Restaurants never run themselves. The work routine cannot be established and then left on autopilot. The work is endless and thankless. Five percent of it, perhaps, has something to do with cooking; the other 95 percent is cleaning, budgeting, ordering, hiring, managing, filling out paperwork and paying taxes. A restaurant is not a big dinner party; it is a managerial enterprise with a kitchen and dining room attached. Many restaurants never turn a profit before going under, and many that do run on extremely thin margins and are not profitable enough to guarantee a comfortable retirement. As the coronavirus “phase one” reopenings begin, many restaurants are finding that running at reduced capacity simply doesn’t pencil out. Indeed, one can be left wondering how restaurants exist at all. Some thrive, to be sure. But many have short lives, and perhaps the continued existence of so large a number of restaurants at any given time relies on inexperienced people volunteering to have their lives ground up.
Slavery is America’s original sin, but a few sins behind is our overarching tendency to conflate economic failure with moral failure. The result is that we often punish people for trying. It is difficult to watch Kitchen Nightmares—or to drive down an old commercial strip in the wake of a recession—and spy any evidence for the Smithian view of economics as cunning and mutually productive self-interest. Rather, one wonders whether the American economy relies on something darker. If restaurants as a category run on burnout, broken marriages, bitter families, and exhausted finances, is it even moral to go out to eat? Or to put it more soberly, how can we reward and incentivize successful enterprises without perpetuating the aspects of the business that destroy human lives?
In a 2019 interview with Hot Ones, a popular online food show, Gordon Ramsay addressed “all the snowflakes and Millennials out there: the more you get pushed, the thicker your skin, and the thicker your skin, trust me, the higher you go.” Grit, determination, and success certainly describe Ramsay’s own professional arc. But one wonders how high the families from innumerable episodes of Kitchen Nightmares have gone, put through the wringer of bankruptcy and foreclosure and divorce and deferred childbearing and untold emotional pain for the crime of serving frozen pizza, or even for the “crime” of doing business in an unforeseen recession. One wonders what fate will befall the owners of thousands of shuttered restaurants at this moment, on which many owners have staked their futures and retirements. A recession at least as severe as 2008 may already be baked into the cake. And recessions, like rain, fall on the just and the unjust. The least we can do is align our own expectations with standards that are humanly possible, and meet failure with a measure of compassion.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
