FM is back, Batali is not, Grubhub's phone bills, 2019 price hikes, Bocuse restored, and more...

Family Meal - Friday, January 11th, 2019

Hello Friday,

A belated Happy New Year to you, and welcome back to Family Meal! Thanks much to everyone who reached out while I was away. The new baby at home is doing wonderfully, and (at only one month old) can already maintain eye contact while he conducts… other bidness. Life is a miracle.

A fair amount of restaurant news happened over the past month – Free tweet: “Wanna feel old? Mike Isabella filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy exactly one month ago today.” – but I won’t go back too far here. This is a newsletter about current events, and I am not currently sleeping enough to focus on much else.

Let’s get to it…

The Lists – First up, some helpful summations to get (me) caught up: Eater is out with updated versions of their Eater 38 lists in all 25 of their cities, but what I really love for a sense of what’s going on around the country (plus London) are their “Most Anticipated Restaurants of Winter 2019” lists, which have been trickling out over the past month from Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and presumably more, with more on the way.

The Law – “Three investigations into sexual assault allegations against the celebrity chef Mario Batali have been closed because detectives could not find enough evidence to make an arrest, a New York Police Department official said Tuesday… Charges could not be brought in two of the cases because they were beyond the New York State statute of limitations… Prosecutors could not bring charges in the third case because cold-case detectives in the Special Victims Division could not find enough evidence to prove that a crime had occurred.

“The third woman said she was raped eight or nine years ago after visiting the Spotted Pig… [but] ‘She couldn’t put the pieces together,’ the police official said. ‘Something happened to that victim in that room, but we don’t know if it’s criminal or not.’” Details via Ashley Southall and Julia Moskin in the NYT.

The Law too – “After six years of legal battles, California’s ban on foie gras is still in effect. The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday it would not hear a challenge to California’s 2004 ban on the production and sale of foie gras, leaving in place a 2017 ruling upholding it... Starting in 2012, groups such as the Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards, backed by the French Laundry’s Thomas Keller and dozens of other chefs, have supported a series of efforts to overturn the ban, leading to a legal back-and-forth…. Shortly after the decision was announced, the chefs’ coalition announced that it will attempt another legal challenge in federal district court, but did not specify on what grounds.” Full story from Jonathan Kauffman in the SF Chronicle.

The Suits – Per Philly Mag’s Victor Fiorillo, Philadelphia’s Tiffin chain “has filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court against Grubhub, alleging that the company may have bilked its many restaurant customers out of more than $5 million in what [Tiffin founder Munish Narula] calls a ‘scheme’ involving ‘sham telephone orders.’” Narula claims that after test-calling his restaurant through the Grubhub app, but not placing an order, he was charged a commission as if he’d made a sale. He also said that when questioned, a Grubhub rep told him they charge a commission on all calls to the restaurant that go through their app and last longer than 45 seconds, regardless of whether or not a sale is made.

Cue receptionists handling phone calls like 1990s movie fugitives avoiding a trace.

The Sale - “The French-based Gault & Millau food guides have been bought by an unnamed Russian family, its owner told AFP Wednesday. Come de Cherisey, who heads the prestigious gastronomic guides said the Russian investors have promised to pump several million euros into the company…. The new owners are linked to the state-owned VTB, one of Russia's top banks, which has been hit by both EU and US sanctions since Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.” The world’s first internationally sanctioned restaurant guide?

The Numbers – Jonathan Kauffman looked at sales tax data and found that for all the challenges facing SF restaurants (“rising minimum wages…. rents zooming northward, the difficulty of finding and retaining staff”), “in 2013, restaurants and hotels paid $43.4 million to the city in sales tax, 10 percent less than the consumer goods sector, which paid $47.8 million. By 2017, those industries had essentially swapped dominance: Retailers paid the city $45.3 million in sales tax, while restaurants and hotels paid $54.2 million.” But but but: “A closer, year-by-year look at San Francisco’s sales tax revenue sounds a warning. In 2016 and 2017, restaurant sales growth slowed, and the shrinking of retail sales increased.”

The 2019 Price Points – In NYC, “As of the new year, a dinner for two at Thomas Keller’s Per Se costs more than $700 before wine, tax, or supplements. And a wine-paired dinner date at Daniel Humm and Will Guidara’s Eleven Madison Park will top $1,100 — about as much as last minute tickets to Hamilton… The price of the tasting at Eleven Madison, specifically, has risen by $20 to $335 in the new year. That modest 6 percent increase is confined to the dinner menu… Keller’s restaurant, located on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center, raised the price of its nine-course dinner menu by $15 to $355 in 2019, making it the city’s third most expensive restaurant after Masa ($595), and Brooklyn Fare (~$363).” Full story plus graph from Ryan Sutton in Eater.

For Fashion Fans – Khushbu Shah is in the NYT this week, talking professional kitchen wear beyond chef’s whites: “As the culinary world distances itself from a boys' club mentality — most recently because of the #MeToo movement — so have kitchen-wear companies like Hedley & Bennett, Tilit and Polka Pants, which design clothes that are both comfortable and stylish.” With cameos from many a dishwasher shirt.

For Construction Fans – On Twitter, Elizabeth Auerbach has a very short video of a walkthrough of Restaurant Paul Bocuse mid-rehab this month. Genuinely thought those wrapped chandeliers were a new, modern, cloud-lighting look for a heartbeat. Scroll down for a totally torn up kitchen. That sound you hear is the clutching of preservationists’ pearls.

And last but not least – While I was away, the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner took the preposterous position on Twitter that food photography is “not that hard”, and then attempted to back up her claim by posting a 97-slide PowerPoint presentation on “How to Take Awesome Food Photos” that doesn’t even go beyond how to frame a photo. Despite her obviously very bad take (Not that hard! Ninety-seven slides!), the deck is a public service and definitely worth a look if you’re trying to get better this year. I am. Please follow my journey on Instagram. Thank you.

And that’s it for today. It’ll take me at least one more of these to get back into the swing of things, but if you’ve got suggestions for how to improve Family Meal in 2019, or people I should be talking to, partnerships I should be thinking about, whatever, please send them my way. I’ve got some changes in mind for when I’m getting enough sleep, and would love to hear your thoughts in the meantime.

Great to be back with you, and 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 the ~$363 I need for Brooklyn Fare 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! Most archives at thisfamilymeal.com for now.