ll discover some actionable ideas in it.
Many other inspiring ideas came out of The Communal Table Talks, and I’ve been putting some of them into play as I advise clients — particularly a couple of first-time restaurateurs who are open to new ways of doing things, including creating flexible physical spaces capable of producing revenue streams throughout the day. After all, you’re paying all that rent, so why not make what you’re paying a fortune for work for you?
I’m excited to tell you more in an upcoming newsletter. And if you’re not in the business, but love eating out, I think you may still be interested — as the kind of evolution we’re envisioning will change the way we experience food, and each other, in dining spaces.
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Related reading & watching
• How things look from fast-food workers’ POV: Washington Post published a terrific piece on Saturday by Greg Jaffee, with photos by Ricky Caroti: “‘It’s a walkout’: Inside the fast-food workers’ season of rebellion.” Is the season of rebellion really a thing? You bet — Jaffee cites labor reporter Mike Elk’s website paydayreport.com, which has compiled a database of 1,600 walkouts since March, 2020. From Jaffee’s story:
“People in the service industry are done with the disrespect,” wrote a local physician. “I don’t think it’s just about the money. … Whether it’s about flipping burgers or saving lives they crave gratitude and validation. Society has become so intolerant. So disrespectful. So judgmental. So cruel. Let’s change it.”
• A chef with no staffing crisis: From The New Yorker, “A Celebrity Chef’s Burnout and Pivot to Resiliency: Edward Columbia’s documentary ‘Little Fish’ follows the sustainable-food pioneer Bun Lai as he closes his successful restaurant and pursues a new approach to life.” The film is by Edward Columbia, the text by David Kortava.
Unrelated reading: seafood weirdness, sustainability and bad behavior
• The crazy story behind the crazy rolls: On Sunday, The New York Times published an utterly weird and baffling report by Daniel Fromson that seems to explain a lot about the strange proliferation of sushi restaurants across the country. Read it, and you may wonder if you took one edible too many.
• Back away from that bluefin: Chef Tom Colicchio wrote an Op-Ed published by the L.A. Times on Sunday advocating for a proposed law — HR3075 — that aims to link illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing to human rights abuses including human trafficking.
• Avocados under fire: It’s a worrying time for lovers of the voluptuous green fruit, as chefs swear off of them over sustainability concerns. But something tells me there may be some less-than-meticulous reporting that has led to this — check out the correction at the end of this Guardian story.
Quick — we need some good news!
• Messy is in! This story about a wacky cake trend is bound to cheer you up.
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Have a great rest of the week. I’ll try not to be such a stranger.