Ten years ago, NPD Group, a consumer and retail research firm, issued a report showing that independent restaurants had been losing market share to chain restaurants at an alarming rate. According to NPD’s research, independent restaurants had accounted for 87 percent of the total visit losses over a three-year period. During the same time frame, 7,158 independent restaurants had closed in the United States. Chain restaurants, however, added 4,511 units. A decade before the world had ever heard of Covid-19, it was already a cautionary tale.

Financial analysts who cover the food and beverage industry recognized early in the pandemic that large restaurant groups were likely going to benefit from increased market share as swaths of independent restaurants closed. In late 2020, Peter Saleh, an analyst for the financial services firm BTIG, raised his price target for shares of Texas Roadhouse, the Louisville-based, casual steakhouse chain. While Covid-19 cases were reaching record numbers, BTIG reiterated its buy rating on the company’s stock.

“We believe that industry closure activity, shouldered mostly by independent restaurants, creates an opportunity for Texas Roadhouse to expand its footprint into smaller markets,” Saleh wrote in a note to clients.

While independent restaurants across the country have indeed closed in record numbers since the pandemic began, corporate full-service restaurant groups have succeeded by leveraging the one advantage most indies don’t have—scale.

In December of 2021, Olive Garden announced it would discontinue its long-standing “Never Ending Pasta Bowl” promotion across all company-owned and franchise locations. It wasn’t the first time the company had broken carbo-loaders’ hearts by withholding free refills. The chain had been offering the promotion intermittently since 1995, but, by the end of 2021, the commercial landscape looked dramatically different. 

Rick Cardenas, the incoming CEO of Olive Garden’s parent company Darden Restaurants, intimated on its quarterly earnings call that the change would likely be permanent. Darden was focused on shoring up its profits, even though revenues were already surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

Lost in its announcement on the end of never-ending pasta was that Darden didn’t need the promotion to lure guests into its restaurants. In fact, according to Cardenas, Olive Garden locations were busier and more profitable without it. Implicit in Darden’s positive earnings report was the boost in Olive Garden’s bottom-line from diminished competition.

Despite the effects of almost two years of stagnating growth in the restaurant sector as a whole, chain restaurants are doing more business now than they did before the pandemic. According to research firm IBIS World, the market size of full-service chain restaurants (excluding fast food) is expected to increase by 8.7 percent in 2022—well above the normal annualized growth rate of 2.2 percent. There are currently over 100,000 full-service chain restaurants in the U.S., and sales are projected to grow to over $162 billion this year.

Technomic’s annual Top 500 Chain Restaurant report, which includes quick-service restaurants (QSRs), showed that sales at the most popular full-service chains (FSRs) were recovering. FSRs like Longhorn Steakhouse (also owned by Darden) and Fogo De Chao collectively grew their share of the Top 500 from 18 percent in 2020 to 21 percent in 2021. 

BTIG’s Saleh turned out to be right about Texas Roadhouse’s golden opportunity to expand its addressable market. “We estimate [independent closures] could increase the concept’s long-term unit potential by a few hundred restaurants,” he wrote back in 2020, “extending its growth trajectory by at least another decade.” 

By the end of fiscal year 2021, Texas Roadhouse’s revenue had risen 26 percent above pre-pandemic levels, and the company is expecting to add approximately 25 new company-owned locations and seven franchise locations in 2022. (Three company-owned Texas Roadhouses were already added in in Q1 and two internationally with franchise partners).

The pandemic has created an environment where independent restaurants and chains are competing for survival, and the battles are being fought in the real estate market. It is the sudden glut of available storefronts—over 90,000 restaurants permanently closed in 2020 according to Yelp—that has executives like John Cywinski, president of Applebee’s parent company Dine Brands, smelling blood in the water. 

“We know there is a lot of white space because the [restaurant] category has contracted. There is a big opportunity for us to gain market share,” Cywinski said on Dine Brands’ Q4 earnings call in 2021.

The outgoing CEO of Darden Restaurants, Gene Lee, echoed these sentiments on his final earnings call with the company this past March. “There’s a lot of smaller regional players out there competing for space,” Lee said. “At the end of the day, most landlords want a Darden guarantee signature on their property.”

CEOs like Lee and Cywinski are salivating over these available leases and aggressively deploying capital to colonize new territory. Same-store sales are difficult to push beyond single-digit, year-over-year growth once stores become established, so chains like Applebee’s and Olive Garden need to multiply in physical locations to meet quarterly metrics and grow revenue.

“We get to look at most of the real estate out there in the United States, and we get first look at it,” Darden’s Lee said about acquiring new physical locations, “And if we can make it work, we’re going to—we’ll sign a lease and we’ll try to put the right brand on there to maximize the opportunity.”

Companies like Darden have been carefully annexing new properties into their portfolios in places where independents have been hit hardest. They’re winning on a local level by offering dining experiences that appeal to the broadest audience possible. Familiarity is their secret sauce. 

Guests rely on those predictable comforts every time they visit, no matter which location they patronize, and they’re seemingly willing to pay a premium for the privilege of ordering the same dish, cooked the same way, anywhere in the country. On its latest earnings call earlier this month, Texas Roadhouse CEO Gerald Morgan cited a recent 3.2 percent menu price increase across the board that, to date, has had no negative impact on traffic or product mix.

Creating experiences that keep users locked into their ecosystems gives chains more pricing power. Customers who crave the cheddar biscuits at Red Lobster or Bloomin’ Onions at Outback Steakhouse may remain loyal despite incremental price hikes. Independent restaurants rarely achieve the same manufactured precision—but then, most of them don’t aspire to it. Nor do most feel confident they’ll retain customers if they add several dollars to the cost of their signature dish.

Chain restaurants spend billions insinuating their brands into the community through a combination of down-home marketing and folksy advertising. Even though most of these companies siphon away wealth by returning profits to shareholders rather than reinvesting them in the community, creating the illusion of neighborliness is integral to their appeal. Catch phrases and taglines fortify these myths—like Applebee’s “Eating Good in the Neighborhood” or Olive Garden’s “When You’re Here, You’re Family,” for example. 

Most of us can recall one or two chain restaurants we loved as a kid—as I did Bakers Square—but a majority of Americans over the age of 40 don’t remember our hometowns as the over-farmed breeding grounds for chain restaurants they’ve become. Today, corporate-branded franchise restaurants have the upper hand. In their relentless pursuit of growth, they are bullying local businesses, making neighboring towns virtually indistinguishable.

I saw a thread on Twitter some months ago, written by a woman whose father’s favorite restaurant was Olive Garden. For a milestone birthday, the family decided to fly the father to Italy to experience real Italian food. To the woman’s dismay, her father hated the food there. Italian food, he learned, didn’t resemble the rich cream sauces and goopy melted cheeses he was accustomed to eating at Olive Garden. In her father’s case, Olive Garden’s fabricated version of Italian cuisine had successfully supplanted the genuine article. His brand loyalty was so strong that the restaurant had redefined his conception of what real Italian food should be.

Whether Olive Garden is authentic Italian food or not is immaterial. The problem is in the facade it creates—a sterile algorithm that distorts cultural history and dilutes world cuisine. Of course, we’d all love to live in a utopian world with unlimited pasta, breadsticks, and salad. But there’s a cost to forfeiting our commercial districts to restaurants with no provenance. Doing so erases history and renders our communities rudderless.

As these chains chisel away at our city centers, we will inevitably have fewer local dining options. It’s no different from how Amazon has decimated brick-and-mortar retail, leaving Main Streets across America barren and featureless. Where we choose to spend our money can help turn the tide, but we need more municipal ordinances that institute tougher zoning laws to limit chain restaurants or offer tax advantages to independent businesses.

Breaking ourselves from the chains really must be a community effort. Otherwise, dining in America is doomed to conform to a dystopian corporate vision of how Americans should dine, not the reflection of our regionality and unique cultural history it should be. In chain restaurant parlance, “Eating Good in the Neighborhood” won’t be so good at all if our neighborhoods don’t belong to us anymore.

The post The pandemic has transformed America’s dining landscape into an oligopoly dominated by chains  appeared first on The Counter.

Flint Marx: I kind of agree. He’s not Jewish? 

Druckman: In no way. A Buddhist? My issue with this book was its need to package itself as a fun gift. My problem wasn’t so much which foods were chosen because that was always going to be debatable. The question was about who got to decide. There are a lot of people in this book where I was like, “Well, yes, that is someone who always writes about Jewish food or I know you.” 

Flint Marx: I did really like it for the writing—it’s such a fun book to read. People are coming to the concept of Jewishness with very different ideas, so the way one person writes about a product might be very deeply tied to a holiday or a renewal, while others may be talking about it in a completely secular way. I think it’s representative of the range of experiences we all have. 

I want to go back to something I said earlier when you asked “Who do you think this book is aimed at?” And I said Jews, and I do believe that. But to qualify that further, it’s like a specific slice of an American Jewish audience—people like me and you who grew up with cultural touchstones in certain communities and cultures. But you know, there are going to be other American Jews who look at this book and don’t have that connection. 

Druckman: I do wonder if a deeply religious person would be offended. But I mean, a deeply religious person isn’t looking at these books. Orthodox people aren’t picking these cookbooks up. 

I [often] read about how New York or like “New York Jew” is often code for “Jew.” When people think of a Jewish person like they’re often thinking of, like, Jerry Seinfeld. Maybe Mel Brooks or Jackie Mason or something. But there’s a certain kind of vibe that has been made synonymous with New York, even though it might not be said. 

Flint Marx: It’s the Cranky New York Jew book. There’s so many neuroses threaded through it, which I personally like. 

Druckman: Again, as a Jewish person looking for information about Jewish food, I feel like it’s the same few people writing about it over and over again. And unfortunately, they all kind of have the same point of view, which is an Eastern European kind of New York sensibility. What’s unfortunate is that they’ve kind of cornered the market. It would be nice to hear from Sephardic Jews, from more Arab Jews. It bugs me that the only Black Jewish food writer that we know about is Michael Twitty, for example. It becomes part of this sort of monolithic representation of Jewish food, and I would say almost monochromatic. 

So Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook for Jews Who Like Food and People Who Like Jews by Evan Bloom and Rachel Levin?

Flint Marx: Here’s the funny thing. We were talking so much about books being filtered through the lens of New York Jewishness. To me, this one has a very like, Florida and Northern California lens. 

Druckman: I’m getting the Palm Beach or Boca Grandparent Vibe. I got a little annoyed at this book. Annoyed that we’re getting into high shtick. I wrote down that if we were giving the Hollywood pitch version of this book, it would be The Goldbergs, but it’s a cookbook. 

Flint Marx: Mm-hmm. It’s a little borscht belt. 

Druckman: But I feel like these books speak to a generational gap where we have people who are disconnected from their roots, like the disconnect from the immigrant part of their family that came here. Or it’s a disconnect from religious practice. But what I feel about cookbooks like this and the next one we’re going to talk about is that they’re operating off of a nostalgia for nostalgia. Instead of getting something that feels—I’m putting it in quotes—“real” or “authentic,” you get something that ends up seeming caricatured. But the actual experience or connections aren’t there. You’re missing something that your parents or grandparents had, and you’re trying to almost mimic their nostalgia for a thing they had and lost. You end up constructing something that feels forced.

I think that’s true of a lot of these cookbooks presenting this sort of rediscovery or reclamation of Jewish food. But it worries me you can end up inadvertently feeding stereotypes back to Jews. Like if this book is for “Jews who like food and food lovers who like Jews,” it comes dangerously close to stereotype. I also think it’s sort of dangerous when you’re talking about religious holidays and you’re trying to package it in an entertaining cookbook— it becomes really lifestyle-y. 

Druckman: I wanted it to have a little more … gravitas isn’t the right word, but something that was anchoring it. On the other hand, I’m the last person who thinks a cookbook should be everything to all people. And if it has the effect that it’s intended to have, even just on you, then it nailed what it wanted to do. 

Flint Marx: As my English professor said in freshman year of college, we all have baggage that we bring to whatever text we interact with, right? I look at this book and I’m like, “This feels familiar to me,” even though I didn’t grow up taking trips to Palm Beach or whatever. There is still that element of suburban Jewish life in the ’80s and ’90s that feels so familiar to me. And it makes me wish some of my relatives were still around, frankly. 

Druckman: Next is Jew-Ish by Jake Cohen. We should probably say that earlier this year, Jake Cohen was named as a defendant in a case about alleged discrimination at FeedFeed, the company where he worked. We did not know that when this story was first proposed. Neither of us looked at the book through that lens. So when we criticize this book—because we’re both very critical of this book—it is not related to issues outside of the book. It comes solely from having looked at the material. 

This book really pissed me off. 

Flint Marx: Yeah, me too. So the book, to be clear, is written as Jew hyphen ish. That title Jew-Ish, not Jewish, is billed as reinvented recipes from a “modern mensch.” 

What pissed me off was this idea in the introduction, I’m paraphrasing, that if you’re not the kind of Jew who goes to synagogue, you are not fully Jewish, you are Jew-Ish. So already I’m kind of like, well, wait a minute because like, I don’t really go to temple. Does that mean I’m only sort of Jewish? Am I just a cultural Jew, a “less than”? This whole concept of varying degrees of what makes a Jew a Jew, told in this incredibly glib way, was really galling.  

Druckman: And what made me even more annoyed was like he was saying, “We are not fully Jewish, but also you don’t have to do too much to be just like us and being just like us is really cool, so come join our party, right?” Incredibly reductive in so many ways. I felt like he was trying to offer himself up as the Alison Roman of Jewish cooking. This was a book about entertaining, where he was saying that you don’t have to know anything about Shabbat, but if you throw dinner parties every Friday night, you can be Jewish like me. 

It also felt prescriptive, like he was saying that was the better way to be Jewish, that we should aspire to not necessarily feeling connected in any way, besides throwing Friday night dinner parties. Either way, if that’s what makes you feel Jewish, I’m not going to judge it. But I don’t think you should actually go around telling people that this is how to do it or how to be any degree of Jewish. My mind was kind of blown by it. 

Flint Marx: To be fair, I wouldn’t say that Jake Cohen is saying, you know, no Jewish anything. But I think I know what you’re saying: this idea of selective parts of Judaism as an aspirational lifestyle, that all you need to do is throw tahini on something and “Oh my God, it’s Jewish.”

Druckman: It’s like he’s selling Judaism as a lifestyle brand. And part of that brand means being minimally connected to actually being Jewish.  These things are so decontextualized. 

Flint Marx: Yeah, I think that’s a good way of putting it. It’s like a very decontextualized Jewish cookbook. 

I think one of the recipes that really irked me was that tomato galette with everything bagel seasoning sprinkled on the crust, that was one of them. And the whole pumpkin spice babka thing. 

Druckman: Oh lord. 

Flint Marx: Look, I’m not a purist. I think the whole notion of authenticity is a trap. It’s impossible. And I think that the more people try to contort themselves into some prescribed idea of authenticity, we all lose from that. There’s nothing to be gained. 

But having said that, I think there is something that really pissed me off about somebody taking a babka and being like, “Let’s put pumpkin spice on it” because … what? What is your goal here? You have this whole thing of reinventing recipes. To what end are you trying to make babka more fun? Babka’s already fun. It’s fucking chocolate and dough. What is more fun than that? 

Look, this is a book for entertaining. I don’t have a problem with that. I like food that is designed to serve a bunch of people. That’s cool, but make it just an entertaining book. Just call it like 60 Sexy Sabbaths.  

Druckman: Make it an entertaining cookbook. Just explain that you are someone who is not really a religious Jewish person, but has found a lot of comfort and inspiration in Jewish food. And you’ve been looking at food trends and applying that to Jewish food, because that’s how you like to entertain. That’s totally fine. But you don’t have to market it as some formula for being Jewish. You can’t brand Jewishness, or you shouldn’t try. It’s a mess. 

Flint Marx: Yeah. Please don’t. 

Flint Marx: Everybody has to come to Judaism in their own time if they’re going to come, and there’s no right or wrong way to do it. If Jake Cohen started going to Sabbath dinners or throwing them and felt a sense of kinship and appreciation for his heritage, I’m not going to knock that. But whether it translates to being a meaningful cookbook is a completely different story. 

Druckman: On the one hand, that is on him. But it’s also on publishers or a cookbook editor. I would not take it upon myself to write a Jewish cookbook. I do not have any business doing it. The only way I could do it would be if I spent a very long time doing research, but I could not write a personal Jewish cookbook because I did not grow up having any of these Jewish traditional foods and I don’t feel well-versed in them. So throwing pumpkin spice onto things is not going to help my cause. 

Our next book: Faith Kramer’s 52 Shabbats. It came out in December. It is actually a really lovely way to present the idea of what Shabbat is, as opposed to a totally decontextualized dinner party book.

I really liked 52 Shabbats. I would cook the most from Leah’s, but in terms of things I’m looking for in a cookbook about Jewish food or a Jewish experience, I really appreciated Faith Kramer’s 52. And I didn’t grow up having Shabbat. 

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.

The Independent Restaurant Coalition (IRC) campaigned hard for $48 billion in next-wave aid, but executive director Erika Polmar liked to break it down to a more palatable ask: $283,000 each for restaurants that have been left out in the cold so far. That was the average first-round amount for aid recipients who brought in $1 million or less in annual revenues, like the neighborhood place you might be heading to for dinner tonight.

“In real life, to me, it trickles down to this: You can save a business for $283,000,” she said, before she found out it wouldn’t happen.

That’s the heartbreaker, because it dovetails with a sad hunch that’s nagged at me, of late: The pandemic may be the proximate cause of restaurants’ woes, but they were wobbly on their pins before anyone heard of Covid, and the challenges they faced back then haven’t gone away. More aid might keep more places on their feet, for a while, but it isn’t a panacea for tough competition, which turns out to have survived even the shutdowns of the last two years. 

We ran some numbers of our own to see just how hard restaurants have to fight for customers, looking at restaurant and population growth in five urban areas over a span of 20 years—Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, and New York City. When we were done, we confronted a painful and unavoidable follow-up question:

Are there too many restaurants?

Looks that way.

Our data came from the U.S. Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which makes an annual count of “eating establishments.” We divided the population in a given location by the number of restaurants, year after year, to figure out the ratio of customers to places to eat.

All five samples tell the same story. Since 2001, restaurants have grown at a faster rate than the population they serve, which means fewer potential customers per restaurant today than in 2001. Back then, there were 671 customers for every restaurant in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago. In 2020, the number was down to 468, which makes the competition that much stiffer. Nobody can quantify exactly how many restaurants are too many to sustain, but we seem to have passed the saturation mile marker without noticing it.

The BLS numbers don’t even include the food trucks, corner carts, and pop-ups that make dining a moveable feast—and dilute a restaurant’s customer base even further. And they don’t reflect churn; the numbers look more stable than they really are, because new places aren’t added on top of an existing total each year. The tally doesn’t say who took over a lease from a failed restaurant, or how many chain outlets colonized a block that used to be full of local businesses.

Numbers don’t lie, but they are hard-pressed to convey context.

If this were the stock market, we’d be anticipating a correction, according to Stephen Zagor, a restaurant consultant who teaches a graduate-level class on food entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School. “Even before the pandemic, businesses were suffering from incredible competition, hanging on by life support,” he said. “What was evolutionary has become revolutionary, as trends that were rolling along put on afterburners and went into high gear.”

Beth Wagner knows it. She and her husband run Chicago’s Honky Tonk BBQ, which has a head start on success: Two appearances on the television show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives made a neighborhood place into a tourist destination; Beth owns the building, which eliminates landlord hassles; they have a existing catering program they can expand. Even with those advantages, they’re down to three nights a week instead of six, had to reduce their staff, and took a $300,000 Small Business Administration loan on top of the aid they received.

Wagner is a staunch supporter of OFW’s campaign for $25 an hour, but said she can’t pay it, not yet, nor can she afford to abandon the tipped minimum wage, though she tops off wages for employees who don’t make enough in tips to reach a $16 hourly threshold.

Polmar worries about owners who go into debt to stay afloat, to say nothing of the ones who sell possessions to do so; she also worries about what will happen on a larger scale if they fail, and operations with bigger pockets step in to feed us. Polmar can’t stand the idea of “a very cookie-cutter, homogenized restaurant landscape,” she said, dominated by replicable national chains, where dining out becomes a transaction rather than a neighborhood experience. She can’t stand the idea that we’d turn our backs on the next generation of small businesses and the diversity they represent.

She knows how much work restaurants have to do to improve their own culture, but they can’t do it if they go out of business. “Let’s save the businesses and then make them work in ways that are more equitable, sustainable and resilient,” she said. “If we don’t save them first, we have nothing to work with.”

Congress didn’t step up this time, despite all the lobbying and celebrity testimonials and individual elected officials’ support. Which leaves survivors where, exactly? Food costs, wages, and rent are going up, which means higher menu prices, and that, in turn, increases the risk that a diner will decamp for a burger that’s just a bit cheaper, down the street. If anything, competition for an already shrunken customer base is about to get even tougher.

The old model—think of it as eat, pay, leave—may not be up to the task. Zagor believes that restaurants need to be more elastic, to incorporate some of the pandemic’s greatest hits, including a curated market component or wine shop, meal kits, catering, stepped-up take-out and delivery. At the same time, they need to get lean: Austerity is essential, whether the cutbacks involve the size of the staff, the cost of ingredients, or even the decision to close an hour early because there aren’t enough late-night customers to justify the cost of staying open any later.

And yet nobody seems ready to give up, despite a daunting and unsubsidized future. Three hundred students signed up for the 75 seats in Zagor’s food entrepreneurship course, and when most of them didn’t get a spot they appealed to the dean for more sections, which they got, rather than sign up for another class. And preliminary BLS data for the first two quarters of 2021 shows a slight uptick in eating establishments in four of our samples—people continuing to open restaurants even as existing ones struggled to stay afloat. Among the five cities analyzed by The Counter, only New York City saw an overall decline in restaurants, a net loss of 881 places.

We all bear some responsibility for this. Chefs have entered the lexicon alongside other celebrity-fueled pipe dreams—Oscar-winning actor, basketball star, songbird—elevated to that rarified status, over 20 years, by food television, and social media, and restaurant-chasing as a competitive urban sport. We’ve become more demanding, more fickle, expecting an array of choices right this minute, which makes it easy for an aspiring restaurateur to mistake our restlessness for reliable demand. 

Drive dies hard, even in the face of sobering numbers. Surely bad news is meant to happen to someone else.

That kind of denial seems essential, in the face of Wednesday’s disappointing news. The alternative is pre-emptive surrender, restaurant people turning away from work that was never the safe choice in the first place. Why would anyone suddenly become logical about an illogical commitment? If you regard restaurants as an essential third place—not home, not work, but a gathering place that celebrates friendship, family and a sense of community—you can’t really afford to see the glass as half empty, even though it likely is, for some places, for who knows how long.

F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote about restaurants, as far as I know, but he had the current dilemma down cold. In “The Crack-Up,” a 1936 essay for Esquire magazine, he wrote, “. . .the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Data reporting and visualization by Karthika Namboothiri.

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Of course the books in this series are, by no means, the only single-subject food history books on the market today. Microhistory emerged as a genre in Italy during the 1970s and has gained popularity over the past couple decades in food publishing. “In food history terms, there is nothing more ordinary than the everyday food ordinary people eat, and microhistorical studies of these unprepossessing subjects are popular, so much so that, at times, they are topping the bestseller lists,” writes Australian food writer and professor Donna Lee Brien. Indeed, books such as Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World have received praise from critics and readers, with nearly 90,000 ratings between them on the book review site Goodreads.

In this genre, the banana has garnered a fair amount of coverage. In addition to Banana: A Global History, published as part of the aforementioned series, Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World ranks high on many bestseller and recommended reading lists. Peter Chapman’s Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World has also received a lot of attention. (And while not a book, The Counter itself has done its own single-subject deep dive on the ubiquitous banana.)

But what about the plantain?

As a first-generation Nigerian-American, I grew up eating plantain and consider it an essential part of my understanding of what it means to be West African. Each bite of plantain connects me to my roots, though I am many miles from my father’s homeland.

You may be thinking that you’ve seen plantain in the media recently, and you’d be right. It is not uncommon these days for stories in prominent publications to praise the fruit for its multifunctionality, and to offer recipes. Over the past couple years, Nigerian food writer and recipe developer Yewande Komolafe has written about the starchy fruit and its versatility for both TASTE and The New York Times. Also, word has been spreading about Ghanaian-American scholar and entrepreneur Rachel Laryea, founder of the plant[ain]-based Brooklyn shop Kelewele, which opened last year. Laryea sells all kinds of amazing plantain-based foods ranging from what she calls “placos” (plantain tacos) to “Liquid Gold” plantain ice cream, not to mention some fashionable plantain gear. 

Yet, even with Komolafe and Laryea’s efforts, among others, I still see a gap in the publishing world when it comes to plantain. There are few—online or in print—easily digestible and accessible global histories that tell the plantain’s tale. I believe the American public deserves the chance to hear the plantain’s unique story, like the fact that one of the world’s leading banana experts once hypothesized that it may have been the first-ever fruit crop on Earth.

Admittedly, an investigation into plantain’s origins leads to words like “complex.” That’s because the history of the plantain is nearly inextricably linked to the history of the banana. This makes sense as the two fruits have an abundance of overlaps, even today. And it’s worth noting that when you start investigating bananas and plantains, you will find divided opinions and classifications: Are plantains a type of banana? Are they genetically related but distinct? Is the truth somewhere in between? Experts disagree.

Regardless, it’s clear that plantains are of singular importance in many cultures across the globe, and have a rich and complicated history that’s both intertwined and distinct from the banana. As Komolafe notes in her Times piece, “[L]ike bananas, plantains grow in tropical and subtropical climates across the globe, ensuring that they are always in season and making them a crucial ingredient in cuisines across West Africa, South and Central America, India and the Caribbean.”

It might be easiest, then, to begin—but not end—with the banana, whose origins are generally considered to be in Southeast Asia between 8000-5000 BCE. In his 1995 paper “Banana and Plantain: The Earliest Fruit Crops?” Professor Edmond De Langhe, founding director of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP), discusses bananas and plantains as two separate groups, hypothesizing, “If the term ‘crop’ signifies a plant that can be grown for subsistence, then the plantain and the edible diploid bananas [a group that shares a similar genetic structure or makeup] may indeed have been the first fruit crop, at a time when hunting and gathering were still the main means of procuring food.” De Langhe theorized that between the 5th and 15th centuries, bananas and plantains likely moved along the coast of the Indian Ocean by humans. After that, up until the 19th century, Portuguese and Spanish traders probably carried the crops “all over tropical America.” 

This is fascinating information about the plantain’s globetrotting. Yet, not only is it hypothetical—it is also only available online as a file that requires a degree of tech-savvy to access. And De Langhe’s audience is by no means the general Western public. Though he has done amazing research into the plantain, much of De Langhe’s work is stuck in peer-reviewed (and paywalled) academic journals. Most other works that mention the plantain’s past are also buried in academic texts not accessible to the masses. 

And speaking of the masses, where are the stories by people who live and breathe plantain, consuming it every day of their lives, in the research?

We have to construct our own plantain history. And piecing together the fruit’s unheralded story will require scouring the internet’s far corners to see what stories exist in the online world’s remote regions. And it will also require getting out and talking to those for whom plantaining is a way of life.

Here is how I would start.

In my father’s homeland of Nigeria, fried plantain, referred to as dodo in his native Yoruba language, is a favorite food. In this country famous for having one of the highest rates of twin births in the world, a common piece of plantain folklore is that if you encounter a pair of conjoined plantains, you must separate them in front of yourself. Otherwise, doing so behind your back will cause you to birth conjoined twins. 

As evidenced on many a food blog, plantain has long been so central to the way of life in both Cuba and the Dominican Republic that a particular descriptor—aplatanado—is used among locals. It roughly translates as “to be plantainized” or “to be plantain-like” and is used to refer to foreigners who have become accustomed to the local traditions. In a post on their award-winning “Dominican Cooking” food blog, Clara Gonzalez and Ilana Benady proclaim, “As plantains are a traditional, indispensable, and favorite addition to our daily meals, they have apparently been chosen to represent our sense of being Dominican in the same manner that people from the U.S. have chosen apple pie.” 

One of the few references to plantain’s history I have seen in a prominent Western publication was in the food origins and culture magazine Whetstone last year. The article, written by Indian food writer Jehan Nezar, focuses on the Mappilas, a Muslim community in the south Indian state of Kerala. “The story of bananas and plantains in Mappila cuisine is also a tale that is interwoven with that evocative element of nostalgia,” Nezar writes. 

As Nezar distinguishes between the two fruits, she documents the plantain in dishes that sometimes show its relationship to the banana and sometimes its uniqueness. To illustrate the plantain’s distinct significance in Mappilan cuisine, she tells the story of local cookbook author Ummi Abdulla, whom she calls “the doyenne of Kerala’s Mappila cuisine.” Abdulla hosted a food festival at a 5-star hotel in another town, but the venue was unable to provide plantains. Adamant that she could not host the event without the fruit, she resolved to get plantains to the hotel on her own. “I ended up having to send raw plantains from Kerala by courier,” she tells Nezar. “By the time I reached Kolkata, they were ripe.”

Don’t these anecdotes documenting plantain’s global presence demand that we need to know more? Or call for more curiosity, at the very least? As a child growing up in California, I recall reading Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s poem “United Fruit Co.” at school and learning about the imperialist invasions orchestrated by American banana companies in Central America. It was a troubling look at the dark history of the banana industry but was also required reading for all students. I was 37 the first time I saw plantain mentioned in a piece of literature, and that was because I went digging for it. Yes, plantain is less common and less popular in the West than the banana. But that doesn’t mean its story should be invisible.

I spoke with Rachel Laryea about her work toward shining a spotlight on the plantain via her Kelewele shop in Brooklyn. She said it is as much an educational endeavor as it is entrepreneurial. “I spend a lot of time educating people on what plantains are in the first place,” she said. “It’s folks that look like me that are doing that work of putting plantain on America’s culinary landscape.” 

That landscape may soon look brighter thanks to an upcoming release in the publishing world: a children’s book. Earlier this year, Afro-Latinx author Alyssa Reynoso-Morris landed a deal with Atheneum—an imprint of the third largest publisher in the United States, Simon & Schuster—to publish her debut children’s book Plátanos Are Love in 2023. The book tells the story of a young girl who learns about plantain’s cultural significance from her grandmother. 

I talked to Reynoso-Morris about the inspiration behind her book. “Growing up, I ate plantains for every meal basically,” she said. Since her audience is young children, Reynoso-Morris said her book will focus narrowly on plantain’s significance in Dominican and Puerto Rican cultures. However, she hopes to include a map of all the countries where plantain is eaten in the back matter of the book and also to share lesson plans with information about plantain’s global presence on her website. 

While I wait for Reynoso-Morris’ book to reach my hands and my sons’ ears, you’ll encounter me reading, writing, and talking about my favorite starchy fruit, continuing my never-ending quest to normalize knowledge of its past.

When it comes to the plantain, there are more stories to tell, more blanks to fill in—and, I maintain, a book’s worth of global history that needs to be written. 

The post Publish the plantain: Why this venerable, global fruit deserves a book of its own appeared first on The Counter.

Traditionally, the Salish and Kootenai peoples would hunt and fish with the seasons. Bull trout were not just an abundant food source, but one that would feed them in the scarcer winter months. State officials introduced a handful of fish species to Flathead Lake in the early 1900s, in an ill-advised attempt to add more options to the area’s fishing scene. Of that handful, lake trout was the only one that flourished. 

The population erupted in 1981, when Mysis—tiny, translucent, darkness-loving shrimp—were discovered in Flathead Lake. They had been introduced into the watershed as a food source candidate for non-native kokanee salmon, but their arrival in the lake caused chaos. Instead of being the kokanee’s dinner, Mysis beat out the salmon for the main meal: zooplankton. By the time the 1990s rolled around, there were no more kokanee salmon in Flathead Lake, and lake trout suddenly found themselves with a lake full of tasty shrimp. Suddenly, Flathead Lake’s lake trout population was booming.

When lake trout get big enough to be unsatisfied by Mysis, they seek out other fish. Lake trout can eat fish over half of their own size, and even consume members of their own species. But in Flathead Lake, a central target of their predatory tendencies is the native bull trout, which by the mid-90s were reduced to a population of just over 1,000.

“It was kind of a shock,” Bras-Benson said. 

When bull trout numbers got really low, her dad quit fishing in the lake entirely. He didn’t like the taste of the lake trout—didn’t think they compared to the native fish. The lake trout population was preying on bull trout to such an extreme that “the data suggests, without intervention, they would go to extinction,” said Barry Hansen, fisheries biologist for the CSKT. “It’s not a fair battle.”

Hansen is a tall man with a resonant voice and a conversational way of speaking. His hair and beard are both white—he’s been working for the CSKT for just over 30 years. Lake trout have been a top focus for most of that time.

Approximately half of Flathead Lake sits on the CSKT’s reservation, so the lake is co-managed by the CSKT and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. In 2000, shortly after bull trout were listed as a threatened species, the two groups committed to prioritizing native fish.

“That may sound like a small thing, but it was a big thing,” Hansen said.  The plan listed increasing and protecting native trout populations as one of three primary goals for the next 10 years.

They wrote the Flathead Lake and River Fisheries Co-Management Plan for 2001-2010, with another of its goals being to “balance tradeoffs between native species conservation and nonnative species reduction to maintain a viable recreational/subsistence fishery.” This plan emphasized the importance of recreational anglers as the primary tool for reducing lake trout. But over the next several years there was no substantial change. Something more needed to be done. 

Flathead Lake is hardly the only body of water to struggle with an aggressive, non-native lake trout population. The west is peppered with lakes that have tried and failed and tried again to suppress lake trout. Yellowstone Lake in Wyoming and Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho are two neighboring communities that have grappled with a lake trout problem.

Those two lakes share a hauntingly similar narrative to Flathead Lake. Either lake trout were introduced or found there and the population exploded, dominating the ecosystem at the expense of native species. At both of these locations, officials have attempted to suppress the species.

At Yellowstone Lake, park officials tried vacuuming up lake trout eggs and depriving them of oxygen with tarps. They even attempted to snuff out the eggs by covering them with dead fish carcasses. Both locations have had varying levels of success, but neither has gotten rid of the problem.

The CSKT decided to take a different approach.

Summers on Flathead Lake draw visitors from across the state and beyond. The clear, clean water is perfect for swimming, kayaking, and, of course, fishing. But on this particular day, a late-summer rainstorm has caused the large lake to behave like a small ocean. White-capped waves crest on the water’s surface, forceful enough to wipe out pieces of the shoreline.

At the CSKT’s Blue Bay fish processing center on the southeastern shore of Flathead Lake, this means that it’s not a good day to drag nets, which can get tangled and torn. Instead, the crew spends the afternoon on the shore, replacing their nets and setting up a new vacuum sealer. Cindy Bras-Benson helps guide the process: After her father quit fishing there, Bras-Benson went to work to save the fish species that was so bountiful during her childhood.

This fish processing plant is the central hub for the CSKT’s lake trout suppression effort, with a two-pronged approach introduced in 2014. Instead of trying to completely extirpate the species, the CSKT tries to decrease their numbers a little more every year. 

First, there are community fishing events called “Mack Days.” The first Mack Days, in 2002, brought approximately 900 lake trout out of Flathead Lake. Now, the annual number is closer to 60,000.  

The second tactic involves strategic drag netting. The CSKT net, process, and sell fish through a program established in 2017 called Native Fish Keepers, Inc., based in the Blue Bay fish processing center. Because of habitat knowledge and observations, Native Fish Keepers are able to net large numbers of lake trout with very little bycatch—the accidental netting of other species.

Lake trout tend to thrive in deep waters. By netting in deeper parts of the lake, Native Fish Keepers can target their search, using bigger-mesh nets that enable juvenile bull trout, which like to swim into the depths to snack on Mysis shrimp, to slip right through. 

The crew at Native Fish Keepers goes out on their boat (an unnamed silver trawler that at least one team member jokingly refers to it as the “Slimy Sculpin”) five days per week in the summer months. They lay two miles of netting every day, in sections of about 900 feet, each of which pulls up anywhere from 30 to 150 fish, which are then brought to shore for processing. The fish are cleaned, filleted, vacuum-sealed, and flash-frozen to preserve their freshness. Hansen says that the fish go from lake to freezer in four hours, sometimes less.

Native Fish Keepers sells the bulk of its catch to restaurants, grocery stores, and private buyers across the state. According to Native Fish Keepers Marketing Director Lynn DuCharme, the organization processes an average of 22,000 pounds of fish every year, about 80 percent of which is invasive lake trout. People like to buy the fish, says Hansen, because it’s a local, wild-caught product that supports native trout conservation. 

The Mack Days haul—about 4,000 pounds annually—gets donated to food banks like Loaves & Fishes Food Pantry in Polson. According to operational manager Mary Martin, the two Mack Days competitions are enough to keep them stocked with fish all year round.

While many lakes struggle with lake trout, the CSKT is unique for commercializing it as a food source. All the money made in the business goes back to funding its operation—though that only covers about 20 percent of the total costs of Native Fish Keepers. To cover the rest of their expenses, they use mitigation funding from two hydroelectric dams that impact the lake’s fisheries. They also apply for relevant grant funding, and Hansen anticipates doing more of this in the future.

The CSKT has never entertained the idea that they will get rid of lake trout entirely, says Hansen. Instead, their population-modeling research indicates that if they reduce the lake trout population by 75 percent, bull trout will make a 90 percent recovery.

“That sounded like a pretty good trade to us,” Hansen said. “Not just pie in the sky. It’s something we could achieve.”

Considering the sheer number of lake trout in Flathead Lake, the CSKT is now evaluating how suppressing lake trout might affect the lake’s current food web.

Environmental economist Nanette Nelson’s enthusiasm for her work is palpable. Tall, with glasses and short, curly gray hair, Nelson moved to Montana about five years ago to work at the Flathead Lake Biological Station (FLBS). (Editor’s note: This story’s writer was previously an intern with FLBS.)

In 2020, Nelson received grant funding from the Environmental Protection Agency as part of the Columbia River Basin Restoration Funding Assistance Program. She is using this grant to monitor how methylmercury distribution in the food web changes with the removal of large numbers of lake trout, and to evaluate the community’s awareness of safe fish consumption guidelines.

Methylmercury bioaccumulates in aquatic food chains: Small organisms can have very low levels of methylmercury, but that level grows higher in the larger organisms that prey on them. By the time you get to the top of the food chain, these levels can become a cause for concern if intended for human consumption. 

Fear of mercury poisoning is something that often steers consumers away from eating fish. By contrast, the USDA’s most recent dietary recommendations promote fish consumption like never before, citing the many health benefits of fish and seafood.

“Because it’s not a yes or a no, a black or white, it becomes a very complicated message to get across to people,” Nelson said.

Lake trout are safe to eat as long as you consume fish that fall within the official recommendations, which compute servings per month based on the size of the fish; adults can consume 12 monthly servings of a trout that is under 14 inches long. The CSKT monitors methylmercury in lake trout and uses this data to inform safe consumption guidelines. 

Because most of the investigators for this project work for FLBS, any and all implementation of the data will be at the discretion of the tribes. This was very important to the researchers.

“There’s all these layers of history and backstory,” Nelson said. “We didn’t want to be the drivers of how the data would be used.” 

According to Erin Sexton, a co-principal investigator on this project and research scientist with FLBS, there was no other way to go about this initiative.

“Any work that’s done in this landscape should somehow engage the tribes,” Sexton said, “and their perspective on the landscape, and their right to management on the landscape.”

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