Saturday, February 25, 2023

Opinion Today: Worry less about your Wagyu and more about the person serving it to you

We care about what we eat. Why can't we do the same for those who prepare our food?

Even for those of us who don't treat hunting restaurant reservations as a sport, we must stomach the truth that we are supporting a certain type of work environment every time we decide where to dine.

James Estrin/The New York Times

By Robyn Tse

I was just a college kid when I knocked on the back door of ABC Kitchen in New York, but the folks there still accepted me and my set of cheap knives. It was my first experience working with people who devoted their lives to serving others — who loved their work so much that they dedicated their waking hours to feeding strangers, who poured their passion and love for the craft onto each plate that they set down on the "hot pass" for the servers to pick up, working when everyone else was playing, coming home each night too tired to feed themselves but waking up every morning to do it all again.

I fell in love with the industry.

By the time I left Noma, the Copenhagen fine-dining temple considered by many the best restaurant in the world, in 2015, I had internalized the mantra that everything we did was for our guests. But I couldn't help wondering why catering to them needed to come at the expense of our team's welfare and dignity, a cruel trade-off I wrote about in a guest essay this week.

I had seen enough burns and burnouts, and decided I didn't want to handle the heat anymore. I pivoted to the business side of food in pursuit of fewer open flames in the work environment: I joined a management consulting firm, a restaurant start-up, a food tech venture capital firm and a hospitality investment group. Along the way, I had more conversations in the office about the importance of fostering a great work culture and taking care of a team's mental health.

But while these management concepts are commonly discussed in white-collar workplaces, they are just starting to migrate to professional kitchens. And as hard as I've tried to stay away, I'll be heading back to the industry after I graduate from business school this year, determined to help make it a better place. As I write in my essay, we should apply the same level of scrutiny that we give to the food on our plates to the treatment of the people who serve it to us. The key ingredient to a phenomenal dining experience should be a high-quality workplace environment for those bringing your meal to life.

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