No seats lost, Fertitta's private pool, Of masks and masters, and more...
Family Meal - Tuesday, May 19th, 2020
Hello Tuesday,
“Restaurants. What a great business to be in. But perhaps not this week.” – President Donald J. Trump, Monday, May 18th, 2020.
Let’s get to it…
The Relief – If you missed the big Presidential restaurant roundtable yesterday, there’s video up on YouTube, with the actual meeting starting around the 01:15:00 mark. Per Tim Carman’s recap in the Washington Post, “Ten chefs and executives, representing chains as large as Burger King and restaurants as rarefied as Per Se in New York City, brought their economic concerns to the meeting…. All the hospitality industry representatives were male, and mostly white, though the Independent Restaurant Coalition initially requested that North Carolina chef-restaurateur Katie Button represent the group. IRC co-founder Tom Colicchio… says someone at the White House rejected her. He didn’t know who.” Will Guidara went in her place.
I could not watch the whole thing (sorry), but did scan the White House transcript, and pulled out a few key points. First, Trump began the meeting by announcing some dramatic announcements: “Big announcements coming, big announcements have already come, and tremendous progress has been made — therapeutically, cure-wise, and also, obviously, vaccine.”
Those potential cures are apparently going to make a restaurant comeback very easy, according to this actual exchange with Galatoire’s CEO Melvin Rogrigue:
“MR. RODRIGUE: You know, just the very nature of restaurants in general: We rely on social interaction. So it makes us really unique that we were hit hard quickly, and it’s going to make our comeback really difficult. That being said, I’m glad to hear your news that there’s —
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. Well, my [cure / vaccine] news negates what you just said because you would — you would be back into business like you had it.
MR. RODRIGUE: Yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: No seats lost, et cetera, et cetera. So we’ll see what happens, but it certainly negates it. Yeah.
MR. RODRIGUE: Yeah. So, you know, in the interim…”
Yeah. So, you know, in the interim… The big push from restaurateurs in the room was two-fold: Change the PPP loan repayment schedule to 24 weeks from the current 8, and create legislation protecting restaurants from COVID-based lawsuits. Re the latter, Trump said, “The Democrats don’t want to give you lia- — the liability provisions…. But we’ll get it anyway.” Re the former, he told the press: “ I’m surprised that’s all they asked for. No, I think what they’re asking for is very reasonable, Steve [Mnuchin]. You know, I mean, we’re going to have to go and get it approved. And again, we — we’ve saved and we’ll continue to save the restaurant business.” So… Congrats!
P.S. There was a third, logically-challenged point from Tilman Fertitta, owner of Landry’s (and the Houston Rockets), who wants us all to know he thinks small business owners don’t understand finite math: “If you would just split [the PPP fund] up — and I’m not saying add any more money, but add a category for the larger private restauranteur [sic] that could go out and take this money and put it in a different bucket so it wouldn’t be me taking this money away from the little beauty salon.”
To paraphrase Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood: “If you have a milkshake, and I have a President who will allocate a portion of that milkshake to me…”
The Undocumented – This Patricia Escárcega LAT piece on undocumented restaurant workers in Los Angeles got a lot of traction over the weekend, and rightly so. One cook, brought here as a one year old, told her, “I was 21 or 22 when I realized I would probably never get to work in a high-end kitchen because most of them use E-Verify and I wouldn’t pass a background check. That’s when I got the first taste of not belonging. That’s when I first realized how serious it was to not have papers.” It only got more serious in the pandemic, and kudos to Escárcega and others who have been covering this key issue (I think immediately of Laura Hayes at Washington City Paper, who had two big pieces on this issue recently – here and here), but what big name restaurateur is going take the public lead on it? Will anyone? Or, more difficult… can anyone?
The Counterpoint – Also in the LAT, Jenn Harris has this twist in the delivery fee cap wars: “In an unexpected move, more than 20 Los Angeles restaurants, including Canter’s, Sichuan Impression and Sweetfin, have signed a petition opposing a City Council proposal to cap third-party delivery app fees.” Minor point: “The petition was facilitated by Postmates after ‘business owners reached out to us to see what they could do to support us,’ a Postmates spokesman said.”
The Burden – In Kim Severson’s NYT piece yesterday about the use of masks in restaurants, she has a good rundown on all the many ways guests and the industry are handling (or not) the most visible new PPE in the US. But this little nugget from Patrick O’Connell at the Inn at Little Washington really stuck out: “If guests ask to be waited on by someone without a mask, and the waiter is willing, the restaurant will accommodate them.” Even if a server were allowed to say “no” and still wait on that table, I don’t see how allowing customers to request varying degrees of staff PPE could possibly be a just solution in a tipped system.
“Hey, Dave. Your table 7 tonight is Secretary Importantperson and her husband Orders Bigbottles from New York City — you know, the epicenter. They want a waiter without a mask, but if you’re not willing to risk your health and the health of your family for that extra tip money I know your kid needs for that health condition that’s compromising her immune system, you can always swap for Laura’s table 8, the Justwaterspleases from Sperryville. Up to you.” (Ad absurdum non est disputandum, FYIum.)
And last and least: The arbitrage – Fellow newsletterer Ranjan Roy has a fun little tale of a glitch in the no-consent delivery system this week, wherein a friend whose pizza restaurant had been unwittingly added to Doordash realized something beyond the usual was amiss: “The prices were off. He was frustrated that customers were seeing incorrectly low prices. A pizza that he charged $24 for was listed as $16 by Doordash…. Cue the Wall Street trader in me…..ARBITRAGE!!!! If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You'd net a clean $8 profit per pizza… So we put in the first order for 10 pizzas.” Reader, it worked. Again and again. Quoth Roy: “Was this a bit shady? Maybe, but [language inappropriate for a Family Meal] Doordash.”
And that’s it for today.
I’ll see you here Friday for next Family Meal.
Good luck, you know, in the interim…
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