San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Workers in the battered live music industry get one break: free highend meals.
With live music shut down, the ones who make it all happen get fed — very well
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Verjus was exceptionally if unusually staffed. Food runners came not just from the Jackson Square wine bar, restaurant and shop but also from Another Planet Entertainment, the concert promoter that runs the Greek Theatre, the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and the Independent, among other venues and festivals throughout the Bay Area.
The workers were ferrying paper bags full of fried chicken or arancini (mozzarellastuffed risotto balls), plus coleslaw, honeysmothered buttermilk biscuits and more, from the commissary kitchen out to the curb, where Another Planet, in partnership with Touring Professionals Alliance Kitchen, had set up tents.
Before long, the invitees, all live music industry workers, trickled in to receive their free meals. They were stagehands, concessionaires and technicians; bartenders, caterers and stage managers; security, medical and janitorial staff.
In normal times, they might not be among the regular clientele of chef Michael Tusk, who with wife Lindsay
runs Quince and Cotogna in San Francisco, in addition to Verjus. But for five weeks, through Thursday, May 20, these workers are the beneficiaries of a partnership between Another Planet and Touring Professionals Alliance Kitchen to provide free highend meals to an industry that can’t bounce back from the pandemic as quickly as many others might.
Jerome Crooks, a tour manager for bands including Tool and Nine Inch Nails, cofounded the Touring Professionals Alliance in the early days of the pandemic as a way to share information and resources among tour crews. The organization added the kitchen component in August, looking for ways to get crews special meals over the winter holidays.
“We’re just trying to make sure that people that have been forgotten during this time take a nice, hot, fresh meal home,” Crooks told The Chronicle by phone from his home in Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles County). “Whatever money they would have spent on dinner that night, for those two nights, they put towards their bills. It gives them a little breathing room for at least a month.
“There’s not a lot of positive things going on right now for people in this industry,” he added. “We wanted to give them something special.”
Working initially with Louisville, Ky., chef Edward Lee of the Lee Initiative, whose mission is to improve the lives of restaurant industry workers, TPA Kitchen raised enough money to serve meals for seven weeks in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Nashville. Now, it’s again raised money to restart service in Nashville, as well as open in the Bay Area and Austin, Texas.
Mary Conde, general manager at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, said that when she heard about TPA Kitchen, she immediately wanted to create a local chapter. Another Planet and TPA Kitchen found donors in Green Day and San Francisco singersongwriter Matt Nathanson, as well as Crush Management, Phish’s WaterWheel Foundation, Meyer Sound, Dolby, Cresco Equipment Rentals, San Francisco Giants and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 16 — approximately 80% of whose 2,000 members are still unemployed, reports
Joanne Desmond, the union’s assistant business agent.
“We’re not looking at it as a handout,” Conde said. “We’re looking at this as a ‘thank you that you hung in there.’ ”
She’s hopeful for her industry, though concerts are still months away from returning to San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and she wants recipients to see the meals as a sign of hope, too.
“This isn’t a soup kitchen,” Conde added. “The chef prepared an elevated meal. The whole idea is dinner’s on us tonight.”
In addition to Tusk, participating local restaurateurs include the Hi Neighbor Hospitality Group, which operates Corridor, the Vault and Trestle in San Francisco; and, in Oakland, Jenny Schwarz and Kyle Itani of Hopscotch and Silvia and Cory McCollow of Nido’s Backyard. Together, they’re distributing 2,500 meals over five weeks; should additional donations roll in, they’ll be distributed as grocery store gift cards.
“I love live music,” Tusk said of his decision to participate. He collects vinyl, and for a past free meal, his pastry team lacquered cookies to make them look like 45s. For the meal on Tuesday, May 4, he wanted to include as much “uberseasonal” produce as possible from his farm in Bolinas, settling on peas, cabbage and kohlrabi for the coleslaw. Panna cotta came with firstoftheseason strawberries. (“We do have some secret strawberry farmers that we cannot tell you about,” said culinary assistant Joyce Liu.)
Tusk wanted to participate also because he saw parallels between the issues for workers in the music and restaurant industries: the long hours, the lack of benefits, the mental health stressors, the high cost of living in the city.
“When you’re always cooking or touring, you don’t really get to think things through in a way to say, ‘What can I do to make my industry better?’ ” he said.
At the curb, San Francisco Symphony stagehand Joe Crowley showed up in a sport utility vehicle with a team of three more.
“They’re wholesome and awesome meals,” he said. “That’s why we come back.”
Bay Area bartender and caterer Kelly
Abrams, who worked frequently at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, had to call a friend when she first heard about the program to ask, “Is this for real?”
“This blew me away,” she said of the program.
She and fellow caterer and single mother Lucena Kimbrough miss their customers — even though they could be crazy, she said. Now they even miss that craziness. They miss being in constant motion on the job. They miss the bands themselves.
Abrams still has one gig; she shares a room in her Concord home with her son, who’s almost 16.
“I don’t have time to cook anything,” she said. Picking up her bagged meals on Tuesday, she said looked forward to being able to say to her son, “You’re going to have dinner for tonight!”