Mission dissected, Eater's New Guard, Ghost deeds, and more...
Family Meal - Friday, October 23rd, 2020
Hello Friday,
At bottom is the Tuesday Family Meal that went out to paying subscribers, as usual. If you’d like to get Tuesdays’ on Tuesdays…
Let’s get to it…
The (maybe) Final Word – After months of back and forth between Angela Dimayuga, Danny Bowien, and others, Grubstreet’s Chris Crowley has a genuine deep dive into what really happened at Mission Chinese Food. The details are still hard to hear, even if you’ve heard versions of them many times by now: “One night in 2016, chef de cuisine Quynh Le instructed a sous-chef to heat up a spoon by dipping it in hot oil. Le then took the broiling silverware and approached a dishwasher, who was Black. Le had been picking on the dishwasher since he started at the restaurant, calling him ‘Pimp Hand’ and referring to Black employees as ‘boy.’ Now he took the red-hot spoon and placed it directly on the man’s arm, searing his skin and causing him to cry out in pain. As employees watched in horror, Le looked a line cook straight in the eyes and asked, ‘What are you going to do about it?’
Hector Campos, who worked as a food runner at the restaurant, decided to speak up. He told Le that he couldn’t do that. Le responded by telling Campos, who was born in Mexico, that he couldn’t wait for Donald Trump to get elected so that ‘you can’t come back to this country.’”
Obviously, a lot of the blame there lies with Le(!), but so much of the recrimination going on after the fact has been about who should have stopped Le and others from (headline) “The Nightmare Inside Mission Chinese Food.” Crowley says he spoke to 26 employees and came to the conclusion that the buck stopped at chasing fame (at best): “It was, in the end, a complete failure of leadership, with employees left to suffer the abuse as management were off promoting themselves in the public eye.”
Fahrenheit 45 – This Kate Krader piece in Bloomberg is nominally about “How Chefs Are Adapting Their Menus for Chilly Outdoor Dining,” but most interesting to me was this nugget: “A report from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. indicated that 45F (7.2C) is the temperature below which demand for outdoor dining will collapse. (In a separate report, the company projected that outdoor dining demand would fall to 5% in December before rebounding in 2021.)” Krader’s link there goes to a tweet of a graph titled “Exhibit 2: Cold Weather During the Pandemic Has Had a Non-Linear Negative Effect on Dining in Excess of Normal Seasonal Patterns,” so you can be sure Goldman’s junior associate Vice President in charge of Hard Rock Café patio revenue predictions takes these stats very seriously. Plan accordingly?
Growth in outdoor dining appears to begin again around 65 degrees, FYI.
And if you’re wondering what other chefs are doing to adapt their menus for the cold, the answer is: “Such dishes as braised short ribs with heirloom potatoes and cassoulet served in eight-inch cast iron pans are selling well.” Translation: It’s sizzler season, baby!
The Opportunity – Hot on the heels of 50 Best’s similar 50 Next program (in Family Meal last week), Eater is expanding its Young Guns program and changing the name to: The New Guard. Nominations now open here, but you can’t be any geek off the street: “To be eligible to be a member of the inaugural Eater New Guard class, nominees must be based in the United States, and they must have less than five years’ experience in their fields or be under 30 years of age as of January 17, 2021. Talented chefs, bakers, sommeliers, and other hospitality professionals who excel at what they do are still welcome, but so are community organizers, people engaged in mutual aid, nonprofit workers, artists, provocateurs, farmers, and advocates for a more sustainable food supply and community health.”
Rewards for being part of past Young Guns lists included a profile (about you), a party (in your honor), and a pledge (you had to sign). This year, I believe Eater is also considering paying for Family Meal subscriptions for all New Guard nominees! (Details of this partnership have not yet been hammered out, but according to the principles of The Secret, we are halfway there). Nominate away!
The Deeds – While “ghost” and “cloud” kitchens are being pitched as ethereal, highly variable spaces, turns out “the former chief executive of Uber has been quietly assembling a mini real-estate empire over the past two years, acquiring closed restaurants, auto-body shops and warehouses for use in his new ghost kitchen venture. Entities tied to Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens, a startup that rents out space to businesses that prepare food for delivery, have bought more than 40 properties in nearly two dozen cities for more than $130 million.” Presumably leases are relatively cheap right now, but the WSJ’s Konrad Putzier reports, “Entities tied to CloudKitchens paid $9.2 million for a vacant restaurant space in Miami Beach in May and $6.6 million for an industrial property in Queens, N.Y., in March.”
Weird to pay that kind of money for an actual restaurant space if all you want is the kitchen, but whatever’s going on there, worth knowing who owns what before you negotiate fees on that sweet, sweet ghost $$$ deal.
(Side note: This is the exact opposite strategy of WeWork, which mostly leased its buildings and then sub-leased to tenants…. unless Kalanick is buying the buildings himself and then leasing them back to CloudKitchens, in which case it’s the exact strategy of WeWork’s founder, Adam Neumann. Ah, tech!)
The End of an Era – In Seattle: “Trailblazing Organic Restaurant Tilth Will Close Permanently Next Week. Chef Maria Hines’s Wallingford destination had a 14-year run, influencing many with its dedication to local sourcing.” Details via Gabe Guarente in Eater.
That Hotel $$$ – Per Ian McNulty on Nola.com, Alon and Emily Shaya have signed on to run the marquis restaurant at the new Four Seasons there, “now slated to open in early 2021.” A big bet for a new hotel in a tourist town these days…
And last but not least: For the Somm – In the NYT, Eric Asimov breaks down how both increasing demand / limited supply and an increase in income inequality around the world, has led wine prices to grow out of synch with general inflation and even other luxury goods. “In a more extreme case, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche 1990, a grand cru and one of the world’s great wines, cost $285 in 1993 ($513 in 2020, accounting for inflation). That’s no small sum then or now, but… Today, a bottle of the 2017 La Tâche goes for about $5,000, well out of reach for dedicated students of wine, except for the most wealthy…. The prices of top wines have risen at a far steeper rate than the prices of many other luxury goods. La Tâche 2017 is almost 18 times as expensive as the 1990, while a basic Hermès Birkin 30 bag, the grand cru of handbags, has gone from about $3,000 in 1990 to $11,000 in 2020, not quite four times as much.”
Harry Nilsson voice: “She put the wine in the Birkin bag; she drank em both up.”
And that’s it for today!
I’ll see paying subscribers here Tuesday for next Family Meal. Everyone else, until Friday!
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or the grand cru of handbags 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!
Here begins the copy/paste of the Family Meal that went out Tuesday to paying subscribers. If you’d also like to get Tuesdays’ on Tuesdays…
Family Meal - Tuesday, October 20th, 2020
Vampire votes, PPP taxes, Beard at rest, Meadowood reconsidered, and more...
Hello Tuesday,
Two weeks, folks. Two weeks.
If I were in PR, I’d be sending all my clients an email this morning with two points: 1) Remind the team: No blackface; not in any context. Stick to the classics. Dracula is awesome. If you’re unsure about a costume, ask a humorless friend, or me. And 2) There’s still a lot of solid press to be gained from non-partisan voting-related restaurant work. Eater, for example, is putting out story after story on things like restaurant freebies for voters in Houston, restaurants’ support for staff to work the polls in Atlanta, and a national roundup on employers providing time off to vote. Vote and let vote.
Subject line: The undead can’t be cancelled. Voting is SEO.
But, I’m not in PR, so…
Let’s get to it…
The Relief – According to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, we should know by the end of the day whether or not a federal stimulus deal is coming soon. “Pelosi set a Tuesday deadline in an appearance on a Sunday talk show, indicating that if no agreement was reached by Tuesday night, it would not be possible to get legislation passed before the Nov. 3 election.” I’m not holding my breath. The headline on this Erica Werner and Jeff Stein piece cites “progress,” but the subhed says, “One senior House Democrat says not a single Democrat could vote for the White House’s latest deal.” And further down we learn (because repetition is the mother of all learning) that “Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters that ‘it’d be hard’ for the bill to command enough GOP support to pass even if a deal is reached between the White House and Pelosi.”
NB: Beyond the $120B RESTAURANTS Act money many are hoping for, restaurants that took PPP funds last time round are also lobbying for a key tax fix in any new stimulus package. Backstory in Restaurant Business Online from Peter Romeo: “When Congress established the PPP under the omnibus CARES Act in March, it specified that loans essentially converted into grants under the carefully delineated forgiveness process would not count as taxable income for the borrower. But in April, after the bill had become law, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued a ruling that business expenses paid with forgiven PPP funds could not be written off as normal tax deductions. Borrowers would be on the hook for roughly 20% to 30% of the forgiven funds when they paid their 2020 taxes, even if the money was used exactly as Congress had set as the prerequisites for forgiveness.”
A rep for the NRA tells Romeo that unlike with the rest of the stimulus deal terms, “All the right people, they’re in agreement on fixing this issue.”
Good luck, all the right people!
The Numbers – On Friday, Eater SF’s Eve Batey had a by-the-numbers look at the construction costs behind a handful of COVID-era Bay Area on-street dining setups (called “shared space platforms” or SSPs). Sample receipts: "$90,000: The cost of the Hayes Valley public parklet constructed by Souvla in 2019. $12,000: The cost of the SSP constructed by Divisadero dive bar the Page. (Over) $15,000: The cost, each, for the SSPs constructed outside the Dorian and Palm House. $20,000: The cost for the SSP outside Cole Valley brunch destination Zazie.” (Links go to an old SF Chronicle story about the Souvla build, and some Instagram pics I found of SSP setups at the Dorian and Zazie.)
The Man, The Myth, The Bio – There have been a lot of reviews and discussions of John Birdsall’s new biography of James Beard “The Man Who Ate Too Much,” but my favorite so far is this interview with LAT critic Bill Addison, which is great for getting into the places Beard made for himself as both a gay man and a famous cook in his day and age. Says Birdsall: “James Beard is absolutely a tragic figure... I see it in James Beard to a certain extent, that happiness was a compromise in some way. I think it partly explains the many myths and lies he told about himself. It was his instinct to hide. And not just from a practical sense — you know, ‘The general public can’t know who I am because I won’t be able to sell cookbooks.’ I’m not sure he felt he deserved happiness. And in his later years, when he was more physically frail, I don’t think he was really able to push away the depression. He was aware in the 1980s that his impact had been eclipsed, especially in American food media, because figures like James Beard and Julia Child weren’t the interesting, sexy stories anymore. It was the time of young, hot restaurant chefs.”
There’s a bonus anecdote of Andrew Zimmern’s childhood moments with Beard later on too. And P.S. – Eater ran a long excerpt of the book earlier this month, if you’d like an actual sample.
The End of an Era – “After nearly 35 years on Chicago’s fine-dining summit, Everest restaurant is closing.” Details from Phil Vettel in the Tribune: “The four-star restaurant will serve its last meal on New Year’s Eve…. ‘It’s all about the lease,’ [chef/owner Jean Joho] said. ‘The lease was up, and I was in negotiations way before COVID. But the building didn’t want to renew.’” Simpler times.
The Editorial – A few weeks ago, the SF Chronicle came out with a story headlined: “The Restaurant at Meadowood pushed chefs for brilliance — some say at a human cost.” It got mixed reactions both because of its timing (right after the restaurant literally burned to the ground) and the relatively common/mild nature of the accusations (a framing which may also get mixed reactions…). I didn’t include it in Family Meal at the time, because the only newsworthiness I could see for you all was why/how the Chronicle decided to publish it at all.
Well, on yesterday’s Extra Spicy podcast, critic Soleil Ho and reporter Justin Phillips delve into that very question. The answer (starting around the 33:50 minute mark after some helpful, nuanced discussion with actual sources for the original story) is a not entirely exciting mix of “we serve the public” journalism and higher thinking on questions like: “Who are we willing to throw under the bus so we can have a good time?” So… Fine. (Some might say that could be better accomplished as more of a roundup, with a few other places that haven’t just burned to the ground for perspective maybe… but fine.)
And that’s it for today. FYI: If you need to run your Halloween outfit by someone, I’m your man. BUT I can tell you without looking that the Jeffrey Toobin costumes some of you are thinking about right now are at once hilarious and ill-advised. Err on the side of caution. Cameras are on.
I’ll see you here Friday for next Family Meal.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or negotiations way before COVID 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!
End end.