What Will Happen to My Favorite Restaurant?
“Closed for business indefinitely” — a common, chances-are-it’ll-be-you industry motto always looming over every restaurant owner. It’s the voice of an inner, unshakable demon. A devouring giant; prime mover to consider each penny an essential lifeline.
Food industry profit margins are slim, waste is a cardinal sin. I’ve seen chefs reach arms deep into scrap bins fishing out usable cuts of meat, halves of fruits and vegetables. Empty sauce containers found unscraped clean in dish bins can cause a nuclear reaction, a classic chef scolding, toward an entire kitchen staff. As any chef worth their Japanese knives says, “pennies add up.”
Maintaining operating costs is like air traffic control. Giving in to distraction could determine the whole scope of your business’ survival. With the pandemic scorching its way through every nook, sinus, and cranny on the face of the planet, the damage it has caused precedes profit margins and expense reports.
It feels like a parallel galaxy away looking back on drives along the avenues of San Francisco, peering through wide open glass windows of bars and restaurants, vibrating with life. A cultural bloom from the Mission to Van Ness, Richmond District to the Marina, now boarded up like a generic scene from any dystopian zombie movie. The backdrop to empty, desolate, wide washes of streets and sidewalks at one time defined by dense foot streams, a temper trigger for lack of vacant parking spaces. Our minds now stocked with uncertainty, images of a socially not so distant, grim future. All of us navigating in place, a life without convenience.
Here’s another industry motto — “It’s better to have lots of leftover, than to be plenty out of.”
My wife and I ran our catering service for several years. More than a decade leading up to, I was a busser as a teenager, a line cook in my 20s, then a sous chef for a few restaurants and caterers around the bay. During our heyday, we operated a humble, little booth at Fort Mason and Sundays in two separate farmer’s markets. Every service, alongside other mobile food pop-up entrepreneurs, prepped enough to serve a community of thousands — street food enthusiasts and open-air foodies. Even if the industry was inherently cutthroat on a surface level, there was a peaceable, competitive camaraderie amongst the hustle of a fellow food business owner that offered a kindred connection.
On an ideal day most vendors were sold out of food. Some events, unfortunately, there was plenty of food leftover. Event planners that hired us for special events requested we prepare for a generic number of guests, basically a tossup. They were paying clients, and we were committed to do so under the unspoken oath of proper service. A Rule of thumb, though — no event planner hires a caterer for repeat business if you’re caught halfway out of food while there’s 3 plus hours left at a party — never a happy scene.
Educated guesses as to how much food to stock up on differ between businesses, on any given day. Your best move is dependent on several factors. Is it payday? Is a holiday coming up? Will people be eating beforehand? Drinks and cocktails to be served? The unpredictable days, the curveballs, no matter the busiest restaurant, catering business, or buffet — lots were left over. It would move me to the moon to say that most food waste was donated to the Glide Memorial Soup Kitchen or even composted, but that would be a stretch.
Here in San Francisco, just like every major city, we never needed more restaurants. They just kept popping up. Although the loss for jobs is deeply heartbreaking, maybe this temporary reset could be a blessing in disguise. For an industry over-saturated with choices to satisfy a basic survival need, I often question how essential it is to have such an excess of options on hand.
Google “US Food Waste”, and you will find there are plenty of reliable sources that report how much food we are chucking into the trash, both restaurants and people at home. Almost half of the food on our plates go to waste, equivalent to about $165 billion. You’ll also find that the US accumulates an estimate of 38 million tons of food waste in one year. Of the 38 million tons of waste, 95 percent of discarded food ends up in landfills and only 5 percent diverted from landfills for composting. The remaining food waste on landfills is left to decompose producing methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. The study also highlights that reducing food waste by “15 percent could feed more than 25 million Americans every year.”
Some food Service restaurant groups on the US fortune 500 are reporting efforts to reduce their waste footprint. Darden Restaurant Group, the umbrella company for Olive Garden and their other 1700 restaurants have been donating food since 2003 through the “Harvest Food Donation Program” — an estimated 8 million pounds of food a year in partnership with “Feeding America”, the nation’s leading hunger-relief organization. In 2019 they donated 1.7 million pounds of food, equalling 18.7 million meals for the needy through schools and the aid of volunteers. Yum brands — the stakeholder in KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut — made efforts to switch to all recyclable cups and packaging, in addition to sourcing 100% cage-free eggs in its US and Canada locations.
On a smaller scale, restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkley and Blue Hill in New York, helped pioneer and influence big corporations to think small and environmentally conscious. On a much grander scale, major cities such as San Francisco, New York, Austin, Seattle, and Washington DC have zero waste goals set for the next 20 years, with the hopes of providing enough infrastructure to divert most, if not all food waste away from landfill into composting facilities.
During my years working in professional kitchens, I have seen a largess of wince-worthy acts. Cases of frozen chicken thawed all morning in a sink under running water. Hotel pans full of beef stew that didn’t get served because of a miscommunication between the front of the house and the back of the house. Customers sending backplates of perfectly good food because they forgot to mention to their server they wanted sauce on the side. Racks and racks full of porchetta for a party serving 3000 tech workers that weren’t touched. The hundreds of pounds in sous vide hangar steaks that went rancid overnight due to power failure. These things happen, as they must, because staying way ahead beats being in the weeds preparing food on the fly for hungry, demanding humans that would cuss you out on a whim for what they feel would be a lapse incompetency. I remember all these things, Then I think about how many others out there — restaurants, caterers, food service workers, have been subject to doing the same thing for decades.
It humbles me knowing that most places and the people I’ve had the privilege to work for treated the food and trimmings with reverence, yet even then there was still waste to account for. However, I cannot vouch for those working in the foodservice business because it’s the only work they could find, unable to find the pride in themselves for doing a job well done. Then, I see the long lines at the grocery store, or all the cars double-parked outside Mission street for restaurant-delivery drivers waiting for customer orders. All of the people that need to file for unemployment. Then I think about all that waste. All 165 billion dollars of it.
Please, I am not trying to say there is a lack of effort here in the Bay Area. The channels of food banks that depend on donations and volunteers here deserve just as much press as any Michelin star restaurant. However, donations and volunteers can only get you so far. On several occasions I have experienced barriers in trying to organize leftover food to be donated, but couldn’t due to lack of available volunteers. In other instances it took up to two days for a food bank distribution center to send out someone to pick up leftover food, a few times no one showed at all.
The food and beverage business has and will always be the center of culture. From your working-class neighborhood watering hole to the kids running to lunch at the school cafeteria. From a Coffee shop couch, to the bodega deli counter that serves your favorite turkey sandwich on dutch crunch. The food industry employs an estimate of almost 11.9 million people in the US alone, a number that has likely grown since, based on a survey by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018.
Restaurants are one of the few places outside of the internet that has the power to connect the world — a talented line cook from Central America, to a native San Franciscan taking the order, to a food runner from Ireland delivering a hot plate to an engineer from India. Apart from being a center of culture and a great gathering space for people, the small business restaurant in your neighborhood attracts consumers from other parts of the world, and keeps tax dollars close to home.
The food businesses that remain afloat will be faced with a crossroads — retool, restructure, or return to business as usual. The landscape has been set.
New ways to serve food made by hard-working people will once again emerge. They will saturate the grocery shelves, fill the queue, and reshape a marketplace vast enough for infinite ingenuity. Customers will line up once again with swapped expectations, a new set of interests, unfamiliar demands. The food business entrepreneur will meet them head-on. They’ll remember the long social distancing lines at the grocery store that couldn’t keep up with demand. They will finally realize that the privilege to feed a thriving economy also comes with the responsibility to manage waste responsibly, redirecting salvageable excess to those in need and those that can repurpose it into valuable forms of energy.
The food business entrepreneur after the pandemic will know that their stake in the grand scale of the world extends beyond those that sit at their tables, further than those that pay at the register, and into the 41 million starving Americans struggling to make ends meet. Until there is a vaccine, there are no guarantees that shelter in place orders, quarantines, and overall shutdowns won’t be part of the new norm. As sure as that will be, they will adapt and continue to move forward. Proving that the food cooked, packaged, and served by a labor force of citizens and immigrants is foremost a byproduct of culture, creativity, ingenuity, craftsmanship — an essential thread in the web of an industry that keeps this country well and alive.
