San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
STARVING FOR ARTISTS
The restaurant industry was the paying gig for many creatives. We’ll miss them.
You’ve met my tribe.
You’ve seen their work in small art galleries, and you’ve listened to their band play. Maybe you have a tote bag they designed or a print on your apartment wall with their signature in the corner. They directed the short you saw at the local film festival and they took all the photos for the Instagram handle you’re really into.
But that isn’t how you actually met them.
No, your first interaction was when they assured you the kitchen knew you were glutenfree. They recommended your table try the Beaujolais or they plated the dessert for your birthday dinner and carried it out to you, candle and all. It’s all right if you didn’t recognize that you were being served by these local artists the last time you dined out. They were busy working after all, and were content with the earnings they’d walk away with that evening, money that would pay the bills while they pursued creative interests on the side.
You should know that their employers were content as well; the restaurant industry has nearly always had a healthy symbiosis with actors, artists, writers and musicians, and was delighted to offer them work, even if it was just the occasional shift here and there.
Were. Was. Pasttense intended. Because I don’t know what’s going to become of my people and their former places of employment now.
I was brought into the tribe after a complete career change. After studying French and English and teaching for 10 years, I found myself sidehustling as a barista while pursuing freelance writing and translation. After a fortuitous turn of events, I now work as assistant to Dominique Crenn, a San Francisco chef who famously never attended culinary school and discovered her love and talent for gastronomy only after having received a master’s degree in business. My love of the hospitality industry stems in part from this shared experience, that both she and I have been allowed to thrive in an area outside of our college studies. I struggle to think of other work arenas that allow this sort of fluidity.
For every person like me who unexpectedly found their calling through the restaurant industry, for every chef like my boss who rose through the ranks after mentors gave her a chance, there is a master sommelier who discovered winemaking on his way to an acting audition. There are writers or photographers who decided gastronomy was their muse. And, yes, there are others who have simply passed this way and used restaurant work as a stepping stone on their way to something else. One dear friend from my barista days now has a fulltime job at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and contributes her artwork to galleries across the country. Another works in film and is a helping hand behind local festivals.
Others still work — worked — as servers or cooks but also regularly performed in ballets, gave readings in bookshops, or recorded albums with their friends. Now, furloughed or fired, they’re all feeling the same misplaced pressure to make something of this time. Finish your novel! Write your screenplay! Paint your masterpiece! Many are relying on unemployment for the next few months but recognize that it’s temporary. They’ll need jobs again, and many local restaurants don’t know when or if they’ll be able to offer those muchneeded shifts. And if an industry that has just contributed up to 60% of our current unemployment rate, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, can’t receive a proper helping hand, as we’ve seen through the recent Paycheck Protection Program debacle, we’re perhaps wrong to expect the National Endowment for the Arts to wake up to overflowing coffers anytime soon.
Like so many in the world of food and wine, I fear what our celebrated restaurant scene will look like for years to come. I also can’t help but think of the future of our cultural fabric in general. Surely the decline of my industry will be felt in all creative and cultural sectors throughout the city. In my most feverish of nightmares, I see myself, a pescatarian, sadly studying the menu of yet an
other Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse for the nth Friday night in a row. My choices for activities after dinner will be equally bleak; my dear friends won’t be DJing, dancing or leading any workshops that night. For lack of jobs, they’ll have moved elsewhere, finally having lost the costofliving battle after all these years.
While we rush to find a vaccine for the illness that came upon us so suddenly, perhaps we can also direct our energy to broader societal healing. Can we begin to vaccinate against what has plagued our city for years now, namely the difficulty in living here with anything less than a sixfigure paycheck from a tech job? I don’t pretend to understand all the complexities of such a remedy, but these past few weeks, we’ve caught a glimpse of the policy, advocacy and generosity we are capable of.
In my own advocacy to save independent restaurants, I also see that we’re fighting to save something of a much larger scale. And if you don’t yet know what that something much larger is, ask the many creative minds who have shaped Bay Area culture over the years.
Hurry before they’re gone.