Why Does Modern Hospitality Suck So Much?

Is this the worst era of modern dining? Let's talk about it.

Hi everyone,

Truthfully, I’ve been pretty avoidant about reading anything having to do with restaurants or the food industry since the pandemic because it always bums me out and I hate being a Debbie Downer on a magic realism lifestyle newsletter. Still, I was just grated enough to put aside my Sunday afternoon to address what a shit show the restaurant industry has become since we first went into lockdown back on March 22, 2020 (happy PTSD anniversary!).

As one of those special plebes who did not leave New York during the pandemic (these colors don’t run!), I had the privilege to witness the impact on restaurants first-hand, from the time we started wiping down our mail with alcohol swabs to the mass layoffs. closures, and all the subsequent ways the industry frantically adapted to survive.

My first meal out in 2020 was take out from Brooklyn’s Pies ‘n’ Thighs, which I ate unceremoniously with my roommate at the time in her car outside the restaurant as I wondered if I was going to die from passive human contact (not half-bad for a last meal). From there, everything went downhill: the mental health issues and suicides, the racism against Asian owners, the social media attacks on independent restaurants, the vandalization from riots and random acts of arson, the outdoor dining sheds, the social distancing, short-staffing and employee burnout, the economic toll from lack of tourism, the rising costs, the PPP debacle, the customer abuse, the tip fatigue, etc. Every thinkpiece I read made me want to slit my own wrists and throw myself off a pier. It was every writer for themselves, so I just switched careers because I didn’t have a husband.

While this was happening, some people were living in La La Land where nothing changed at all, so I guess it makes sense that I burnt bridges with one magazine over a story about in-restaurant dining vs. take out and “how to maintain customer touch points and hospitality in the face of crisis” as a “COVID special edition,” like it was a one-month fluke and not a never ending nightmare. When I reiterated that everyone in New York City was still having a complete mental breakdown instilling blind trust in restaurants to deliver food safely through empty transactions because we had just spent the past two months walking past refrigerator trucks every day overflowing with dead bodies, that was the last time I wrote for that magazine and roughly around the time I stopped writing about restaurants, in general. Sometimes, I suffer from keepin’ things a lil’ too real!

In 2021, eager for human connection, I began working at Four & Twenty Blackbird pie shop in Park Slope because I thought might be uplifting after months of isolation. Who could be one mad about getting a slice of pie and coffee? Bonus: my employer at at a place called Four & Twenty* probably did not care that I smoke weed (they did not). Turns out, I underestimated Park Slope. What a beautifully unhinged community filled with gorgeous brownstones and absolutely horrid people with a lot of money and entitlement. Fortunately, I had the pie to make me feel better, which is how I gained 20 pounds before deciding I should probably get another job and join a wellness cult. (*I still love the Four & Twenty crew and their pies are absolutely legendary. Just be nice to the people who work there, as well as other genuinely awesome independent restaurants and foodservice businesses like them who are exempt from this entire rant).

By the time 2022 hit, restaurants were seen as a silver lining in the return to “normal,” whatever that meant. If we could get dining back, to be able to see other humans again, to make memories over meals, then surely, we could begin to rebuild in the wake of so much pain. Sure, it might cost a bit more now and customers had become even more insufferable and indignant about tipping for the luxury to be assholes to minimum wage employees, but at least we can all finally be together, enjoying meals that don’t quite taste as good as they used to (probably because climate change is still very much a problem and will continue to get worse if we don’t stop fucking around and take care of it).

Four years out, the industry seems to have finally bounced back with projections surpassing pre-pandemic numbers of $1 trillion. And while you would think this would be a huge success, it is actually clear to me that we are now living in what is quite possibly the worst era of modern dining.

In the wake of COVID-19, two major trends emerge almost instantly, reflecting the grotesque polarity of the current economic conditions: excessive fine dining and mutual aid. Somehow neither of these concepts are hospitable or inspiring, and both are ruining restaurants. This is the world we live in now, and I hate it. Is it restaurants or a response to society? Probably both, if we’re being honest here.

Earlier this month, Michelin starred restaurant Sushi Noz received backlash over a viral video from TikTok creator Luis Carlos Zaragoza over the restaurant’s “pink tax” where his girlfriend was given smaller portions on their $700 per person omakase service. I couldn’t tell who I hated more: the restaurant for being sexist or the couple who had spent $8,400 on six separate meals there before realizing they were getting ripped off. That’s a down payment on a car.

Frog Club, the buzzy new West Village restaurant that makes you put a sticker over your phone’s camera while you eat, has a cutesy $1,000 menu item to “kiss the chef” that one “lucky” diner ordered on opening night. Even better: the restaurant is from Chef Elizabeth Johnson, whose name might sound familiar if you were following her very public split from former partner Will Aghajanian, with whom she co-owned famed Los Angeles restaurant, Horses. Notably, Aghajanian was accused of killing the couple’s cats and domestic abuse among a very long list of offenses in a wild expose from GrubStreet that includes tidbits, such as:

“Former Mimi employees say Aghajanian often seemed insulted that he was expected to prepare family meal for the staff, the standard at any buzzy Manhattan restaurant. Typically, family meal is something hearty and comforting that workers can eat before a busy service. Instead, Aghajanian often served disgusting dishes, says Halpern. She remembers a night when Aghajanian was cleaning monkfish liver: “He took all the worms from the monkfish liver and took sheep’s liver and put it through a grinder,” she says, then served that combination brusquely to the group. Another time he offered staff fish carcasses blended with water. Aghajanian denies serving fish worms in a staff meal. He says, “I would use trims of meat and fish because they were working with a tight budget and the staff at Mimi were never happy unless they had perfect cuts of meat.” Still, the staff often found the family meals so inedible that management would buy them pizza instead.”

Somehow, neither of their restaurants suffered in spite of these facts.

Today, there are enough in-demand extravagant restaurants to warrant an entire economy of own exclusive members-only apps like Dorsia, where bookings have minimum spends starting at $100 for two at Bar Pasquale to a $1,500 table for four at Carbone, all paid upfront in non-refundable deposits. The app’s name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the highly coveted fictitious restaurant featured in the movie, American Psycho, that the murderous psychopathic Wall Street investment banker protagonist Patrick Bateman obsesses over throughout the film—presumably the app’s target audience.

The apps mainly seem to be building on the strategy established by Tock—the ticketed reservation system developed by Alinea restaurateur Nick Kokonas that sold for $400 million in 2021—another wildly successful app that I do not use, built on the backs of OpenTable, Michelin, and all of the other reservation tools that came before that executive assistants rely on arrange lunches and dinners for their C-suite bosses who all lack personalities and moral compasses.

And this essentially sums up what the entire cultural temperature of dining is right now: an empty, extravagant, corporate card battlefield of status symbols and transactions. It is soulless and hateful. Nothing in the slightest feels hospitable, poetic, inspiring, optimistic, encouraging, positive, nurturing—all of the qualities that inspired me to get into food writing. It’s an elite vomitorium of excess. This is why Ozempic is popular as a topic and Martha Stewart is putting up $250 lobster-chicken abominations from Daniel Boulud on social media. The best AND worst of times!

Tell me you need therapy without telling me you need therapy:

marthastewart48

A post shared by @marthastewart48

Bizarrely, no one seems bothered by this trend. In fact, New Yorker’s Hannah Goldfield published an article last week casually discussing this as the next wave of dining. Among those participating: award-winning chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton, who we last heard from in 2020 with an impassioned feature for the New York Times about shuttering her iconic East Village restaurant, Prune, one month into lockdown. Apparently she’s back in business now—but only if you have a secret handshake. Goldfield recounts attending a private birthday dinner at the new secret-ish Prune, where Hamilton pours the champagne towers herself now (how quaint!).

I kept waiting for some kind of criticism to kick in, but there wasn’t one. In fact, there’s an explanation:

“The best reason to run a functionally private restaurant in New York is also the saddest reason,” restauranteur Ashwin Deshmukh tells Goldfield over a meal of seafood salad and roasted sweet peppers strewn with golden raisins and pine nuts. “[In the face of inflation and exorbitant rents] it’s easier to focus on the six hundred people who can pay your bills than on serving the masses.”

OK. Poor them. Why does that not make me feel better knowing all of this? Did you think I also would not want a seafood salad with roasted sweet peppers strewn with golden raisins and pine nuts instead of the wilted lettuce at the store? I thought we all agreed if we continued having a planet then nature wouldn’t be a premium and then all of us could have delicious things. This is food hoarding reserved for the elite, and it is not a good look.

Fine dining has always been expensive and exclusive and extravagant, and private supper clubs aren’t new. It’s also frequently exploitative, where most of the costs are absorbed into real estate, product, and investors rather than the support staff that keeps the operation running. Even before the pandemic, stages at some of the world’s top restaurants were often unpaid, working grueling shifts averaging over 12 hours in complete silence, where the only words you would hear were often, “Yes, chef; no, chef.” As a writer, you were expected to glorify these chefs and restaurateurs, which only crumbled around #MeToo. And even then, obviously it didn’t for certain people.

In an attempt to “save hospitality” we’re now seeing exactly what happened during the pandemic: the ultra wealthy paying vast sums of money to take what should be cornerstones of communities into private spaces. The same people getting greedy off the circumstances leading to empty real estate at astronomical rent prices are also the ones who can afford private dining experiences, which chefs and restaurateurs willingly cater because a check is a check. An entire separate economy is therefore created between restaurants and the elite, fueling the fire for already unsustainable costs and modes of operation. Nothing about that should be celebrated.

Tech entrepreneurs, focused on the front-end user experience, continue to find ways to justify their existence without really doing anything for the back-of-the-house because none of them work in the industry that they create products for. They’re fanboys. They think the reservation system is what’s holding the experience together—because this is what they’ve always thought and prioritized while ignoring the $1 trillion back-end business opportunity sitting right in front of them—and that by creating demand, it’s somehow solving all the restaurant’s problems. They have no investment in the sustainability of their consumption or creating streamlined solutions for operators, only that whatever they receive is “the best” so they can brag about it to their friends like court-side tickets to the Knicks. Does your caviar deplete entire sturgeon populations in Russia? Who gives a shit! As long as it’s the finest! You could blame the customer in this case, but obviously someone is a decision-maker sourcing this shit.

A compound issue has been growing in hospitality over the past decade, amplified by social media and marketing, and everyone is complicit in the problem. There is a constant demand for patronage and the experience economy, but an overall devaluation in the perception of labor that creates it, leading to abysmal service and excessive price gouging. Service workers are treated like charity recipients while consumers are angry they have to pay $1 as a tip to ensure their barista still sees value in showing up to work—yet somehow have no problem forking over wads of cash for a table at Ella Funt? Meanwhile, the places that stand to make the biggest impact in sustainability are doing fuck all to promote it, presumably because they’re as jaded as their customers now.

According to the National Restaurant Association, 45 percent of restaurant operators report needing more employees to meet customer demand and a majority (70 percent) have job openings that are hard to fill. Why is that? Probably because the employees can’t afford the $700 per person meals they’re serving. There are two reasons to work a job: money and self-fulfillment. If you aren’t getting either of those, you’re going to have a hard time filling jobs—particularly in hospitality, where personality counts. The ones being hit the hardest are the small-time mom-and-pops because the fine dining sector is once again abusing its own position of power and no one is calling it out.

While attempts have been made to include random service fees that allegedly go towards employee benefits, there is still an expectation of tipping on top of that, requiring diners to engage in mental gymnastics at the end of a mostly emotionally unfulfilling meal. The sense of genuine “community,” where there was some kind of purpose with supporting small local farms and that your money was going towards something “good”—the agnostic ethos behind the original farm-to-table concept—feels shoved to the back burner. The whole point of that concept was to illustrate food waste and the importance of creating sustainable food communities. It was pretty simple and it worked. There is only so much you can make people care about, and clearly, basic human integrity and environmental stewardship are no longer among the values many people seem to care about.

Personally, I’ve found myself scaling back on dining out tremendously because it feels like a huge rip off, particularly dining alone. Pre-pandemic, I was a total barfly; now, no one socializes at the bar and bartenders seem put out having to talk to you, while most menus are very lackluster. I don’t know if paying 4x as much would make that any better, but unless you’re the guy featured in Goldfield’s story who is dropping an ungodly amount of money on the reg, many restaurants on apps like Dorsia and Resy no longer accommodate tables for one anyway, and they’re even less friendly when you show up at the door, particularly as a woman. I’d be curious to see how Ruth Reichl would operate in today’s climate if she was still reviewing like back in the day.

For the privilege of sitting alone scrolling on my phone while being treated like an inconvenience, I can expect to pay up to $20 for a glass of wine before tax and tip, which is why the smartest purchase I made last year was a Coravin so I can just pour myself nicer bottles by the glass for practically the same price to support the wine industry, which is constantly freaking out about their margins like every other industry.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned high-end clientele is too busy looking at the devaluation of their art and stock portfolio investments to notice or care, and happy to pay a premium in the meantime to be unbothered hearing about the impact this is having on destroying the middle class.

You’d think it would be time to perhaps consider a different model. “But, which one, Carly?” LOL. Girl, please. I am not that much of a miracle maker. Knock on wood! Rooting for you, humanity! Don’t accidentally choose the wrong revolution!

On that note, a reminder that the publishing industry that brought you thoughtful, well-researched commentary and interviews is also charitable work now and hobbyism. So, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription while I shake myself another cocktail wondering how we’re all going to get out of this mess.

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Recipe: L’Alaska by Estelle Bossy of Le Rock (Punch Magazine)

Last October, I found myself in Annecy, a picturesque little Alpine town just near the Geneva border in France, while I was fucking off and trying to write the Next Great American Novel. That wasn’t a great month, unfortunately, so I didn’t get much writing done, but I did have the eye to pick up a number of specialty goods for later, including: three miniature bottles of Chartreuse, a small bottle of Genepy, a Tisane blend from Dammann Brothers, a ton of spice blends. and a bunch of Savoie cheeses that I immediately inhaled.

I had been saving the Chartreuse for a special occasion—just wanted to make it count for sentimental value as a souvenir. And I found that reason: Alaskas—a straightforward gin- and chartreuse-based classic cocktail—are having a moment, according to Punch magazine, which is fantastic because I’m not a basic and am tired of cocktail menus with 5 million espresso martinis that I don’t want to drink.

Miraculously, I happened to have all of the ingredients I picked up in Annecy for the L’Alaska variation from Estelle Bossy of Le Rock in NYC—including a satchel of that tisane blend I mention above that she borrows from Carthusian monks (which I think is much easier and achieves essentially the same effect). I have been obsessed with this tea since I’ve gotten it. It’s such an elegant tea, and the herbaceous, botanical, and medicinal nature of all the ingredients combined make this a distinctively weed witchy cocktail, in my opinion. Good work, Estelle! Honorary Weed Witch!

Get the recipe for L’Alaska (via PUNCH)

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