A large part of the hospitality industry is ravaged, thanks to the pandemic and its fallout. Even spots that pivoted through the initial crisis were soon suffocated by labor shortages or a mucked-up supply chain. But restaurants were struggling with losses in staffing, momentum and revenue long before 2020. The pandemic merely made obvious the archaic and limited nature of our gerbil wheel of a business model.
Even so, Chef & the Farmer closed, in large part because the inefficiencies, stress and fatigue brought by an unsustainable business model became impossible to ignore. Our industry needs to evolve or else more full-service, cuisine-driven restaurants like mine will languish their way to extinction.
Chef & the Farmer belonged to a corner of the industry where carrot dishes cost $16 and menus were printed nightly because said carrots were reimagined by a tweezer-bedecked wizard on a whim. We didn’t just serve cocktails, coffee and wine — we had a “beverage program,” and a director to oversee it. From the outside, our candlelit symphony of sophisticated servers, sommeliers and hosts looked just as we intended, bearing knowing smiles as they made round trips to the kitchen to fetch magic from the wizard herself.
But while guests sipped and savored their painstakingly created foodie fever dreams, the people behind the scenes got slammed — or, to apply some of the other words we used to describe our experience as we put together yours, we got crushed, pummeled and murdered.
Paper-thin margins make a career in this industry either a distinct choice or a dead end. Restaurateurs depend on alcohol sales to pay a large portion of our staff, and we rely largely on our guests’ tips to pay everyone else. Even when sales couldn’t be better, many independently owned restaurants have to overwork salaried employees and underpay hourly ones. It’s all but impossible to offer meaningful benefits like health insurance or paid leave. That’s perhaps why you so rarely hear a parent say: “You should get into the restaurant business. It looks like a nice life.”
Why are our margins so small? For starters, several people spent hours transforming in-a-husk corn into that artfully plated smoked corn agnolotti. Many restaurants have prep cooks, butchers, sous chefs, bakers, managers and custodians who spend hours on the clock before the restaurant opens and begins taking in revenue.
Restaurants also require expensive specialized equipment. Our staff needs to cook on a range, fry in a fryer and do dishes in the dish pit. None of that is possible without a robust hood system. Pricey equipment, even pricier infrastructure, all the small things (plates, linens, flatware, pots and pans) and the not-so-small things (tables, chairs, light fixtures and signs) turn dinner into an experience worth remembering. A restaurant is a hefty investment that looks terrible on paper — but when we have a spitfire talent at the helm, we convince ourselves that it just might work.
I’m not the first to recognize the fallacies of our business model. Fast food, counter service and drive-throughs proliferate for a reason. Think about your region’s most noteworthy chef, the one with a James Beard Award and a custom apron. I bet at a certain point, after being anointed a creative genius by diners and journalists, your favorite magician decided to pull a burger joint, a taco shop or a fried chicken shack out of his or her toque.
