This Is For People Who Eat Out In Restaurants-- And For People Who Serve Them

Me and Fransje in de Kosmos kitchen

Everyone should work in a restaurant at some time in their life. I had literally never cooked anything when I went to work at the macrobiotic restaurant at the meditation center, de Kosmos, in Amsterdam. I had washed up in Amsterdam, broke and still living in my van, after a leisurely drive across Europe and Asia, as far as India, Nepal and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). When I got back to Europe I was in poor health and broke, I found de Kosmos not because I was looking for enlightenment but because I was looking for cheap, healthy food. I mean cost a dollar; even I could afford that.

Eventually the people who worked in the restaurant noticed I was eating there everyday. They asked me if I wanted to wash dishes for my meals. I was happy to and eventually I was also waiting tables. Marie, the head cook, decided to help cure my ailments— she noticed advanced sanpaku (三白眼)— and started teaching me the principles behind macrobiotics and then how to work in a kitchen. Soon I was cooking there and later the manager. We all did every job— dish-washing, serving, cooking, teaching courses, tending the store. I learned what being “woke” was decades before conservatives invented and weaponized the term and turned it against the people who took Jesus’ message to heart. Conservatives have always understood that empathy is their biggest enemy. In de Kosmos we served delicious, healthy food with the empathy.

The skills I learned there allowed me to find jobs at other times in my life and I worked at a health food restaurant in San Francisco many years later. Eventually my path went in a different direction. Yesterday the NY Times published a piece Ligaya Mishan about the post-pandemic scary, often hostile, dynamic between restaurant staff and guests.

mmmm... soup for 100

In Amsterdam we were all poor. There was no culture of tipping, although occasionally someone would leave a few cents or even a guilder in the communal tip jar. Sometime rich people would be slumming and find their way to our restaurant and leave a tip and every summer American tourists would come over; they generally left tips. Mishan painted a dystopian relationship between wait staff and diners based on ugly power dynamics with “guests who flex their power from the moment they stalk into the dining room; who frown at the table they’re led to, aggrieved at the imagined underestimation of their status, and insist on moving to another, often identical table; who try to meddle with the kitchen, demanding that the chef subtract and substitute ingredients, to the point of creating entirely new dishes; who wrinkle their noses at a perfectly fine bottle of wine and declare it corked, just to pull rank on the sommelier; who snap their fingers at servers, leer, sneer or scream, “You can’t do your job,” a line attributed to the actor and late-night host James Corden last fall over a flubbed order at the downtown Manhattan brasserie Balthazar; who tip stingily or not at all, ignoring the fact that, in the United States, the federal minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13 an hour; or who book a table and then don’t bother to show up, as happens with as many as 28 percent of all reservations, according to a 2021 survey by YouGov and OpenTable, and which can cost a small restaurant hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars, if not an entire night’s profit.”

The compulsion to act the tyrant isn’t confined to high rollers at expensive restaurants. (After all, fine dining and fast food both rely on low wages.) According to a 2021 study by the Fight for $15 and a Union, more than 77,000 conflagrations at fast-food outlets in California led to calls to 911 between 2017 and 2020, with 13 percent involving physical or sexual assault. Workers were choked, stabbed and beaten so savagely that they sustained concussions. All up and down the restaurant economy (indeed, across service industries: on airlines, at hotels and in hospitals and public schools), antagonism is on the rise. During the pandemic, the idea that certain workers were essential took hold, but that gained them little respect beyond a brief spate of nightly applause in big cities. If anything, the opposite happened: The people on the front lines, from emergency rooms to meat-processing plants, came to be seen as disposable, their lives and labor of worth only insofar as they benefited those privileged enough to be able to shelter at home or otherwise stay out of harm’s way.

Ours is an era of rage. Equal-opportunity rage: Even people with power and capital (social, cultural, financial) perceive themselves as not having enough. And while this has been exacerbated by our past few years in thrall to a virus— something tiny, invisible, insidious and still incompletely understood— it started earlier, with the society-wide turn to consumerism, the mimetic pursuit of status through acquisition, the elevation of wealth to a gospel, the patronizing and dehumanizing of the have-nots and the growing rift between rich and poor, which is now close to an abyss. The brilliance of the system is that it pits us against each other rather than those above us; it encourages us to worship and seek to imitate our overlords, not depose them. Note how, in the wake of the pandemic, corporate chains like Starbucks and Chipotle hiked prices and put the blame on workers, citing the need to raise wages in part because of a labor shortage— as if it were their workers’ fault for wanting to be paid what the free market will bear. (At the same time, profits and in some cases executive salaries have gone up, the higher prices simply feeding into company coffers.)

The restaurant has become an arena for both sides, the servers and the served, each wary of the other, each suspecting themselves undervalued and taken advantage of. From the perspective of the customer, the hostility can manifest as early as the booking process: To curb no-shows, a number of restaurants now require a deposit or “prepaid reservation,” as they call it, often equivalent to the baseline cost of the meal or a significant fraction thereof: 300 British pounds (around $365) per person for the parade of small plates at Kitchen Table in London; 4,444 renminbi (around $640) per person, depending on the evening, for the technology-enhanced, “avant-garde figurative” experience at Ultraviolet in Shanghai (which announces on its website, “We eat more myths than calories”); $1,200 per person for a caviar and black truffle dinner at the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif. Don’t expect to get your money back if your plans change at the last minute; Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare in New York requires eight days’ notice for modifications or cancellations, otherwise deposits are forfeited, although they may be applied to a future reservation— provided it’s made within three months of the original date. Other places charge a booking fee that cannot be applied to the cost of food and drink, like the $2.50 per person at Au Cheval in New York simply for the privilege of guaranteeing yourself a seat. (That’s less than the price of a subway ride, for what it’s worth, and that comes with no such guarantee.)

You are welcomed to dine but are also warned. In a society that has come to expect consumption on demand— whatever we want, whenever we want it, delivered via apps like Uber Eats that charge fees of as much as 30 percent of each order, cutting into restaurants’ profits— battle lines are drawn. At the time of booking, a restaurant may note that accommodations cannot be made for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, disavowers of salt or sugar or those who claim allergies to anything from alliums to gluten. In what might be a cri de coeur for restaurant kitchens everywhere, the Menu chef Julian Slowik, played by Ralph Fiennes, bellows, “There are no substitutions,” gazing wild-eyed into the vast dark surrounding the restaurant, before he metes out what he considers an appropriate punishment (death) for someone who violated that cardinal rule.

In the language of food service, a diner is not a customer but a guest. This suggests that when you show up at a restaurant, you will be treated with honor. People will be nice to you. Your needs will come first. Perhaps it’s this veneer of welcome that can make the nickel-and-diming of a meal— which at base is a primal, intimate event, the entwined acts of feeding and being fed— seem jarring, especially to those who seek in dining out a kind of reprieve, not just from doing the work of cooking and presenting the food and then cleaning up but from having to think about that kind of work at all, and who might be required to do it, if not you. It’s a desire “to be served rather than to engage,” as the essayist Alicia Kennedy has written.

At some restaurants, bread is no longer free, which makes sense, given the price of quality ingredients, the investment of time in baking and how much goes to waste (an environmental concern, since food that winds up in landfills releases greenhouse gases as it decays). Requests for tips — a tradition that took root in the United States only after the Civil War, in part as an excuse for white bosses to underpay Black employees, as the Pullman Company did on its rail cars with Black porters, who as late as 1934 were officially paid an average of $16.92 a week for more than 73 hours of work — are now built into payment systems even at outlets that don’t have table service, like doughnut shops and coffee carts, with the default often starting at 20 percent or higher. It’s a crafty tactic, the company offloading the cost of labor onto the customer, who then directs ire at the worker standing there with averted eyes, trapped behind the touch screen. In an economy in which everyone is constantly being ranked and rated, one-star reviews on Yelp are weaponized to punish restaurant workers for slights, perceived or real, while bad customers are outed via bootleg videos on social media, to howls of public condemnation. But here again the playing field is uneven: Where a string of nasty Yelp reviews can cause a dangerous drop in business, public shaming of individuals, while intense, is fleeting and, except in extreme, isolated cases, rarely has a sustained financial impact.

The New York restaurateur Danny Meyer has argued that empathy is essential to hospitality. A bad customer is just an unhappy person. In truth, we all have our griefs, our thwarted desires. But in the vulnerable hierarchy of the service industry, only some are allowed to wallow and indulge; others must sublimate. In The Menu, the chef draws a distinction between “those who give”— his staff— and “those who take”— the diners, swaggering, entitled, pretentious know-it-alls and trophy hunters, including a number who are interested not so much in tasting his food as in saying they’ve tasted it. One guest’s crime is misremembering what fish she ate the last time she came to dinner. “What does it matter?” she asks. “It matters to the halibut,” Slowik replies, taking the side not of the consumer but the consumed.

And yet have we not all, at different times, been takers and givers, server and served? The ancient mandate of hospitality rests in part on pragmatism: We were historically taught to give comfort to strangers because we might one day be strangers ourselves. Or perhaps it’s more instinctual, a memory of our defenseless beginnings: The writer and activist Priya Basil, in Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity (2019), notes that we enter the world as guests, “helpless little creatures whose every need must be attended to, who for a long time can give nothing or very little back.” Is this not the arc of a life, to slowly become aware of the people around us and the labor required to make our survival and happiness possible— the spills quietly mopped up, the food materializing as if out of thin air on the table— and to learn, if we can, to do the same for others?

Once, when I was working for Warner Bros., I took a big-name British musician out to lunch. I loved his music and his quirky character and we got along well, so I took him out whenever he was in L.A. I had the company credit card so I always happily picked up the tab. This time, though, he insisted on paying; first time in at least 4 or 5 years. I was surprised but it was at his hotel and he would be able to sign for it and it would come out of touring expenses. But more shocking than him picking up the tab was that he didn’t leave a tip. Whoa, whoa, whoa, amigo… you have to leave a tip. He looked at me as though I was speaking Swahili or Pashtun.

So I explained tipping to this young millionaire who had apparently never left one in his life! Then I explained how to figure out 15%. I suspect he may still be leaving 15%… in a world (at least an American world) where 20% is barely acceptable any longer— and where a service charge is added to the bill to split between the kitchen staff or provide for the staff’s healthcare.

Next week is my birthday. Some old friends are coming to town to help me celebrate with a dinner. They asked me to pick my favorite restaurant. I did but the reservation comes with a non-refundable $85/person "deposit." I thought that was only in L.A. But I gather from Mishan that it's now the custom in New York as well. What about where you live?