Fine dining faces its dark truths in Copenhagen
ft.com
ft.com
https://www.ft.com/content/a62a96b8-2db2-44ec-ac80-67fcf83d8...
But you were commenting on the use of drugs, which is not mentioned in the article? Is that correct?
There is a complicated issue where some people thrive in an environment which is abusive to people who have much different needs. Only accommodating the most vulnerable does leave people behind. (And I say this having had to speak up loudly more than once for someone being mistreated in the industry)
to put it another way, it's not that the kitchen turns people into alcoholics, it's that alcoholics find it hard to work anywhere else (since they can indulge their vice while gainfully employed)
As for abusers, they may find it convenient to fill their payroll with people who can't make it elsewhere (drug addicts, misfits), such that your employees won't quit the second you start sexually harassing them
(edit: a sibling comment to you makes a good point about the cycle of abuse, start as a misfit, get hazed, perpetuate the cycle of hiring people who put up with your abuse because they have no where else to go)
- landlords
- owners of the brand
> I’ve had to ask myself, and I have been for some time, “To what extent in that book did I provide validation to meatheads?”
> …I mean, I became a leading figure in a very old, very oppressive system so I could hardly blame anyone for looking at me as somebody who’s not going to be particularly sympathetic. They say something to me about someone I know, and maybe I would tell them.
> …And from the get-go, this system that I was, let’s be honest, celebrating and bragging about surviving, we’re talking about a militaristic, male system that goes back in Europe back to the guild system, generally populated in the classic example by abused male children who were abused in kitchens, worked their way up through this sadistic system of hazing, became chefs and then abused those below them in the same way. The traditional system was the male chef would abuse his male chef de cuisine. The male chef de cuisine would then abuse his sous-chef. The sous-chefs would take it out on all the cooks who would then physically hit, kick, torment, haze, and pressure each other as punishment for bringing this shit down on them yet again. And God help you if you were a woman in those days.
—https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/anthony-bourdain...
And:
> I’d put aside my psychotic rage, after many years being awful to line cooks, abusive to waiters, bullying to dishwashers. It’s terrible – and counter-productive – to make people feel idiots for working hard for you. Nowadays I still have a rather withering ability to be sarcastic and displeased but I’m not screaming at anyone.
—https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jan/15/anthony...
https://www.reddit.com/user/NooYawkCity/
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/anthon...
1. You work obscene hours. The industry standard for fine-dining is to work 60+ hours a week, and you're on your feet pretty much 90% of it. Also, you're only getting payed around 35k a year with minimal benefits, although this is changing somewhat in the last few years. Drugs and alcohol are just kinda needed by most people to cope with the stress.
2. You work odd hours. Most fine-dining restaurants close around 11 pm, which means you'd get out somewhere between midnight and 1 am. There's nothing else to do when you get out besides go to another bar or restaurant and get wasted. Also, since you work in restaurants, you know other people that work in bars/restaurants. Thus, when you go out to other bars/restaurants, you usually know people who hook it up in terms of drinks. I went to so many bars after work where we'd get "industry discounts" and literally pay like 20% of the listed price.
3. You're surrounded by it. This is one of the most important ones in my opinion. When I worked in restaurants, it was very common for wine vendors to pop in during our prep periods and say something like, "Hey, we just got a special shipment of wine from this fancy place in Italy. Here's the pricing and a free sample bottle for you guys to try out!" Or your boss comes in one day and says, "Hey, this beer isn't selling so you guys should just drink this keg before it goes skunk on us," and now suddenly, there's a free, half-full keg in the walk-in. A lot of what prevents me from drinking is that I'm just lazy and it's expensive, but if someone is going to bring me booze for free to me on a regular basis, you better believe I'll be getting drunk on a regular basis too.
4. The people it draws. Restaurants are known for being pretty lax when it comes to background checks so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone when you get people who have more clandestine backgrounds.
As a regular one in a bar which is frequently visited by the guys after hours[0] I can only confirm this anecdata.
> "Hey, this beer isn't selling so you guys should just drink this keg before it goes skunk on us,"
Yep, is a thing too.
> but if someone is going to bring me booze for free to me on a regular basis, you better believe I'll be getting drunk on a regular basis too
Of course. All other points doesn't help too.
PS guess where am I writing this?
[0] this is greatly depends on the location and the feel, but it is not an uncommon thing. If you are near this you would learn of such places pretty soon if you tend to be there after half of the midnight.
When I worked in a kitchen at a popular thai restaurant in North America when I was a kid, I walked into the mini fridge to grab some noodles and the manager was in there taking a bump of blow, I kinda just froze and then the guy yelled at me. Then I got yelled at more for not getting the noodles fast enough. Quit that job and got into IT as soon as I could.
Former barkeeper here. The thing is, hospitality in general is an incredibly stressful job, it's not just limited to restaurants, but anything involving hostels, hotels, motels, restaurants, bars, discos or event venues:
- the wages usually suck, although the post-covid crunch has seemed to improve the situation.
- a lot of employers outsource the operational risk on their staff by having customers tip them instead of providing an actual living wage.
- in low-class places, the clientele is just trashy (think needles in the urinals or regular brawls levels of trashy). In higher-class places, the clientele is incredibly entitled. Think of "Karen complaining at Walmart" memes, make it 100x worse, and you get the expectations that customers have. Both can be incredibly exhausting.
- the employment conditions suck, many places are horribly understaffed, shift lengths are insane and breaks are rare. And in places where the designated smoking space for employees and customers is the same, customers usually seem to think that it is okay to order a beer while you're still out for a smoke.
- related to the two above points is anything involving alcohol. Many venues don't have dedicated security, which means you are the one who now either has to drag out a confrontational drunk moron, call the police or keep a crowd of people smoking outside quiet enough that the neighbors don't call the police on you. Not fun.
- anything with gambling present always has the associated side effects: thieves, robbers, people who lost their money and now want to trade their last possessions in the vain hope of winning the jackpot, or people who react aggressively to being out of money. Personally, I've been stolen from, I've been robbed, I've been offered anything from likely-stolen phones over marijuana to blowjobs, and I've seen someone bash in the screen of a one-armed bandit with his head, requiring an EMT and police.
- the equipment is often enough horribly complex (artisanal coffee machines), incredibly brittle to operate or requires excessive amounts of deep cleaning simply to keep it somewhat healthy (McDonald's ice makers). Unfortunately, customers aren't really accepting when stuff is broken down. They want their McFlurry. Like, right now. And they'll scream as long as they want until they get their McFlurry. And you're not allowed to kick these entitled arseholes out.
- moments of actual appreciation (beyond a tip) both by managers and customers are rare. For people who require external validation for their mental health, they are in for a hard time.
- managers are reluctant to give their poorly paid staff the power to eject people from the premises out of a fear of bad Google/Yelp/FB reviews. The results are Karen-meme people.
- Places with kitchens... oh well, these are a nightmare in itself. Everyone is shouting all the time, the machinery is loud, the cooking processes create a lot of noise, heat and smells, the ventilation is more often than not a joke which makes all the issues worse, you have a hard time moving around because everything is cramped, half the machines aren't really designed to be ergonomical, and a lot of stuff is inherently dangerous (sharp knives, pans, fryers, freezers, gas flames).
- The working hours can be a real kick in the nuts. Basically you work when everyone else does not: late in the evening, on weekends, on public holidays, at night. And unlike police, utilities, public transport or EMTs your average hospitality job is not unionized, which means employers get away with a lot of insanities: double shifts, day-evening-night-day-evening-night rotations that completely wreck with your sleep schedule, manipulated time sheets to avoid trouble when the authorities come to inspect, no healthcare or other benefits...
The result of all that stress is that people have to cope with it. And most do that by drugs. Some like me smoke, some drink, some use cocaine or similar stuff simply to have enough energy to make it through the shift. And some turn to sex, the industry is fucking like rabbits.
You're going to get this in any place where you have to deal with the general public--not just in hospitality. One of the first things that surprises you when you work in service or retail is how many customers out there are either trashy, belligerent, crazy, entitled, or multiple of the above. They might not be that way on the outside, but as soon as they walk into a business and become The Customer, they transform.
Sounds extremely petty compared to all of that stuff but I'm curious to know if I'm wrong about that
I don't know what that is but it seems like something I would very much like to learn more about.
The huge demand for even unpaid internships at these places allows employers to abuse their workers without penalty.
Maybe the thing to look out for when finding an industry worth joining is to ask how the interns and fresh grads are treated.
on edit: seems my whining paid off, still seemed weird though.
Peculiar how despite all the promises, marketing, media, and government revenue, these things still happen.
Which promises, marketing, and media?
https://denmark.dk/people-and-culture/happiness
https://denmark.dk/society-and-business/the-danish-labour-ma...
However, Denmark was a very fun country to party in before I was married and so on :)
It is pretty funny you think government guarantees has been “marketed”, when the touted “Danish model” is exactly the oppposite.
As you are probably aware, there is a push to make unpaid internships illegal in the USA. Bernie Sanders wants to make the USA "more like Denmark", but in this regard the two countries are already the same, no?
https://mobile.twitter.com/berniesanders/status/112617754437...
Like there is no minimum wage in Denmark. And a unions ability to blockade an employer whose employees aren't unionized are not fantastic -- it does happen though.
Turns out he used to be a cook and after years of pulling 12h shifts sitting just 8h in an air-conditioned office for easily triple the compensation was a pretty sweet deal from his perspective.
“When you're good at something, you'll tell everyone. When you're great at something, they'll tell you.”
So two notes:
if everyone is always telling you how great you are you would probably still be full of yourself.
if you are great at something that means you are good at it, perhaps the great also tell everyone how good they are, although in my experience they just let you know they know it without being so gauche as to have to mention it all the time.
It used to be that Cliff would ask on his mailing list, "does anyone want to host this person?" He'd get these giant catalogs from the publishers of their upcoming books, and there was no possible way we could host them all.
Usually I'd be the only one to raise his hand. I liked to bring authors who wouldn't get a chance otherwise. Thus, you've never heard of most of them.
And, of course, I had no idea how many people wanted to come see them, either.
Interestingly, the bicycle delivery people I would hang out with would rarely talk about work.
And the reasons why poor people are universally exploited are straight forward. They have no say, and no power. When other discriminated groups (color, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) get some power they're still part of that group but when poor people get to power they are no longer poor and have very little interest in pursuing that cause. On the other hand trying to help any of these people is quickly branded as socialism (or worse, communism) and that's a scarlet letter sentence which most do their best to avoid.
Could you clarify which people you're referring to?
It's a pretty strong criticism, so painting with an overly broad brush isn't really fair.
But the reality is that it's not that the job has no value, or anyone could do it. If your trash sat in front of your house for weeks you'd pay them a yearly salary just to take it away. They get abuse because they have no choice. Somehow they ended up on that bottom rung of the ladder and society made it close to impossible to get up from there.
If you want to solve other types of discrimination you intrinsically accept that the abusers will pay for it. Your board is all white men? Some will have to pay the price for centuries of abuse and make room for other genders or people of color. If you are looking for such equality you will have solid arguments to justify getting it. Until it comes to poor people and then nothing else matters, they're poor for a reason, why should you pay for lifting them up?
So I'll say there's no brush broad enough to paint this with. It has been almost universally proven throughout recorded history, it has happened all over the world to varying degrees: the world needs a bottom rung to do what nobody else even wants to think about. It will make sure that bottom rung keeps existing in ample supply to achieve that and it will abuse those people because it can. It's the one universal discrimination where the power balance is so one sided it's absolutely ridiculous. It doesn't care about gender, race, religion, if you're poor you will pay for it in ways you never though exist, you will be forced to subsidize the well being of those better off. And those better off will find justifications to not do much, if anything, about it.
Maybe you aren't one of those people. But you did have to ask with surprise which makes me think you never even noticed or ever really wondered.
Actually, I'm trying to get better at speaking politely. That's the reason for how I phrased my earlier post.
I completely agree with this. In Seattle, our city council proposed an ordinance requiring minimum wage and hour standards for so-called platform workers (your nominally independent contractor staff for companies like Uber and Lyft and Amazon and the like). Everything was, by Seattle political standards, going smoothly until DoorDash put the "the cost of your delivery will go up because of meddling by the Seattle council" blurb in their app. Then, immense pushback.
I hear this fairly often from people I work with. I work for a medical practice group and patients, of course, want to be seen outside of the hours when they work, so we have some clinics that are open until the ungodly late hours of 7 or 8pm. One clinic is, because the clinic director is a Khan-level tyrant, open for four hours on Saturdays.
The amount of moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth by some of my colleagues, and some of the medical staff, when their turn in the rotation comes up is deafening. To be asked to work anything other than 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday is an affront to dignity.
Yet these same people think nothing of also complaining when their favorite restaurant spot trims its hours back from midnight to 11pm. Or when the grocery store closes at 10pm. Or that places are crowded and have slower service on the weekends.
Where, exactly, do they expect all of those employees to come from and why should those employees "suffer" to work nights and weekends?
It grates on me.
One fairly awful bit about the nighttime economy is commuting. Light rail is closed from midnight to 5, parking is also not good during night hours. When I lived in Berlin they ran 24/3, so weekdays they would do nighttime maintainance but they would maintain service for the weekend nighttime economy.
Which makes sense to me, but people still raise a stink that retail isn't seven days a week "like it used to be."
A lot of people still remember the early 2010s when Seattle was open later than it is today. There used to be a lot of 24-hour or late-night spots. Beth's, Lost Lake, 13 Coins, North Star, Third Shift Bar, and the like. QFC, Metro Market, and Safeway all had 24-hour grocery shopping. The big Starbucks in University Village used to be open 24/7, then got trimmed back to "just" 2am, and is now 9pm.
But this comes with trade-offs: people don't want to work miserable jobs with crap scheduling and low pay (hoping for tips) and not get appreciated for it. The pandemic showed people they don't have to do that, but those who are used to plentiful services are salty because, hey, it turns out service employees are humans, too!
> Light rail is closed from midnight to 5
I agree that Sound Transit needs to explain exactly why they need 35 hours a week for maintenance when other agencies manage to pull it off in a fraction of the time.
But, to be fair to the rail, buses do still exist and we did a big restructure of our overnight bus service such that the routes actually exist and make some sense. Having ridden the 83 or 84 home more than once, those old owl routes were a travesty.
That being said, I think the reason these frustrations are exploitable is because every single charge is passed directly to the consumer. For all of the private market's genius, it struggles to capture efficiencies except for when it enriches the shareholders, board members or C-suite with salary ties to stock performance. No one ever seems to ask why that is. Its just assumed that the consumer should pay for it out of their post tax wallet share.
These dining experiences cost hundreds of euros per meal, so it’s not the most price-sensitive market. And the people who work in the kitchens are not necessarily poor. After all you can’t be completely broke to work for months on an unpaid internship.
The power dynamic here is more about exploiting ambitious young people and pushing them beyond their limits, even making them suffer abuse, while paying little or nothing. It’s like if Google took unpaid SWE interns, asked them to work in data centers where temperatures are above 100 F, and supervisors would kick them in the balls if their programming performance is unsatisfactory (this actually happens in Copenhagen restaurants based on the article).
To me, the revelation in this article was that these fine dining experiences are often unsustainably designed for the price. Even if each dinner customer brings in $200-500 of revenue, the amount of manual labor is so huge that these restaurants can only make it work by using unpaid interns. I wouldn’t have guessed that.
Imagine you're a restaurant wanting to compete in the scene and looking to pay your employees fairly. You can't price your menu at double the competition, so you need to charge the same $200 per guest as other Michelin-hopefuls.
But your margin is cut in half by your fair labour practices and you're bleeding money by the table. Where do you make up the difference? If you skimp on ingredients your food won't make the cut. Raise prices? You'll be out of clients and business in a week. Fine china and decor are mandatory. You can't win.
The way to break the cycle is to change the system. Force everyone to play by the rules we agreed on a century ago. Prohibit unpaid labour. Extra hours are paid double and capped at a reasonable 60/week total. Shifts have to be separated by 12 hours minimum. Two days off per week minimum. Heavy, heavy fines for anyone breaking labour law and jail time for repeat abuser managers/owners. Come down on these practices like teamsters in the early years. Fuck these oppressive, abusive situations. Repeat for construction, fruit picking, whatever other situation forces a person to work their hands to the bone to survive.
I get your sentiment, but I personally think you’re off base here.
You seem to be demonizing the other side a bit and implying they don’t want to help these people.
Is it so hard to believe that some members of society genuinely believe that welfare programs hurt this group rather than help them in the long run?
I’m not asking you to agree with that sentiment - I’m not even saying it’s correct - I’m simply pointing out that many of the people against socialism and communism do genuinely believe that their viewpoints will help these people in the long run.
That's why there's a lot of push from governments for open borders, visa free, easy-emmigration, inviting refugees and migrants, etc. to further drive down local wages and increase demand for real estate, both of which benefit the old money entrenched wealth, business and asset owning class, especially in Europe where this class is a lot bigger and richer than in the US, relative to the wage class. We're basically setting up for Feudalism 2.0 Enhanced Edition.
So all the fancy workers' rights the EU/Nordics are famous for on paper, go out the window when you're a migrant worker on a visa with strings attached, and you find yourself at the mercy of unscrupulous business owners who are experts at skirting employment laws in just the right ways to stay legit, plus the government institutions responsible for regulating this, who know about these practices but turn a blind eye, as instructed by business lobby groups so "the economy can function" (you want your cheap meant, no? or the cheap strawberries? or cheap asparagus?).
I wish we could stop this but it seems like consumers only care about worker abuse until it impacts their wallets and realize they need to pay more for the stuff they've been conditioned to get for cheap their whole lives.
That doesn't make it right however.
No, you are thinking rich countries in general.
> open borders ... inviting refugees ... fancy workers' rights ... instructed by business lobby groups
You paint it like EU was supposed to have an unified and consistent policy.
Could it be that some political entities are actually supporting both open borders and workers rights, while other side with the business others?
What if there were different political entities with opposing values?
"Speaking" never changes laws in our favor though. Big changes only happen when protests and violence are directed towards the ruling class.
The focus on protesting is a meme from the US New Left combined with modern activist brain; “organizers” think they’re doing something by “organizing” people into getting arrested in public because it worked once for civil rights. But of course it doesn’t do anything and everyone just ignores you.
The most reactionary group in the US isn’t the ruling class (oil company billionaires), it’s the local gentry (car dealership owners), and the one opposed to more universal healthcare is the upper middle class (doctors, lawyers).
Similarly expensive housing is blamed on “developers” but is actually caused by rich retired homeowners.
Quite often they're in another country even.
Because the demand for training is high and the demand for entry level staff low. See also acting, the arts in general, publishing. One alternative is the system the US uses for union work in the building trades where you can get trainee work if you are related to someone in the union.
But what about the red hot jobs market and the workers' shortage, everyone's been talking about?
It seems like this is an irrational industry you go into for aesthetic reasons rather than a normal job.
If people want to spend years of their life doing unpaid labor so they can get high status badly paid work those are their own choices. Seems like a poor choice to me but adults are free to make stupid choices in many areas.
It’s a consequence of high labour costs, high minimum wage, and government regulations on employment terms.
What happens then is that wages between 0 and minimum wage are floored to zero.
Yes, I understand that people who refuse to do the kinds of jobs working class people do don’t do working class jobs, even part time, or over the summer to earn money.
Given that and the factors you mentioned Italians, French and Spanish particularly either do internships as part of their studies as a gatekeeping exercise to show they can afford to work without pay and are of the right class, or they go actual where entry level pay is bad but existent before going home.
When one of my college friends went to Paris to do the internship he was doing as part of his degree that was unpaid. The difference between him and the French students doing their stage was that he was working at McDonalds as well to support himself.
That would be a great way to ensure access to low level jobs is gated by social class, yes. If demand for jobs greatly exceeds supply and you have to pay them as well you can demand a lot of side bribes or raise the minimum qualifications until you keep out the wrong sort of people. Minimum qualifications a Master’s, or you have to come from the right school, that sort of thing. Are you related to anyone who could be useful?
That’s why supply and demand is always relevant.
> After all this is why the concept of minimum wage (however bad it is, it is still greater than zero) exists, no? Why doesn’t it apply to interns?
Because no one gives a crap about social climbers who are transparently trying to get into a job because it has high social status. We don’t make trying to make a living as an artist illegal either. People only have so much ability to care and they mostly do not choose to care about who goes into industries that are for the children of people with money or occasionally those who have very supportive spouses.
Mostly issue is why would business accept a person for internship if they had to pay when other alternative would be to pay same or tiny bit more for someone with that experience already and possibly immediately long term employment.
I think if it's a document you sign, it's not an "informal agreement."
> His spokesperson said Redzepi had been open about the issue and participated in “hundreds of hours of counseling”
I just vomited in my mouth a little.
Actually, independent of the content: this article is Journalism as it's supposed to be practiced. Good work, Imogen West-Knights!
Although the article is great journalism.