If you’re a conscientious person, and you love to eat out, you are likely troubled by what you’ve seen and heard about the restaurant world. The poor working conditions, sexual harassment, wage theft. But you’re uncertain how you can help.
You are not alone. I hear this all the time. Diners have become aware of endemic hospitality issues, and it bothers them. They love restaurants and want to eat out. But they want to feel good doing it. The question I get repeatedly: How can we be good diners? How do we choose where to eat without supporting bad labour practices?
A coroner can look inside a body. Superman can see through walls. But your average diner doesn’t have these kinds of resources to determine where to ethically eat. So what are we to do?
The bad news is that there is no foolproof system for determining whether a restaurant owner is good or evil, no online directory of heroes and villains. The good news is that there is absolutely something diners can do to foster the kind of equitable labour practices we want to see more of.
The one simple trick to help restaurants is to ditch the top-10 lists and Michelin-starred destinations. This part used to be easy in Canada, because we didn’t have any. Now that the Michelin guide has announced it will send its “inspectors” to Toronto restaurants, the kitchens where staff works two hours off the clock every day in pursuit of the excellence that lands a spot on the city’s annual restaurant lists will find their cooks arriving an extra hour early in the hopes of nabbing this new prize.
There are exceptions. But, as a general rule, Michelin-starred restaurants and the exalted, listified “have you eaten here yet?” restaurants, the kind that compete to serve the most exquisite food in the most elegant surroundings, do so by treating workers as if they are not deserving of respect, safety, or financial stability. In these places, “front of house” servers can earn good money if they put up with sexual harassment from customers or managers (the best shifts withheld if they complain). Meanwhile, “back of house” cooks who endure low wages or outright wage theft are commended for their “passion” and rewarded with alcohol at the end of a shift (leading to the highest rate of addiction in any industry).
Intimidation-based leadership, threats of demotion, a workload that exceeds the limits of paid hours — that’s just how the sausage is made. Sure, not all high-end restaurants. But the handful of top-tier restaurateurs that go out of their way to be better by investing in their staff’s financial and mental health are vocal about the challenges of eliminating tipping, paying a living wage, or providing additional benefits. If they treated their staff well, you’d hear about it.
Though this may seem an unfair generalization, the past 20 years of my professional life have taught me to assume that the rest are terrible workplaces. Treating workers as disposable is the most obvious, direct, and frequently used route to creating the luxurious experience we have been taught to expect from fine dining. These expectations have been built up in part through an obfuscation of the real work inside the beehive — despite all the attention focused on chefs by misleading competition shows.
The “golden age of dining” that sprang from the 2008 recession was frequently attributed to chefs leaving high-end restaurant jobs and bringing their skills to the mid-range of dining; serving exquisite food at a reasonable price by eliminating fine dining’s costly trappings of tablecloths and fancy dining rooms. That is partly true. But the real secret ingredient that made menus of the era so affordable was that those chefs exported the labour standards— getting 12 hours of work out of employees who are paid for nine hours — from their high-end temples of gastronomy.
Most diners, if they’ve never worked in hospitality, still assume that tips are split evenly, that a separate cleaning crew comes in to wash down at night, and that everyone at the world’s best restaurants must do very well. We can’t blame people for assumptions made about an opaque system.
If you’ve ever gone to a tailor to adjust the waist or shoulders on a favorite piece of clothing, you were likely shocked to hear a price estimate that was almost as much as the garment’s retail cost. But the original labour of making the item was done in another country by people we’ve never met. Accepting and benefiting from their low wages was easier to swallow. Face to face with a skilled tradesperson, it’s hard to deny the value of their work. In person, our reaction is that someone who is going to spend 10 hours making this dress or jacket fit us perfectly, doing work we can’t, deserves this fee. For work of this quality, we can afford to occasionally pay a single person what they are worth. However, a crew of people working at this level of skilled labour?
Consider the restaurant dish with 18 elements on the plate; sometimes they’re expensive ingredients from pedigreed farms that have been laboriously fermented, dehydrated, smoked, shaved paper-thin, sous-vide cooked, disassembled and reassembled, infused, reduced, delivered to the plate via tweezers, and otherwise manipulated into new forms designed to delight and satisfy us diners. Like building a bridge or invading a small country, that kind of operation requires many bodies. How is it possible to have 10, 20, or 30 cooks in the kitchen and pay them well?
It’s not. The only way to do it is to pay people as little as possible, bamboozling your workers with the fiction that their low wages are because they are artists rather than skilled tradespeople. And the only solution to the model of high-end dining is not to support it.
Once we’ve let go of the cachet-driven, glitzy dining world, we can get back to our local neighbourhood restaurant. I have fond memories of a handful of expensive meals. But I have a much stronger connection with — and motivation to financially support — the restaurants that have always been good but don’t land on our city’s top-10 lists, because they’re not new and didn’t spend 2 million dollars to make their dining room look like a Prada shop.
Donate Now