Hello Friday,
[Witty intro here. Not too sad. Not too flippant. Just right. Definitely do not forget to add before hitting send.]
Let’s get to it…
The Relief – Out yesterday: Eater’s Ryan Sutton has a very helpful, hospitality-specific, point by point breakdown of the $2T coronavirus relief bill passed by the Senate Wednesday. Highly recommend if you’re struggling to sort it all out (like me). Quick summary via Sutton on Twitter: “The $2 trillion federal stimulus: a) helps hospitality workers with weekly $600 payments b) creates unfair terms for restaurant loan forgiveness c) overlooks vulnerable undocumented workers d) fails to address the cost of care for COVID-19.”
Key point (among many) in the piece: “Restaurants can still qualify for forgivable loans if they rehire all of their full-time employees by the end of June. That prompts two separate questions: First, will New York restaurants be able to open in three months time? Well, hopefully. Second, will they have enough business to be able to rehire all their employees? The short answer, of course, is probably not.” Oof.
And then of course, there is item C above, the plight of undocumented workers. There will (hopefully) be a lot more coverage of this issue on front pages and Fox & Friends, and I sincerely hope one of the key points driven home over and over again is that undocumented immigrants pay taxes. An anonymous, undocumented restaurateur in NYC made the point perfectly to Grubstreet’s Chris Crowley this week: “I pay so much money to the government, to the city, to the state, but now that I need help for my business and my personal life, are they going to help me out? No, they’re not, because I’m undocumented. Because I don’t have papers. They don’t question where the money for taxes comes from, but if I ask for money, they’re going to question me.”
P.S. The view from the White House – Per Eater’s Madeleine Davies: At yesterday’s coronavirus press conference, “Citing the data from the National Restaurant Association survey, a reporter asked, ‘What do you say to a restaurant owner who is looking at his sheets and thinks he has to close within the next 30 days?’ The president responded… ‘I’ve heard 3 percent could be lost, and you could go as high as 10 or 11 percent, but they’ll all come back in one form of another. Might be a different restaurant. But it’s gonna be a great business for a lot of people. We’re making it easy for people — look, what we’re doing in terms of loans, what we’re doing in terms of salaries, they’ll all come back. It may not be the same restaurant, it may not be the same ownership, but they’ll all be back.’ [Emphasis ours.]” Neat!
The Free Advice – If you’re an owner, check out lawyer Jasmine Moy’s Q&A about tenant-landlord relations in Eater this week. Several good tips and things I didn’t know. For example: “Note: I would not say outright that you will not be paying rent, as within your lease there may be language that allows the landlord to claim you’re in default if there is a ‘threatened breach’ and telling the landlord in advance that you won’t be paying rent would likely qualify as a threatened breach. Some leases also have opening hours requirements, so there may be a couple different areas in which you’re technically in default at the moment; be cautious of that, and have your own attorney discuss with you the risks involved with any communication with your landlord.”
Some sad news – “Floyd Cardoz, an international restaurateur and the first chef to bring the sweep and balance of his native Indian cooking to fine dining in the United States, died on Tuesday at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, N.J. He was 59. The cause was the coronavirus, his family said.” Full obituary via Julia Moskin in the NYT. So, so many tributes being published for Cardoz right now, and I’m sorry I haven’t had time to read them all. One of the best I’ve seen so far is this from Meherwan Irani in Bon Appétit, which makes an elegant argument for the power of representation: “My first words to Floyd were spoken through a microphone in front of 60 or so guests. I thanked this man I’d never met for changing my life and blazing a trail that I and so many other Indian chefs have followed. The acceptance and legitimacy that we all craved and finally gained was because of him. I called Floyd the godfather of modern Indian cuisine. His eyes shone, and in them I saw something I didn’t realize I wanted from him all this time: validation.”
Song of themselves: Barbaric Yelp – Scene: Restaurant tech exec wakes up, eyes fruit fly on foot, slowly pulls blunderbuss from beneath pillow and…
Shot: A Twitter thread from Portland, OR’s Andy McMillan yesterday begins: “Uhhh, what the fuck? Without my permission, or even notifying me, Yelp has created a GoFundMe fundraiser for my bar [Suckerpunch in Portland, OR].” Chaser: Per reporter Ina Fried: “Yelp told Axios on Thursday that it is pausing a program designed to raise money for restaurants and small businesses after some owners complained they were signed up without consent and opting out of the program was overly cumbersome.”
Cut to: Tech exec in Bay Area hospital, tears in eyes, foot in traction, Seven Mary Three blasting over the sobs. “A bitter taste is cumbersome!”
The Future – While most of us are still slogging around in the muck of now, some have begun to consider what happens when this too has passed. Here’s Amanda Cohen in the NYT wondering about raising menu prices to cover fair costs. And here’s Dave Chang near the end of his COVID podcast (loosely transcribed by me), answering a question about what there is to be optimistic about going forward:
(At the 27:50 mark) “You know, the metaphor is like a fire or a flood that burns everything or washes everything away so you can start anew. I’ve had a lot of pessimism to the food industry at large, and I think it has been a bubble... And a lot of the industry has been built on a faulty foundation, whether it’s the brigade system, or how we take care of our employees, or the environment or whatever. We’re going to have an opportunity to start from scratch, and I don’t think people realize the tantalizing opportunity of what that means. We can do this in a way that is on our terms. How we pay people. The foods we make. We don’t even have to worry about the Michelin Guide, the NYT stars, or whatever. We can literally build community again. How do we reverse engineer, and wash away all the stupid shit we’ve had to deal with? I don’t know, but it is a future that is unknown and exciting.”
I mean, sure. But feels like the opportunity Dave describes is the same one he’s had every time he’s opened a restaurant (and chosen the investors to do it with). And it’ll only actually change if everyone agrees to the play on the same field, and that, as New Yorker critic Hannah Goldfield points out, means laws.
Or price fixing.
Whatever works.
And that’s it for today.
I’ll see you here Tuesday for next Family Meal.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or “a great business for a lot of people” to andrew@thisfamilymeal.com. If you like Family Meal and want to keep it going, please chip in here. If you got this as a forward, sign up for yourself
P.S. – A few of you have asked for the view from Hong Kong and Asia. Will try to get together some thoughts on that this weekend, but meantime, here’s the change.org petition some restaurant people are floating for HK right now. You’ll note some stark differences from the asks in the states. Most notably this caveat below the list of “demands”: “As Hong Kong is a free economy, we are not suggesting that any of the above recommendations should be enforced by any changes in Hong Kong Government Law - all of these recommendations are simply a call for action.”