FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY
The ongoing effects of the pandemic prove that restaurants and bars need to become more efficient and better places to work to thrive in the future. By Laura Hayes @LauraHayesDC “It took 50 years for dining habits to transition from the home as the primary place for meals to the pre-pandemic world of large numbers of meals being eaten outside of the home. Then it took 24 hours in March of 2020 for a huge reversal,” says Ruth Gresser, chef-owner of Pizzeria Paradiso. Ever since, restaurants and bars have been reinventing themselves as restrictions fluctuate and consumer behavior changes. There are now more tools to protect against serious illness from the virus, but the pandemic continues and it’s tricky to predict when we’ll enter an endemic phase. Nearly two years of modified living have permanently altered most aspects of public life. Bar and restaurant professionals believe the hospitality industry must become more efficient across the board while simultaneously evolving into a more nurturing place to work. Diners, they say, also have a role to play. When restaurants had to operate as shadows of their former selves during the early months of the pandemic, some sent SOS signals to their ride-ordie regulars. Not knowing how long dining rooms would be closed or operating at reduced capacities, restaurateurs openly discussed their precarious positions and the support they needed. “It felt like a veil was lifted because, in an immediate moment, customers became aware of the dire situation,” says Republic Cantina owner Chris Svetlik. “In restaurants, our job is to hide the chaos, pretend everything is OK, apologize profusely, and bear the full brunt of anything going wrong.” Once the fourth wall fell, Svetlik and others felt confident setting time limits on reservations, charging cancellation fees, and talking candidly with diners about staffing and supply struggles. “Restaurants as theater—where staff are constantly adjusting the scene to accommodate guest behavior with few questions—has diminished in a way that’s healthy,” he says. The heightened transparency comes as some owners say it’s no longer possible for them to eat rising costs instead of passing them on to consumers. “Labor and food costs have increased to an extent that restaurants cannot absorb without increasing prices,” Gresser says. “Plus, the pandemic debt that restaurants took on to continue operations also needs to be paid back.” The government bailed some businesses out, but not all of them. Educating consumers about the true costs of a meal doesn’t have to feel like “sympathy talk,” according to Queen Mother’s Chef Rock Harper. “It’s so expensive and we don’t have people—those things are real and I don’t want to minimize them,” he says. “I hope we can educate consumers on how much it costs to get this beautiful piece of chicken to your plate instead of saying,
Marx Cafe ‘Woe is me.’” Harper, who sells fried chicken sandwiches out of a shared kitchen in Arlington, acknowledges that customers have also gone through a pandemic and might be on tighter budgets. Still, he says, restaurants need to be able to articulate their value. Everyone has to get paid, from the farmer and the trucker to the cook. That same notion, Harper says, applies to correcting customers’ toxic behavior. “With the respect piece, you’ve got to educate your customers on how to engage with us, what’s tolerated, and set clear boundaries in a graceful way like my grandmother would do.” Aggressive and dangerous behavior contributed to an exodus of hospitality employees during the pandemic. In the fall of 2020, some restaurant workers enrolled in de-escalation training with a local organization to learn how to spot objects that could potentially be used as weapons, like pint glasses, before approaching an unruly customer. Caitlin Schiavoni worked her final shift as a server and bartender last month and will now focus on her passion for wildlife preservation. She says enforcing the city’s strictest policies, such as the 10 p.m. alcohol curfew, caused distress. “People not putting on their masks and getting right up in our faces—it was ridiculous,” she says.
22 DECEMBER 17, 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM
“We don’t make the rules, we’re trying not to get fined. We’re already here working in unsafe conditions. … A lot of the reason workers aren’t coming back is they saw how disposable they can be treated.” In addition to the city deputizing restaurant employees as COVID cops, D.C. reopened indoor dining two months before restaurant employees became eligible for vaccines and OK’d those Instagrammable igloos, fudging the definition of outdoor dining. Meanwhile, cooks had one of the most dangerous jobs during the pandemic and fled to other sectors, such as construction, where they had greater job security and felt less anxious about potentially contracting the virus. They were in good company. When bars and restaurants fully reopened earlier this year, not everyone rushed to clock back in. “People who saw this as some form of income and not passion found a different career path,” says The Green Zone bartender Will Alvarez. “They’ve gone into real estate or coding. I think all of us thought about it.” Alvarez stayed because his employer takes care of him. “We’ve done some form of [revenue] sharing to incentivize people to stay around and health and dental care are provided, things you wouldn’t normally see in restaurant jobs or bars before,” he says. When almost everyone is hiring, the power
Darrow Montgomery
Shift Change
dynamic shifts. Prospective employees feel empowered to demand better pay and benefits. “Everybody knows what their worth is now,” says Mick Perrigo, who almost left the industry to become a farmhand before landing a bartending job at Hook Hall’s Cocktail Club. Its parent company, Pirate Ventures, offers all workers access to an Employee Assistance Program, health care for full-time employees after 60 days, and a matching 401K after a year. “Not too many companies I’ve worked for put their employees first,” Perrigo says. Maria Bastasch is experimenting with how to pay staff at Disco Mary, a long-term pop-up with apothecary cocktails and vegan Mexican snacks. “I think back on even the most lucrative night I had [as a tipped worker] and don’t know if I felt fully compensated for the amount of labor I was putting forward,” she says. “And that’s me, who came from a privileged background.” She pays staff a minimum of $20 per hour, $4.80 more than D.C.’s minimum wage. “We think it needs to be more, but we’re working toward that goal,” Bastasch says. A 25 percent service charge, explained on the menu, helps the bar cover labor costs. Bastasch distributes a share of service charge money to kitchen workers. A number of bars and restaurants distanced themselves from tipping and instituted service charges during the pandemic when it was hard to predict how many customers would visit. Bastasch hopes her actions will inspire others. “Places that do have resources, whether that’s years of experience or name recognition, have a responsibility to start doing this so it becomes more normative,” she says. “We can almost use our privilege to blaze a trail.” While restaurants scramble to attract employees, restaurants are learning how to do more with less. Technology is often the answer when businesses need to operate more efficiently. Among the most discussed changes is the implementation of QR codes because they can challenge preestablished notions of service and hospitality. Bars and restaurants experimented with them when they only had a few employees on payroll. Some used them as a replacement for paper menus, while others asked diners to order and pay through them too. The QR codes didn’t disappear when restaurants fully reopened. They’re likely here to stay, despite some diners balking at using their phones during dinner. “I predict table service will be something very special in the future and only offered at fine dining restaurants,” says Jenn Crovato, chef and owner of 1310 Kitchen & Bar. “Asking your server what they recommend at more casual dining establishments may become a thing of the past at many places, with QR codes and food runners staying in place as an alternative.” She hasn’t started using QR codes at her restaurant yet, but thinks it might be inevitable. “The margins are so paper-thin at this point, you’ve got to figure something out.” The costs of integrating QR code technology into point-of-sale systems have already come down because of widespread use, according to Walters Sports Bar owner Jeremy Gifford. “I can now, for $50 a month, throw a QR code on all of my tables and essentially replace my servers,” he says. He used to need 15 to 20 servers on a busy night, but now he only needs six to eight. “I hate it and it takes the customer service and hospitality
