Restaurant industry looks to reset the table
Industry veterans say any attempts to find a ‘new normal’ must address long-standing concerns about racism and workplace abuse
After cataclysm often comes change. The pandemic has overturned our lives and our assumptions. In this occasional series, the Star looks at what lessons we might take and what future we might build.
Most people know what a restaurant reopening will look like: dining rooms and patios at half capacity, servers wearing masks and gloves, bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere and maybe even a few creepy mannequins at the tables to encourage social distancing.
What the restaurant experience will be like when guests start to trickle back after the COVID-19 lockdown is often described as the “new normal.” Missing from the chatter, though, is whether that new normal includes a more inclusive and sustainable industry.
Restaurants had problems long before COVID-19: notoriously slim profit margins, low wages, abuse and unsafe environments for racialized employees.
With Toronto restaurants gearing up to reopen, there is a chance to create a new normal that works for everyone.
“We cannot carry on about the recovery unless we talk about the elephant in the room: systemic racism,” says chef Bashir Munye, who also teaches at George Brown College’s culinary school. Munye is currently working on his master’s of environmental studies at York University, focusing on the idea of decolonizing culinary education. “As a Black person who has endured racism since childhood, it’s important that we address this or else it’s very difficult to move forward.”
Much of the way food is judged and presented in the West is through a colonial, Eurocentric gaze, he says. Culinary students learn about French cooking terms and the kitchen hierarchy set by French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with roles such as chef de cuisine, sous chef and chef de partie becoming the standard in many professional kitchens.
Fine dining is equated with French and Italian food while other cuisines — Chinese or Ghanaian, for example — are considered cheap eats even if they are just as labour-intensive and rich with history.
“We have to understand the power dynamics,” Munye says. “If I’m a person of colour making goat meat but I don’t have money to open a big place, I have to frame my cooking as cheap food. But someone who is white then uses goat and says they’re showcasing my food as an homage, but they’re the ones making money.”
Another part of the re-education, he says, is for restaurant owners and staff to understand intersectionality, the concept of how a person’s race, gender, class and ability can overlap to create a unique experience of systemic oppression.
“Training should be mandatory, like how a restaurant needs a food handler’s certificate or first-aid training,” Munye says. “There should be something about food and racial literacy. It won’t stop it completely, but I think people will act better when there’s an awareness. Just like how having a food handler’s certificate won’t stop you from serving raw chicken, but you know why you shouldn’t do it.”
Filmmaker and former restaurant manager Arianne Persau d recently created the #ChangeHospitality hashtag on social media to call out racism in the restaurant industry, and is launching a newsletter on the issues of privilege and oppression in the field.
It is a response to the #SaveHospitality campaign through which restaurant owners have been asking the provincial and federal governments for a bailout.
Persaud’s criticism of the Save Hospitality campaign is that there hasn’t been much discussion on how the industry leaders will help Black, racialized and transgender employees who have continuously faced discrimination in dining rooms and kitchens. As a Black woman who spent 16 years working in restaurants, Persaud says she wants restaurant owners to do more than post a black square on Instagram to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It’s to keep accountability for the owners who posted black squares. You can’t enter the ring without any self-reflection,” says Persaud, who also started the Toronto Restaurant Workers Relief Fund to provide groceries to unemployed, foodinsecure restaurant workers during the pandemic.
It’s the lack of accountability that has made the industry ripe for abuse, says Michael McGaraughty, a server at House of Parliament in Cabbagetown. McGaraughty has worked in restaurants for 44 years, starting as a dishwasher at 14.
“The racist, homophobic, sexist commentary I’ve heard at the places I’ve worked at is jawdropping,” he says. “In restaurants, if you say you don’t like something, your shifts will be cut back and there’s no one to advocate on your behalf. The owners and managers have the power to make things uncomfortable.”
McGaraughty says workers often feel it’s too costly and time-consuming to pursue legal action against employers, which enables bad behaviour to go unchecked in an industry with a high turnover rate. He says he would like to see a type of ombudsperson, whether from the municipal or provincial government, who could check in with employees. Toronto’s DineSafe program is a way for the public to know whether food safety procedures are being followed, and McGaraughty would like a similar program for the public to know how a restaurant’s employees are treated.
“We lived with our heads in the sand for decades and this is an amazing chance for us to start getting things right,” he says. “As a queer activist, I’ve been through these moments of protest and have seen profound change.”
The traditional restaurant model is built on the exploitation of cheap labour. The idea of tipping was popularized in America after the Civil War as a way for restaurant owners to save money and pay newly freed slaves solely in tips, according to Saru Jayaraman’s 2016 book “Forked: A New Standard for American Dining,” which looks into the treatment of restaurant workers.
In the past decade, a few restaurants in North America experimented with abolishing tips. In Toronto, Indian Street Food Co. and the now-closed Sidecar bar gave it a try five years ago. The intention was to give staff a reliable hourly wage and to eliminate the pay disparity between cooks and servers.
But without it being implemented on a grand scale, the no-tipping policy never took off. Servers who were used to making tips quit. Diners were put off by the higher menu prices required to increase staff’s hourly wage and benefits.
But some restaurants are giving the no-tip policy another try during the pandemic. David Neinstein of Barque Smokehouse in Roncesvalles has been selling $12 quarter-pound cheeseburgers made with house-ground beef. The price includes tax and a built-in 10 per cent tip. He acknowledges it’s a lot more than what people are used to paying, but says it’s working so far. He sold a few hundred burgers last week alone.
“The restaurant model is broken. If we don’t change, we shouldn’t be operating,” he says. “It’s going to be an experiment of how much people are willing to pay for food in order for us to keep the lights on and pay our staff. It’s the new normal or bust.”
Still, he says changes have to be made on a greater scale to enable restaurants to operate on wider margins and pay workers fairly. “Can the government subsidize food sales with Canadian farmers so that it will help with our food costs? Maybe farm subsidies will help us. Will rent control help? Can the government have control over the tipping issue?”
Food Network Canada personality and chef Roger Mooking says rent in the city is astronomical and that he wouldn’t open a brick-and-mortar space in Toronto unless he owned the building. Mooking is the executive chef of Twist by Roger Mooking at Pearson International Airport.
He sees the necessity of multiple revenue streams to boost profits, whether it’s increasing takeout business, doing cooking tutorials, selling pantry staples or catering. “At the end of the day, it’s a business with revenue, expenses and a loss or profit,” he says. “Expanding the revenue is the first thing, because if profitability is zero and you increase payroll, then the business closes.”
The old restaurant model hasn’t worked for everyone, which is why some choose other paths. Chef La-toya Fagon started Twist Catering (no relation to Mooking’s restaurant) in 2007, cooking her style of Caribbean cuisine. During the pandemic she’s also offering takeout. Fagon has worked as a personal chef for the Toronto Raptors, appeared on cooking segments on daytime television and catered major events such as the Toronto International Film Festival. She says the profit margins are better in catering and she feels more fulfilled by being able to focus on a single client at a time.
“It’s why I built my own empire. There was no room for growth (elsewhere),” she says. “I worked for a large company for years and was a trained chef who worked at a bunch of restaurants and travelled in Europe and Mexico, but I was only seen as someone who could make really good rice and chicken.”
Rather than waiting for the restaurant industry to offer her opportunities, Fagon created her own — where she gets the satisfaction of making all the decisions.
“Now, if I had a bad day, I can’t blame it on anybody else. The only person I’m in competition with is myself from yesterday.”
“We lived with our heads in the sand for decades and this is an amazing chance for us to start getting things right.”
MICHAEL MCGARAUGHTY A SERVER WHO HAS WORKED IN RESTAURANTS FOR 44 YEARS