It worked. Bell’s revenues and staff have more than doubled since that pivotal summer day, and now the Ryans are talking about how to add a retirement program with four percent matching funds, a longstanding goal that will also bring them in line with state-mandated legislation.

“We said, ‘If we’re going to change, this is our time to change,’” Greg said. “If we are not trying to be a better business, and a better business for our staff and the people that work with us, we are going to be so upset with ourselves.”

Even before Covid upended the restaurant landscape, operators large and small were staring down the growing burdens of dwindling foot traffic and poor staff retention. The pandemic, however, turned those concerns into crises. 

Revenue shrunk, debt mounted, and employees, fed up with the industry standard of shoddy pay, grueling hours and nonexistent benefits—not to mention having to risk their health for poor compensation and rude customers—hung up their serving aprons and chef’s whites for good. With the food service industry still down 819,900 jobs as of this March compared to February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and any future federal aid uncertain, restaurant owners like the Ryans were left to find their own alternatives to the old, dysfunctional model. 

Many operators have seen a chance to experiment and lay the foundation for a more sustainable industry, which means starting with the individuals who keep it afloat: A healthy staff—physically, mentally, financially—will be far more likely to contribute to long-term success than a team running forever on fumes.

The Ryans built a formula: They figured out how much they’d have to bring in from each seat, down to the penny, to break even, while they guaranteed all their employees more than a living wage along with benefits. 

The couple performed back-of-the-envelope math while plugging into a Google spreadsheet hard costs like real estate, and more flexible ones like food and labor. They consulted with an industry brain trust of former and current management from Union Square Hospitality Group and the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, as well as the restaurant operations support group Oyster Sunday, about what the ideal model would be. And they arrived at a surprisingly simple solution that many restaurants have turned to throughout the pandemic: a pre-fixe dinner menu. 

At $65 for five courses, plus a 20 percent overall service fee in lieu of tips, the price and format felt like a deal that guests could swallow. And, Greg said, it meant that “I’m at least breaking even or I’m not losing a ton of money every second.” The pre-fixe operation not only has helped the team better manage their food costs, but the consistency means they can regularly plan to source salad greens or uni from local producers they’re confident in, versus buying commodity vegetables to accomodate a constantly rotating menu. The service fee, while carrying a significant drawback in that it is reported as income, meaning Bell’s has to pay taxes on it, was a major boon because it removes customers from having any power over their staff’s wages and ensures a guaranteed—and more transparent—revenue stream to help pay for employee costs. 

As of October 2021, the menu now runs $75 per person—the $10 increase due to inflation and growing food costs, with 65 to 75 covers a night. Greg says that the menu price is effectively their break even point, while add-ons like wine, caviar and bread all help to ensure profitability. The new model looks like a success: As the staff—and the total restaurant’s costs—have tripled, the number of customers per night has jumped from the ballpark of 40 in June of 2020. Revenue more than tripled as well: Before Covid, in 2019, the restaurant was clearing $1 million a year. In 2021, despite an on-going pandemic, that number surged to about $3 million. And employee retention has been above 95 percent. 

Greg regularly points out that privilege and good fortune have played a part as well. Early on, he and Daisy purchased the building housing Bell’s instead of buying a home, essentially locking in their real estate costs; their decision to live with Daisy’s parents in the meantime has also helped reduce their overhead costs. The publicity from Daisy being named a Food & Wine Best Chef and Bell’s earning a 2021 Michelin star has helped ensure a continued demand for their food while also allowing them to expand their revenue. And a $93,000 Paycheck Protection Program loan as well as a $150,000 Economic Injury Disaster Loan, along with private funding, helped provide the cash flow to implement these huge workplace overhauls. 

“If someone’s like ‘What’s the blueprint?’ I’m like, it’s a lot of luck, it’s a lot of hard work and it’s just being in the right place at the wrong time, but also the right time,” Greg said.

Still, it’s possible to innovate on more of a shoestring. Stella Dennig, co-owner of Daytrip, a restaurant and wine bar that opened in Oakland, California last October, listed several experiments the restaurant has incorporated to expand its revenue streams, including beverage clubs curating natural wines, beer and aperitifs and a pop-up nighttime wine bar with a menu of easily preparable snacks. She may start a coffee and pastry service as well, which won’t require a full back-of-house team to prepare the food. 

“A dinner restaurant sit-down table service is one of the highest labor versions of what we could be doing, and we want to, as we grow and expand, think of things that can keep labor tight,” Dennig said. “Every five hundred dollars, every thousand dollars all makes a huge difference, so the more revenue streams that we can pull in, that can do that for us every week, every month, it all adds up.”

Dennig estimated that Daytrip’s employee costs range from 40 to 48 percent of the restaurant’s total costs on a good week, greatly exceeding the conventional industry figure of 30 percent. The non-salaried staff starting base wage of $16 to $18 an hour, slightly higher than the $15.06 minimum wage in Oakland, is bolstered by a 20 percent service fee that is pooled and evenly divided among hourly staff. The restaurant also provides access to quarterly financial workshops and a scaling health care stipend, which totals $300 a month for an employee working 40-hour weeks. Retirement plans are a possibility down the line. 

“There’s so much more that I would like to do and that I know that we will get to,” Dennig said. “All I’m doing right now is what feels like the bare minimum to me, and it’s revolutionary only because the bar is so low in this industry, and that’s not OK.” 

Investing in staff wages and benefits can result in a virtuous circle effect: People are more likely to stay at their jobs, which then decreases the costs that result from replacing them. Tim Taney, co-owner of the burger restaurant Slidin’ Dirty in Troy, New York, estimated that training new employees cost him at least $500 a month. A year after expanding his staff’s benefits package to include employee-covered health insurance and a membership to the YMCA, among other perks, staff retention has improved drastically, with only one employee leaving during that time.

“It’s a significant savings,” Taney said. “It certainly doesn’t pay for everybody’s health care for the year, it’s not like that alone covers that, but it’s a part of it.”

Micah Fendley, a server at Bell’s, has been in the industry for about 20 years, and thanks to the changes there has a health insurance card for the first time. That’s affected not just his physical well-being but his outlook on his job and employers, too. 

“I’m proud more than anything that I have a job that respects me enough that pays for my health insurance,” Fendley said. This past February, while the restaurant staff was on a paid winter break, Fendley traveled to Six Flags with his girlfriend, washed his car, had lunch with coworkers, even played disc golf. Returning to the restaurant post-break, he said, “I was able to have an out-of-body experience at work because I was so well rested.”   

Anne McBride, vice president of programs at the James Beard Foundation, noted that not all improvements for workers require employers taking on immense additional costs. Citing findings from a recent report by the organization, McBride said that a number of people left the industry in recent years because there were not clear career paths laid out for growth at restaurants. By simply instituting structures for employees to progress to higher hourly wages or positions, restaurants can turn jobs into careers and reduce turnover. 

“It’s something that restaurants should pay much closer attention to because, not that it’s free, but it’s something that you can do without having to change anything to the financial structure of your restaurants,” McBride said.  

Greg Ryan is encouraged by how the restaurant’s transformation has bettered the lives of Bell’s staff, but he’s already thinking about what more he can do.

“We hope to get to dental and vision, we’re finally working on our 401(k) program,” Greg said. “It’s all these things that make people feel and hopefully see that there is a reinvestment going back into them as people and not some cog in the machine.” 

The post Happier employees, higher profits: Restaurant owners spend more, and it pays off appeared first on The Counter.

Prices for soybean oil—which, according to the Department of Agriculture (USDA), was the most widely consumed edible oil in the United States last year—have roughly tripled in the past two years. While commodity analysts, agricultural economists, and trade organizations all agree that the most recent spikes in edible oil costs are directly tied to Russia invading Ukraine, there may be a more enduring factor behind these record-high prices—specifically, the escalating use of commodities like soybean oil not for food purposes, but rather in the production of greener, renewable fuel.

“We can resolve weather problems, and we can resolve the Ukrainian situation,” said Bill Lapp, president of the commodity price consulting firm Advanced Economic Solutions, “and we still would be faced with a food-versus-fuel debate with regard to vegoil supplies, and trying to burn our food.”

Vegetable oil prices have dogged food processors and restaurants like Steny’s over the past two years, driven higher and higher by a perfect storm of conditions—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cutting off major global exports of commodities like sunflower oil, the continued fallout from Covid-19 supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, and volatile weather conditions across the globe affecting soybean, canola, and palm oil production, among other factors. Yet underpinning these escalating costs are U.S. federal and state policies that, since the advent of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) in 2005, have mandated and encouraged biofuel production like renewable diesel. The Biden administration has championed the RFS as it seeks to address climate change and develop fossil-fuel alternatives. And lately, that has meant it’s not just bakers and chefs like Melenchuk treating soybean oil like “liquid gold.” 

These myriad government policies have been a boon to farmers, who appreciate commanding higher prices for the corn and soy they grow for biofuel production. Energy companies are also cashing in on RFS and other renewable fuel policy incentives like California’s low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS), as they start to manufacture—or ramp up production of—renewable diesel, a biofuel made with plant materials and animal byproducts that emits less carbon emissions than petroleum-based diesel. Animal tallow and used cooking oil can be used to produce renewable diesel, but the same soybean oil bottled and displayed on grocery store shelves is also used as source.

It’s true: The renewable fuel boom is boosting industrial demand for vegetable oils at the same time that prices for cooking oils are soaring. But is that boom turning up the heat on Melenchuk’s fryer oil prices? In interviews with The Counter, agricultural economists and analysts suggested that the renewable diesel industry’s ever-expanding appetite for various fats and oils is indeed ratcheting up competition for vegetable oil, particularly soy in the United States. That increased demand threatens food processors’ supplies while also raising their costs. And when suppliers face higher costs, those of us closer to the dinner table typically do, too. 

A 2021 report published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated that renewable diesel production capacity would more than quadruple by 2024. But some analysts predict that the expected supply of raw materials like animal tallow and used cooking oil won’t be enough to meet production demands, leaving soybean oil—and, likely in the near future, other vegetable oils—to do the heavy lifting of filling in the gap in available feedstocks, or the raw materials used to produce the biofuel. That’s fine in theory: vegetable oils are substitutable goods, meaning that if prices for soybean oil suddenly shoot up or if there is a shortage, it can easily be swapped with other vegetable oils like canola or sunflower. But shutting down or tightening a pipeline for one type of oil, as has been the case with Russia and Ukraine, which export 75 percent of the world’s sunflower oil, will not only crank up the pressure on whatever supply is still available, but will also shoot up demand for similarly substitutable goods. In other words, increased demand for various substitutable edible oils is simultaneously driving up prices for all of them. 

That brings us back to soybean oil. “It’s the industrial demand that’s certainly the growing [use],” said Will Osnato, a senior research analyst at the agriculture data firm Gro-Intelligence, adding that food consumption for soybean oil over the past 10 years has risen only 5 percent, compared to a whopping 126 percent growth in industrial use. Commodity analysts say they are worried that domestic soybean oil demand may outpace supply in the near future, which could mean we’ll face an impossible choice between cheaper food costs and greener energy—and not just in years of great global unrest.  

This industrial demand surge in the United States can be traced back at least 17 years, to the creation of the RFS. First established by Congress as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and expanded in 2007 through the Energy Independence and Security Act, the program sought to boost renewable fuel production while reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Following the expansion, RFS required that a minimum amount of renewable fuel be blended into the overall fuel supply, with the total level rising each year to reach a targeted goal of 36 billion gallons in 2022. (The nation is currently on track to produce far below that historic goal.) 

Over the past 15 years, much of the fuel requirement has been fulfilled by corn ethanol, which currently makes up roughly 10 percent of the nation’s motor fuel supply. But RFS stipulated that as the mandated level of renewable fuel production increased, so too would the proportion of renewable fuels be composed of “advanced biofuels,” which are defined as any renewable fuel besides corn-based ethanol that provide comparably low fuel emission rates. But because advanced biofuels are expensive to produce compared to petroleum diesel, federal and state governments have enacted additional policies that provide subsidies and incentives to make their manufacturing commercially viable. 

These incentives have attracted droves of energy companies to the production of renewable diesel, looking to reap the benefits. In the past three years alone, Marathon Petroleum Corp., CVR Energy, HollyFrontier, and Phillips 66 have all announced plans to convert oil refineries for renewable diesel production with soybean oil as one of the feedstocks. This past July, EIA reported that if all renewable diesel projects that had been announced or were in development were to come online, domestic production capacity would increase to over 5 billion gallons in 2024, up from just short of 0.6 billion gallons in 2020.

But not all incentives were created equal, and one in particular has been seen by the agriculture and energy industries as chiefly responsible for the green diesel rush. “Why are all these renewable diesel plants being built?” asked Scott Irwin, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “A straightforward explanation is it’s California.”

In 2011, the state first implemented its low-carbon fuel standard, which requires a steady, yearly decrease of the carbon intensity (CI) of transportation fuels sold in the state. Irwin explained, however, that it’s not the LCFS alone that is driving so many large multinational energy companies to set up renewable diesel production sites. “They are betting that basically renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel, which is very closely related, will have a major role to play in any climate mitigation policies,” Irwin said. “In essence, they’re betting that the LCFS will spread state by state across the United States.”

You don’t have to look far to find confirmation of Irwin’s assessment. Oregon and Washington have both passed laws enacting their own low-carbon or clean fuel standards, while New York, Colorado, and Minnesota  are exploring enacting their own standards. Biofuel companies and their trade representatives are also pushing for a national low-carbon fuel standard. 

But the looming concern among agriculture and energy analysts remains: whether current and future feedstock supplies will be able to keep up with refineries’ demand. While the ideal raw materials for this outgrowth of renewable diesel facilities are used cooking oil, tallow, and corn oil byproducts, the available supply for these feedstocks is quite limited compared to expected production capacity. Energy companies are therefore expecting soybean oil—currently the only vegetable oil accepted under the RFS for transportation biofuel production—to fill the renewable diesel production gap in the meantime. According to Irwin, this has led to the spike in domestic demand for soybean oil while contributing significantly to the record-high prices we see today.

“Before the renewable diesel boom hit, soybean oil prices were about 30 cents [per pound], and I’d say the renewable diesel boom has doubled them,” Irwin said, adding that other global issues like droughts and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine added an extra 20 cents per pound by mid-March.  

Some food industry groups pin higher prices to proposed updates to the RFS mandates for 2022, which will increase mandated biofuel use this year to a historic high of 20.77 billion gallons. Last year, in an odd moment of unity between the bread and oil industries, the American Bakers Association (ABA) vociferously opposed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed updates. The ABA warned that its processors were already struggling with tight supplies, which could translate to product shortages and price hikes for consumers. 

Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the Biden administration has considered waiving biofuel blending quotas for refiners in an effort to free up soy and corn supplies for cooking and fend off consumer inflation. According to BLS, between February 2021 and February 2022, the fats and oils component of the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers, which includes butter and peanut butter in its makeup, increased 11.7 percent, compared to 7.9 percent for all foods. 

Joe Glauber, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said that government incentives like the dollar-per-gallon federal tax credit enjoyed by biodiesel producers and importers means that consumers end up paying twice.

“We’re essentially paying taxpayer dollars to a product that is raising the prices of vegetable oil for consumers,” Glauber said. “From a policy standpoint, if the concern is about food inflation, I think the administration should think very, very much about suspending the Renewable Fuel Standard.”  

Others, however, are skeptical about how much of an impact soaring vegetable oil prices are actually having on household expenditures. John Jansen, vice president of strategic partnerships at the United Soybean Board, which represents roughly half-a-million soybean farmers, said that food conglomerates like Kellogg Company and General Mills have already locked in manageable prices for their supply of vegetable oils through the futures market, which promises ownership at a later date. But, he added, many small- and mid-sized bakeries and companies that are relying on the spot market for their edible oils, which has seen drastic acceleration over the past two years, are going to feel the pain of these exorbitant costs.

Irwin noted that factors like transportation fuel and labor costs are more likely to have a noticeable impact on grocery store bills than even a 100-percent price increase in a commodity like soybean oil. But he did caution that vegetable oils are used in small amounts in just about everything—from bread to oat milk to corn chips. By incentivizing a new industrial use for these commodities, he said, it’s likely that there will be a “small and persistent impact on retail prices” in the long-run. 

“It’s not like a one-time shock like we’re going through now with the Ukrainian crisis—at some point, that will end and we will go back,” Irwin said. “This happens year after year after year, as long as we continue the kinds of policies that are incentivizing the use of vegetable oils in renewable diesel.” Jansen of the United Soybean Board, however, said that as new facilities that crush soybeans into oil and meal are being constructed alongside new renewable diesel refineries in the next two to three years, they expect domestic soybean oil production will be better equipped to meet increasing demand. This, according to Jansen, will help balance out the vegetable oils market. But he said that for food processors looking to avoid high prices for soybean oil, “until then, it’s going to be difficult.”

Whether or not increased renewable diesel production affects overall consumer food costs, there is another worry underlying the renewable diesel surge: increased reliance on vegetable oil feedstocks for use in “green” energy initiatives could ultimately have net negative impacts on the environment. A February study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which covered eight years following the expansion of the RFS in 2007, found that rather than mitigating carbon emissions that stem from transportation, ethanol mandates had in fact increased net carbon emissions. 

Much of the increase is due to a phenomenon known as land-use change. The RFS mandate drove up the price for corn, which then incentivized U.S. farmers to clear forests and grasslands that act as carbon sinks for agricultural use. Together with increased fertilizer use and water pollution, corn-based ethanol produced to meet the RFS has a carbon intensity that could be at least 24 percent higher than gasoline, the study’s authors estimated. 

“These tradeoffs must be weighed alongside the benefits of biofuels as decision-makers consider the future of renewable energy policies and the potential for fuels like corn ethanol to meet climate mitigation goals,” the study’s authors wrote. 

Jeremy Martin, director of fuels policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, sees parallels between the environmental issues that plagued corn ethanol and what could unfold as demand for vegetable oil continues to grow.  

“It’s shaping up to be a sequel on the soybean side, but intensifying,” Martin said. 

Mac Marshall, vice president of market intelligence from the United Soybean Board and U.S. Soybean Export Council, said in a statement that there are physical constraints on the total land acreage that crops like corn and soybeans can be grown, and that the land most optimal for soybean cultivation is already being farmed. This means that any land that farmers would expand to for further crop production would be marginally productive at best, which combined with rising input costs like fertilizer and fuel is likely to disincentivize expansion. “Ultimately, farmers balance agronomic and economic factors when making planting decisions,” Marshall said. 

Returning then to the question we started with: Is there a connection between chef Melenchuk’s higher fryer oil prices and the renewable diesel boom? Well, yes, however indirect. But there’s a bigger, more existential question prompted by this surge in demand and prices, and it may mean that we do have to make an impossible choice between affordable food and greener fuel—and far sooner than we’d like.

“The issues causing tightness in the vegetable oil markets aren’t all caused by renewable diesel by any means, but this doesn’t seem like the time to demand tens of millions of pounds of more vegetable oil,” Martin said. “Looking at the comparisons with corn ethanol, this looks like a bad idea, bad timing, and ignoring those lessons is gonna do long term harm for the [industry’s] prospects.”

The post How war, weather, and Covid-19 are rekindling the food vs. fuel debate appeared first on The Counter.

As thinkpieces multiplied questioning The Shed’s role in “artwashing” Hudson Yards—a new playground for the one percent, complete with luxury apartments, supertall commercial towers, and upscale shopping and dining—the pandemic intervened to put a major dent in the new arts venue’s activities. The economy seized under the strain of Covid and restaurants, like many local businesses dependent on face-to-face interaction, scrambled to stay alive. Before long, New York was transformed into a city of two sheds: the improvised, DIY dining shed of the pandemic, and The Shed of Hudson Yards, with its elite patronage, deep pockets, and gestures toward community outreach. With something like a global post-pandemic return to normality (hopefully) approaching at last, the visual contest between these two versions of urban life now seems certain to be settled in favor of the latter. But the questions prompted by the former—about the types of cities we want to live in, and who should benefit from the redevelopment of urban space —will hopefully endure.

In its most common nail-and-plywood form, the shed changed the aesthetic of the city, suggesting a different version of New York to itself. In a city made safe for corporate interests, in which the CVS, the Bank of America, and the Blink Fitness have come to dominate the horizon, the sight of these shabby, low-fi, cobbled-together huts lining the streets, their backs turned to traffic and often open to the walking public, introduced a charmingly discordant corrective. They showed that the city could still be a place built on the ancient art of making do, rather than one made safe for those who never go without. Here at last was an urban reality birthed from the very qualities that New Yorkers always fancied themselves to possess—resourcefulness, adaptability, cunning—and that an increasingly generic and policed city sought to suppress. After decades in which the city was given up to the supertall dreams of developers, the dining shed brought New York back down to a human scale.

High-minded critics decried the sheds for their visual blight and “performative urbanism.” Those less charitable complained that the structures were becoming a magnet for drugs or—worse—the homeless, as if affording even a token of temporary shelter during a housing crisis was a mortal injury to the city. However accidentally, the restaurant, often depicted as a visible symbol of gentrification and dispossession, found itself in the strange position of opening up—quite literally—space for a new use of public land. The dining sheds were an emergency measure, introduced out of financial necessity, that forced a much-overdue reconsideration of a critical question: What is the street for? Who owns it? 

In a technical sense, of course, the answer was and remains: the state. And whatever the emancipatory promise of the restaurant’s initial advance beyond the curbside, the city’s residents weren’t “all in the gutter,” as Oscar Wilde once said. Only some of us were: The space for enhanced participation in civic life created by the sheds mostly rewarded those able to afford to eat out regularly. But in a pedestrian-friendly city of small apartments like New York, that constituency is still large. The dining shed expropriated the roadway, from cars, for people—a reclaiming of the commons, if only in the service of middle-class pleasure, that would have been virtually unthinkable prior to the pandemic. This was a genuinely radical break: New York, for all its legendary walkability, is still in many ways the city that Robert Moses built, a kingdom of the car. 

What did those in the dining sheds do with this conquered land? They sat there and enjoyed themselves—enjoyed food, drink, each other’s company, and the spectacle of the street. The shed may be a place where you make things, as The Shed’s CEO once said, but these sheds were places where we ate things—sites of purely static consumption. The old America of builders was now a nation of spenders. The shed’s popularity recalled something about the national nostalgia for a more practical past, mirroring the bipartisan lament that “we don’t build things anymore.” It became a symbol fit for a financialized consumption economy whose defining operational characteristic is the perpetual management of crisis.

The sheds were neither a truly public space nor a venue for authentic interaction between diners and the passing public: More often than not they offered, as do regular brick-and-mortar restaurants, refuge from the city rather than full immersion within it. But in New York, space to pause remains a valuable commodity. Walk the streets of the city today and the dining sheds you’ll see—many of them now neglected and falling apart like wreckage of ships run aground on the gutter—more likely serve as gathering points or rest stops for random passersby than as venues for dining. Even in their late-pandemic dilapidation, dining sheds offer us a reminder of what New York has lost as it’s upzoned its way to corporate respectability: a spirit of coexistence, dialogue, association, even friction, in short all the building blocks of a thriving urban order. 

Places of the gaze rather than scenes of authentic discourse, the sheds nevertheless showed that the car is not unconquerable. They revealed the street as a place to sit, to rest, to be, rather than a mere place of passage, opening the way to more creative and inclusive conceptions of streetspace beyond outdoor dining. Schemes to pedestrianize cities, not only in New York but elsewhere throughout the country, pre-date the pandemic. But the dining shed was unique in its citywide reach—it wasn’t simply a one-off development linked to a single city block or neighborhood—and in New York, it blurred the space between sidewalk and road in a way that felt genuinely different from previous pedestrianization initiatives like Times Square. By virtue of their sheer ubiquity, the sheds have hastened a reimagining of urban space set in motion by earlier attempts to weaken the dominion of the car, engaging residents across the city in a vital question: What other uses could stretches of roadway be put to along the city’s retail and residential corridors now that we understand that this space has civic value, and need not be given up solely to cars? The “roadway cafe” that city authorities have signaled will replace the dining shed—essentially removing the shed’s roof and walls and leaving behind a semi-covered dining space enclosed by a waist-high traffic barrier—represents one answer to this question. But other answers, both imaginative and banal, surely beckon. What matters is that the question is now up for discussion—and it’s this question that represents the real legacy of the shed. 

Under Frederick Law Olmsted’s old vision of public space in America, expressed most clearly in New York’s Central and Prospect Parks, civic landscapes were designed to bring together people of all classes and ethnicities in common pursuit of bourgeois recreations and pleasures. Public architecture took shape through mixing: a project the historian Mike Davis called “urban liberalism.” If the car, the highway, the Hudson Yards-style mega-development, and the hedge fund-sponsored public art boondoggle represent the death of urban liberalism, the dining shed’s disruption of the New York street’s subordination to the automobile opens one small, if closing, pathway to its resurrection. This won’t happen via the restaurant—dining out, after all, is an inherently exclusionary act—but via the possibilities for public space that the restaurant’s advance party into the street has created. Our cities need fewer Sheds, and more sheds. 

The post The dining shed—soon to be banned in NYC—awakened a sense of what’s possible with the city street appeared first on The Counter.

For lead prep cook Alek Hermon, who has worked in Kachka’s kitchen for nearly three years, the change is monumental, the end of the traditional wage gap between front and back of house.

“My whole career, I’ve seen the front of house living a different lifestyle,” Hermon said. “They’re paying mortgages, and we’re paying rent.”

Under the old model, Kachka’s lead prep cooks made $19-21 per hour, for a maximum yearly salary of $41,000. With the new wage model, prep leads will now make $55-$60,000 annually.

“It means a lot to have the experience and the hours put in finally reflected in my earnings,” Hermon said. “It makes me feel like I have a career as opposed to a job.”

The commitment to transparency stems from the combined experience of Bonnie, Kachka’s chef, and Israel, who has spent most of his career in the front of the house. They’ve both worked in restaurants since the late ‘90s, and have a successful and well-regarded restaurant, in pre-pandemic terms, appearing four times in a row on Eater’s annual list of the best restaurants in America.

But before opening Kachka, Bonnie worked at New Seasons, a Portland-based natural foods store that offered profit-sharing and revealed to its employees how company money was spent. It was a revelatory experience to see how such a large business was run, especially for someone who hoped to open her own restaurant.

“I loved understanding the guts of the business,” Bonnie said. “I remember those meetings being really eye-opening to me as an employee, and I want to be able to share that with other people.”

As part of the new order, the Moraleses will formally sit down with their staff, twice each year, to give a presentation about the restaurant’s finances. Bonnie has always welcomed employees’ questions about the business, but this will provide an official forum for looking at concrete numbers.

Such transparency provides helpful insight for those who may want to start their own businesses one day, said Bonnie. It’s also an essential first step for making the two other changes, which are more structural.

The couple is covering more of employees’ healthcare costs and has lowered the threshold to qualify. As of 2022, Kachka covers full health insurance premiums, rather than half. They lowered the eligibility threshold to 17.5 hours per week from 27, and cut the waiting period after being hired from 90 days to 30.

Bonnie said that she has seen back-of-house staff members go without health insurance because they couldn’t afford even half the cost of the premiums.

“With the cost of living, they couldn’t afford to pay health insurance,” Bonnie said. “And that just seems crazy to me.”

To make these changes, she had to dismantle the front-of-house tip model, replacing it with a 22 percent surcharge on the customer’s bill, which allows Kachka to bump up their lowest wage to $25 an hour. Under the old model, dishwashers who made $18 per hour will see a wage increase of $7 per hour. A full-time employee working for $25 an hour will make a yearly wage of approximately $50,000.

Bonnie has wanted to do something to address the front- and back-of-house inequity for years. The pandemic, for all of its significant hurdles, offered Bonnie an opportunity to restructure, with transparency as the key.

“I do think for a model like this to be successful, at this point in time where it is so uncommon, I think that it does go hand in hand,” Bonnie said.

Kachka server Caitlin Midkiff has worked in the restaurant industry for 16 years, both in the front and back of house, and has experienced the inequity firsthand.

“I never knew why we never made that much money in kitchens,” Midkiff said. “I couldn’t buy a car—I barely could pay rent. You have to have like four roommates when you’re working in kitchens. And then I made the switch to bartending.” The income added by tips meant a more livable wage.

More than anything, she appreciates Kachka’s new transparency.

“They’re communicating to each and every one of us and sitting down and helping us plan and make sure that this is going to be beneficial for us,” Midkiff said. “I can see myself working for them for a long time.”

The no-tip model has been tried before, most visibly by New York restaurateur Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group, who eliminated tipping at one restaurant after another, starting in 2015, only to bring it back in 2020, citing the uncertain future of restaurants in a pandemic world.

While getting rid of tips is generally good news for back-of-house employees, it can constitute a pay decrease for front-of-house workers. Bartenders and servers at high-end restaurants can make much more from tips than from an hourly wage increase. Meyer reported losing 30 to 40 percent of long-time front-of-house staffers in the years after making the change. And an accompanying service charge means sticker shock for customers, even if their total bill is similar to what it was when they tipped.

The pandemic has opened the conversation again, though, as mass defections—resignations in the food service industry have risen from 4.8 percent to 6.9 percent in the last year—led owners to reconsider their business model. “I think the tipping question is the question of our generation, for our businesses,” said David Nayfeld, executive chef and co-owner of San Francisco’s 4-year-old Che Fico, as well as a member of the Independent Restaurant Coalition’s Board of Directors. “I have serious doubts that it’s just going to remain the same. I think everybody is going to try and address it in some way or another. I’m just curious to see which ways end up becoming the norm.”

Nayfeld said there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for restaurants. Smaller businesses, like his, have a thin margin for error. “We need so many things to go right for one month to be a positive generating month in an independent restaurant,” Nayfeld said. “Whereas we need one thing to go wrong for the entire month to go awry.”

After 18 months of discussion with his staff, Nayfeld opted to keep the tip line, but include a 10 percent surcharge on the bill and raise menu prices. This allowed him to raise the hourly wage, still cover restaurant costs, and then split tips among the hourly staff based on position and tenure.

Sharing tips—splitting them among front and back of house—is a common way to address inequity, but to Bonnie it didn’t seem like enough. 

She wanted to get rid of what she calls “the dance,” when servers feel that they have to behave in a certain way to make good tips, which can make them vulnerable to harassment if they aren’t deemed to be friendly enough. Ending that dynamic required a complete abolition of the tip model.

“If I have to make tipping available in any way,” Bonnie said. “That would mean we have failed.”

Kachka’s front of house staff faced a wage reduction of approximately 25 percent. To combat this, Bonnie has restructured the front of house schedule to more closely mirror the back of house: the shifts are longer, without staggered ins and outs, which means that wages are about 15-20 percent less than before.

“What used to be a five-hour shift is now a seven-hour shift, as an example,” Bonnie said. “If you just compare before and after, it’s like ‘you’re asking me to work more and make less money,’ and that is true. However, compared to a kitchen employee, you’re now working a similar number of hours and making the same amount of money. And that’s appropriate.”

In this first month of the change, a handful of negative online reviews have cropped up, which tend to revolve around the premise that tipping is the only way to ensure good service.

“Personally, with the added service charge, I feel more pressure to give really great service,” said bar manager Jamie Cecchine. “I don’t want to drop that check and for anyone to feel like they are paying for something that they didn’t get.”

When it comes to customer reactions, Bonnie has found that communication is key, which is why the couple includes literature on the switch with their menus, as well as a QR code that will take customers to their website, which has more information.

Rachel Drushella, who was born and raised in Portland, has dined at Kachka about 10 times over the years. She first heard of the restaurant through a food blog she follows, and has been a fan ever since. Drushella likes having the ability to tip, but says she is open to learning more about this alternative approach.

“I’m very much a context person,” Drushella said. “So I always appreciate learning the background of why decisions are made.”

Bonnie’s started to receive enthusiastic emails. Curious diners, upon learning more about the change, usually respond with positive comments.

“That says to me that this is something that, not only am I happy that we’re doing,” Bonnie said, “but that the world is ready for—at least Portland [is].”

The post Higher pay, better benefits, and full disclosure define a post-pandemic restaurant appeared first on The Counter.

Despite the tenuous nature of government mandates and relief for Covid-related illness, these policies have been a lifeline for those in the hospitality sector. Currently, only a little over a dozen states and Washington D.C. and at least 19 cities and counties have permanent paid sick leave mandates, according to the advocacy group A Better Balance. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 50 percent of leisure and foodservice workers had access to paid sick leave in 2021, compared to 77 percent of all private sector employees. These jobs typically require that employees work in dense, indoor environments in-person, increasing the likelihood of contracting the coronavirus. And in several cases, fast-food franchises illegally denied workers time off despite being entitled to paid Covid sick leave, or stymied their ability to take time off with logistical requirements like showing a doctor’s note or getting someone to cover their shift. 

“There are always these inequalities in access,” said Daniel Schneider, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Shift Project, a collaboration between Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco, that surveys working conditions for retail and service workers. “And what’s made it sort of egregious these days is that they are basically orthogonal to the risk—that those who have the access don’t have the risk, those who don’t [have access] have a lot of the risk.”

Business interests have pushed back on these paid sick leave policies, arguing that they place undue financial strain on already-struggling businesses, and that employees are likely to abuse the system. A 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study, however, found that sick pay is not very costly to employers—roughly 20 cents per hour that an employee works. And the investment of covering employees’ isolation and recovery doubles as insurance against more employees or customers catching the same illness, which could ultimately cost employers more in the long run.

“If [restaurant] owners do not offer that benefit, 50 percent of employees do not have that benefit,” said Nicolas Ziebarth, a health and labor economist at Cornell University and co-author of the NBER study. “If you think that’s a good solution, then you can defend it, of course, but it also means that you have more people going to work sick spreading diseases.”

Putting employers in charge of determining workers’ access to sick pay grants them the power to alter employees’ access to such security, particularly if it is tied to an emergency like the pandemic. This past December, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reduced its recommended quarantine period from 10 to five days, corporations such as Amazon and Walmart cut paid Covid isolation time for employees accordingly. Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at New America researching paid leave policies, said that these actions taken by employers reflect how putting the paid leave policies in the hands of business owners “necessarily tak[es] power and control away from workers who know what’s best for their own health and for their families.” 

Having paid sick leave recognized as a legal policy, be it permanent or as a temporary Covid measure, is a crucial first step in raising the floor for precarious workers such as those in hospitality, said Schneider. Recent survey data from the Shift Project from September to November last year showed that 85 percent of retail and service workers overall and 79 percent of restaurant workers in California reported having access to sick leave, a much narrower gap compared to 50 percent of workers overall and 33 percent of restaurant workers nationally. 

Even so, having a legal right to paid sick leave and taking steps to inform workers that they have such a right, doesn’t always translate to them using it. Schneider said that some workers have cited their managers pressuring them to come into work or fearing retaliation as reason not to take time off. In other cases, they were concerned that by taking sick leave they would be letting their colleagues down. 

“This particular urgent problem of paid sick leave, it is really bound up with the broader set of precarious labor practices around hours and schedules in the restaurant sector,” said Schneider. “There’s a lot to do even once these rights in theory are on the books.”

The post Legislators push to support service workers who lost income due to Covid-19 appeared first on The Counter.

Rural restaurants are a small constituency, and in fact the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the federal Small Business Administration (SBA) don’t even agree on what “rural” means. The USDA follows the U.S. Census’ lead, defining rural as “communities with fewer than 2,500 residents.” In contrast, SBA’s definition of rural is so broad it includes places like Lincoln, Nebraska, population 283,000 and growing. Restaurants in towns like Ila fly under the radar compared to urban and suburban places.

Nick Flores, who owns Nick’s Place in Crawfordville, didn’t apply for pandemic grants because he doesn’t believe in government aid of any kind. He’s gotten by, so far, by living frugally and dipping into his own savings. Jackie Sinclair, who owns Ila Restaurant, applied for and received two PPP grants and $70,000 in Restaurant Revitalization Funds. Without that money, she said, she would have gone out of business because she had to shut her doors for weeks at the pandemic’s start.

But there’s been an increase in tourism in rural areas, according to Salazar, because people are better able to socially distance themselves, which improves the profit side of the ledger. “We’re seeing the rural communities be in a position that they haven’t been in before, which is they’re really poised to make an impact on the broader state tourism product, because there hasn’t been a full-on return for the urban market just yet,” he said. Until I interviewed him, I hadn’t considered my husband and myself “nature-based travelers,” though our pandemic hobby has been to leave Athens, where we live, to hike each of Georgia’s state parks. A recent Saturday found us an hour’s drive from home in Taliaferro County—Georgia’s least populated, and the second least populated county east of the Mississippi River. 

After a hike in A.J. Stephens State Park, we drove to Crawfordville, the county seat, for lunch. At Nick’s Place, we met Flores, 60, who opened his restaurant after a 25-year career with Hyatt Hotels, including his last position as executive sous chef at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill.

There’s still a sign for Hot Thomas Bar-B-Que on Greensboro Highway in Oconee County, Georgia, but the family-run restaurant closed for good in August 2020. The late C.H. “Hot” Thomas began the business selling chicken halves cooked over a big charcoal pit, basted with a ketchup-based sauce, to University of Georgia football fans. He converted a general store that had been in his family for decades, on hundreds of acres of family farmland, into a sit-down and takeout restaurant serving pulled pork, ribs, chicken mull—a regional stew of crackers and chicken—and chicken quarters. 

Tony Waller, 53, lives nearby and was a regular. “It was consistently good, always good. It was fairly standard central Northeast Georgia smoked whole hog barbecue. Cooked over coals,” said Waller.

Thomas’ son and daughter-in-law took over the business after his death in 2011. But when they retired from the restaurant in 2020, their three adult children were disinterested in taking over. “It had all happened in one week,” said Morgan Thomas Davis, 28, the eldest child. “And my mom was like, ‘I am not doing this by myself.’”

A fitness center called CoreBlend, five miles north of the shuttered restaurant, has a growing clientele who spend hundreds of dollars a month on the membership, and Davis jokes that Hot Thomas Bar-B-Que produced some of the gym’s best clients. She met and married her husband, CoreBlend’s founder, at the gym, and for a while worked at both places. But in 2018, she had to choose between helping her husband with his thriving enterprise and managing the restaurant. She chose the gym. “Basically my mom fired me, made the decision for me, in the most loving way possible, ” Davis said. “She was like, ‘You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go do this.’” 

Running a restaurant is harder as one ages, especially without younger family members to help; Sinclair, who has Type 2 diabetes, stopped serving food on Sundays—at $5,000, her biggest sales day—in part because of the physical strain of preparing mashed potatoes from scratch, chicken pot pies, and other dishes. 

Barron said she had been looking forward to getting P-EBT payments again, especially after federal unemployment benefits ended in September. Right now, she told The Counter, her only income is from SNAP and the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. She’s struggling to stretch every dollar and find cheaper ways to keep everyone full. But Barron discovered this month that she wouldn’t be getting that help in a phone call with the Minnesota P-EBT hotline.

Unlike Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Barron’s district offers virtual learning families the option to pick up five days’ worth of meals once every week. But Barron moved a 40-minute drive away from the pick-up location in October, when she found an affordable home through the federal Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program. (It’s worth pointing out that even when districts do offer grab-and-go meals for virtual students, the option might not be feasible for families whose schedules don’t align with pick-up times, or for those without regular access to transportation.)

But not all schools offer grab-and-go meals to virtual learning students. It’s a choice made on a school-by-school basis, not a requirement, said Bridget Lehn, nutrition services director at White Bear Lake Area Schools. She explained that other schools might have a wide range of reasons that prevent them from doing so. In recent months, school nutrition programs have been hit hard by staff shortages, rising food costs, and supply-chain disruptions, for example.

Lehn estimated that, of the more than 240 students enrolled in White Bear Lake’s distant learning program, one quarter would have qualified for P-EBT last year, when all of the district’s students were participating in some level of remote learning, and there was not yet a formal, separate virtual school in place. Barron’s is just one of 60 families now cut off from P-EBT, because they’re now attending a fully virtual school.

“It basically made me feel like I’m being penalized because of the choices that I made, that I, as a parent, assumed was the best option for my children in my situation,” Barron said.

Right now, only eight states have been approved to administer P-EBT for the 2021-2022 school year. According to a Washington Post report earlier this week, 17 more have applied to participate. If approved, the dilemma that parents like Brewer and Barron are facing could soon play out across half the country: With students enrolled for in-person learning being eligible for school meal funds when they switch to online learning, but students enrolled in dedicated virtual schools getting left out.

Anti-hunger advocates argue that excluding families from P-EBT just because they attend a fully virtual school within their district contradicts the program’s original aims.

“The intent was to provide meals for kids who are going to virtual school because of the pandemic,” said Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school-time programs at the Food and Research Action Center (FRAC), an anti-hunger group. “If a child is enrolled in a virtual academy, that may have been the only option that the school district gave them if they wanted to go virtually. [Now] they would lose access to benefits. It is a problem, and we’re hoping USDA might reconsider this interpretation.”

Unless that happens, kids who qualify for free lunch will continue to be excluded from P-EBT when enrolled in virtual schools. And their families, as a result, will continue to bear the emotional and financial toll.

“What happens when families experience food insecurity is that parents do everything they can to try and protect kids,” FitzSimons said. “But how it plays out is a reduced number of meals, reduced amount of food you’re eating, looking to emergency food resources if they’re available to you, but they aren’t always [….] It’s a huge gap for families to have to fill, and if they’re struggling already or close to the edge, it can really push families over.”

Brewer, the mother of four in Charlotte, North Carolina, said that the loss of P-EBT is the latest in a string of financial blows that have strained the household grocery budget, following reduced income and rising food costs at the grocery store.

“It’s adding insult to injury to injury to injury.”

On some days, she said, she has to make the painful decision to tell her kids that there’s simply no food for lunch.

“There are times when I just have to look at them and—I hate to say this—but I have to tell them, ‘There’s nothing I can do, baby,’” she said. “I can make dinner a little earlier, but there’s nothing I can do until dinnertime. Because if I feed them during the day, sometimes I may not have food for them in the evening, or I may not have it for another day later that month.”

The post Covid-19 sent many children into virtual learning programs. Their families didn’t know it could cost them food benefits. appeared first on The Counter.