Blow up the restaurant industry and start again

The last normal night I had in pre-pandemic New York was at a small restaurant in Queens with a couple of friends. It was the first week of March, when city leadership was still telling us that masks were unnecessary if you were “feeling well,” and the general response to the developing crisis felt like a version of the 9/11 recovery ethos of just spend your money and things will be fine eventually. It is hard to remember that night, both because of how misguided I was and how far away it now feels, but it was the end of something. A little more than a week later, after New York marked its first Covid-19 death, restaurants, bars, and most of the rest of the city shuttered in response to an order from the mayor.
On the eve of that announcement, Sarah, a server at a Brooklyn restaurant, was working what would be her last Saturday shift. “We were watching people cough into their napkins, and I had hives on my hands from washing them so much,” she told Marian Bull for TNR this week. “I was scared out of my mind.” She was soon laid off, like millions of other restaurant and hospitality workers across the country.
But mass unemployment is only part of the picture now. In Georgia, restaurants have reopened, with wealthy white patrons in suburban Atlanta believing themselves immune—maybe literally—to the consequences of the virus being felt acutely and disproportionately by black residents across the state. In New York and elsewhere, sit-down restaurants have shifted to takeout and delivery in a bid to stay afloat, while more permanent closures are announced every day. The risks are severe. Money is still scarce; GoFundMe campaigns multiply. Delivery workers, in bandannas and disposable masks, bike their typical routes, often for shit tips. It’s a hard thing to imagine keeping up.

You could say the same for how restaurants worked before, really. The industry is “precarious at the best of times, but also one that relies on exploitation to exist,” as Bull writes. Restaurant workers often don’t have health insurance or any paid time off. Workplaces are highly segregated by race and gender. Undocumented workers are frequent targets of exploitative labor practices like wage theft.

The intensification of these conditions in the pandemic, along with an ambient sense of free fall and possibility in the face of social collapse, has led many people in the industry to consider building something more sustainable and just. “We need ownership models that challenge the status quo, all along the production line,” Tunde Wey, a New Orleans–based chef, told TNR.
But you can’t really separate out how we eat from the rest of how we live, which turns the conversation about remaking restaurants into one about everything else. You can picture it all coming together, Rube Goldberg–style: more democracy through worker ownership and mass unionization, rent stabilization to protect small businesses from the whims of landlords, land trusts to give communities real power to determine what their neighborhood should value, ethical production chains that compensate labor fairly at every step, dignity and protection for undocumented workers, single-payer health care that will help workers and owners alike, universal paid time off.
The idea is to create a workplace where the stakes don’t have to be so high for anyone. But we’re not anywhere near where we need to be—so in the meantime, please tip (and tip and tip), and delete those third-party delivery apps.

See you next week.
—Katie McDonough, Deputy Editor