Culinary intern pay attracting scrutiny
In high-end restaurants, which rely on well-trained cooks’ perfection of practical skills, the role of the stagiaire — a culinary intern — has long been important. Young cooks exchange free labor for valuable training. Restaurants gain valuable help.
The practice also, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, may be illegal.
This week, the Willows Inn in Washington state, one of the most lauded restaurants in the country, agreed to pay $150,000 in unpaid overtime and damages to 19 former stagiaires, also known as stages. The Labor Department had investigated the destination restaurant, which is on an island north of Seattle, for requiring stages to work one month for free and for paying others $50 per day.
The decision may force restaurants all over the country to ask themselves: At what point does professional training
become exploitation?
It’s unclear whether the Department of Labor decision against Willows Inn only affects longer-term stages, or if it also applies to the widespread practice of tryouts, where cooks are asked to audition for a shift or two before being hired.
Traditionally, cooks have used their chef connections to score a coveted stage (pronounced “stahzh”) position at a restaurant in another city or country, working for food and sometimes housing as well. Or, an ambitious cook will work a full week’s shift at her normal job and then spend one of her off days staging at a top restaurant to hone her skills.
Many of the Bay Area’s most lauded chefs have worked as stages. For example, when James Syhabout, who now owns Commis in Oakland, was a line cook moving up the fine dining ranks, he took a year off to work as a stage at some of Europe’s best restaurants: Fat Duck in England, and both El Bulli and Mugaritz in Spain.
Roland Passot, chef-owner of La Folie on San Francisco’s Polk Street, said that many decades ago in France, he built up his resume by traveling from restaurant to restaurant. “You knew you weren’t going to get paid,” he said. One restaurant, he remembers fondly, let him sleep in a barn on a heap of hay.
The internship can give an aspiring chef credibility on a resume or press release. At the same time, some of the world’s highest-end restaurants, like Willows Inn, have relied on free labor to produce course after course of elaborately composed dishes.
The Willows Inn case, initially reported by the Seattle Times, is part of a larger-scale crackdown on unpaid internships in many fields, including journalism. Some aspiring professionals have seen these internships as a way to get much-needed job skills or a foot in the door. Others have criticized the practice because it favors young workers who have family money or other financial support.
A number of high-profile Bay Area restaurants have been sued for labor violations such as wage theft and unpaid overtime in recent months. The restaurant industry is no longer being treated as a special category of work with its own, rather lax, labor laws.
Jose Carnevalli, spokesman for the San Francisco office of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, said that his office has received no complaints about Bay Area restaurants, but refused to answer further questions.
The Chronicle contacted all six of the Michelin three-star restaurants in the Bay Area to ask them about their stage programs. Saison requires a one-year commitment from stagiaires, but pays them. The Restaurant at Meadowood pays stagiaires either a wage or a stipend; the French Laundry said it “work(s) diligently to ensure compliance to all state and federal employment laws.” Manresa, Benu and Quince all declined to comment.
Many former stagiaires still see the value of their unpaid labor.
Before David Barzelay, chefowner of Lazy Bear, started the underground dinners that became his popular Mission restaurant, he was a law student who learned to cook from cookbooks and stages at restaurants like Nopa. “There was no way I was hirable, or that my work was worth paying for, but I was getting tons out of it,” he said of the experience. “I was learning everything from kitchen lingo to how you move in a kitchen and a sense of urgency.”
Commis’ Syhabout said that his year as a stage gave him valuable exposure to how upper-echelon restaurants conceived and executed 40-course meals. “I wasn’t there for recipes,” he said. “It was more to learn the way they think, organize themselves. To be there for the train of thought.”
Yet Syhabout added that his Oakland restaurant is too small to accommodate stages of its own. He turns down numerous requests.
At La Folie, Passot has largely ended the practice.
“If the guy gets injured, has an accident, whatever happens — you don’t want paperwork just because he’s staging,” Passot said. He even pays cookingschool students during their practical internships. He doesn’t want to put his business at risk for the sake of free labor.
Barzelay said that Lazy Bear does accommodate stages, feeding them and encouraging them to pepper the staff with questions, just as he once did. “We have forms that they have to read that say you’re doing this for your own benefit,” he added, not for the promise of a job.
Barzelay even encourages his full-time cooks to stage on their day off.
So does Syhabout. “You can only get so much from Instagram and social media,” the Commis chef said.