My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore

April 24, 2020 9:55 AM

SLNYTimes essay by Gabrielle Hamilton Hamilton is a great writer, and this brought tears to my eyes. It has the Covid tag, so may be free.

The girl who called about brunch the first day we were closed probably lives there. She is used to having an Uber driver pick her up exactly where she stands at any hour of the day, a gel mani-pedi every two weeks and award-winning Thai food delivered to her door by a guy who braved the sleet, having attached oven mitts to his bicycle handlebars to keep his hands warm. But I know she would be outraged if charged $28 for a Bloody Mary.

posted by mumimor (64 comments total)

Pretty much paywalled, really.
posted by hippybear at 10:12 AM on April 24, 2020

Thank you.
posted by hippybear at 10:16 AM on April 24, 2020

That was a powerful read. Very much an ode to the restaurant industry and everything that is going on right now. Thank you for sharing that.
posted by Fizz at 10:30 AM on April 24, 2020 [6 favorites]

This was a lovely read, and it echoes many of the thoughts I've been having about local restaurants in my small town that I've been worrying about since this all began. I'm going out of my way to order take-out (even more than I might have eaten out before) to support them, and I really need all this to just come back to how it was before when all this ends.

I know that isn't going to happen, but that's the ideal. This whole situation for restaurants has been really horrible.

The author wonders if places like hers even matter anymore. They do!
posted by hippybear at 10:39 AM on April 24, 2020 [4 favorites]

So many parts of this, particularly near the end, show such an unbelievably refreshing attitude of solidarity towards others, and of disgust at the suggestion that the what is to be valued about a restaurant would be preserved in a web based takeout service with minimal human contact.

This is the article I needed to read.
posted by patrickdbyers at 10:42 AM on April 24, 2020 [30 favorites]

Big-name chefs need to do more for the employees they laid off (sorry I'm cooking right now, but this seems like a good voice to add without diving into profesh cook twitter to contextualise the other side of the arguments)
posted by The River Ivel at 10:53 AM on April 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

We need to abolish rent.

There is a possible future out there where the next pandemic is boring. Where we close up shop for a few weeks or months, sit it out and when it's time to come back to work, we clean out the cupboards, dust everything off and start up again, just like that. It really doesn't need to be like this.
posted by mhoye at 10:54 AM on April 24, 2020 [47 favorites]

We need to abolish rent.
One of the many things I struggled with explaining in my online class today, is how rent-seeking is a pest on our age. I think I could have easily explained it in a classroom Q&A, but when things are on record there are right-wing crazies ready to complain to the dean...
posted by mumimor at 10:59 AM on April 24, 2020 [25 favorites]

Wow. That is great writing.
Thanks for posting.
posted by bookmammal at 11:00 AM on April 24, 2020

Paul the Apostle said "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." If your wealth derives from owning things and letting other people use them, well, in the words of Dire Straits, "That ain't workin'."
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:02 AM on April 24, 2020 [20 favorites]

Working in sales tax, I keep getting tripped up by her admitting to raiding the sales tax collected to muster up payroll. Sure, it sounds like it was her last stitch of liquidity. But it’s a cardinal rule that anything collected as tax goes to the government. That’s why it’s in a separate account. Its not tax avoidance, or even tax fraud. It’s impersonating a state agency and defrauding your customers bad.

Not that I think she made the wrong choice. But the first rule of fraud is not to publish that fact in the New York Times.
posted by politikitty at 11:33 AM on April 24, 2020 [5 favorites]

Working in sales tax, I keep getting tripped up by her admitting to raiding the sales tax collected to muster up payroll. Sure, it sounds like it was her last stitch of liquidity. But it’s a cardinal rule that anything collected as tax goes to the government. That’s why it’s in a separate account. Its not tax avoidance, or even tax fraud. It’s impersonating a state agency and defrauding your customers bad.

I didn't even notice that, because here, everyone has been allowed to wait with the sales tax till the crisis is over. It's a state loan. Does anyone know what applies in NY?
posted by mumimor at 11:43 AM on April 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

I am in awe of her writing and spirit. That was poetic, gut-wrenching, so deeply human and heartfelt.
posted by treepour at 11:53 AM on April 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

I maybe resent a little her attempt to retcon the history of Prune opening. The economic shifts of the East Village have distinct waves, and Prune fits in with places like 71 Clinton, both of which were distinct sort of beacheads in an already vibrant neighborhood eating scene (I very much remember walking home past 71 Clinton and thinking "oh, so we're doing $20 Hanger Steak now are we?" and worrying about my rent) - believe me, Prune stood out like a sore thumb relative to Boca Chica a half block away. All the things she laments about today she was just an early stage symptom of. She's been shilling the 'we're just a neighborhood restaurant' forever. I don't necessarily mind that someone decided they wanted plant the foodie flag in the EV (I ate at WD-50 tons) but let's save the nostalgia for places like Ci Vediamo or Les Amis et Les Deux Lapins.
posted by 99_ at 11:54 AM on April 24, 2020 [22 favorites]

I work at a university with a culinary degree program (BS, MS, PhD), and this really resonates with me about higher ed, too:

Everybody’s saying that restaurants won’t make it back, that we won’t survive. I imagine this is at least partly true: Not all of us will make it, and not all of us will perish.

Aside from my emotional response, she's a really good writer. I hope she picks up a keyboard now that she has temporarily laid down her knife & ladle: i would like to read more of her words.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:56 AM on April 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

believe me, Prune stood out like a sore thumb relative to Boca Chica a half block away. All the things she laments about today she was just an early stage symptom of

I favorited your comment for balance against the hagiographic tone here, but if you were going to choose an initial, starter culture (a-la bread, ....I prefer this than "disease/symptom"), for a non-greedy gentrification that had some chance of not overtaking the neighborhood, I'd choose Gabi and her model over pretty much anyone......
posted by lalochezia at 12:02 PM on April 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

If you like Hamilton's writing and haven't read her book Blood, Bones, and Butter yet, you should.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:05 PM on April 24, 2020 [17 favorites]

Some staff members remained behind to eat with one another, spending their money in house.

This was the one thing that kinda bothered me, reminding me of working as a dishwasher and busser in my earlier years. Can't put my finger on it, exactly, but buying a meal where I worked felt a bit like being given scrip to spend at the company store, esp. given the wages. It's probably a better piece from the boss end of the perspective.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:11 PM on April 24, 2020 [20 favorites]

for a non-greedy gentrification that had some chance of not overtaking the neighborhood, I'd choose Gabi and her model over pretty much anyone

I never ate there and never met her, so grains of salt and all. My opinion is derived from third-hand gossip (Eater adjancent and school parent sort of stuff, both of which are always highly suspect), though none of made me positively inclined. Her statement on Ken Friedman certainly didn't encourage me to revisit my lazily formed bias.
posted by 99_ at 12:15 PM on April 24, 2020

That was very moving. And echos many of our fears and concerns over our small business right now.
posted by Everyone Expects The Spanish Influenza at 12:18 PM on April 24, 2020

Hamilton's view faults the wrong enemies (the "probably Manhattanite" urban caller, the fetishistic diners) and writes off/romanticizes technology as if the kitchen itself is not intrinsically technological.

The idea of wanting an Italian-style social setting at a restaurant (patronized by artists and and imagined working class who eats at a neighborhood diner on off hours) is also laden with class and racial privilege. It's a valuable ideal, but it's not one that is free of its own cultural and social capital--the rustic artisan. In a capitalist world, rusticism is class! Rustic things are more expensive than the mass produced. And the social-cultural capital is here reinforced by Hamilton's argument benefits from being given voice by the NYTimes.

I've read her cookbook and seen some of her in interviews, and Prune itself is de facto a crafted image that puts forth a privileged cooking-as-idyllic-culture without examining its own positionality while leveling class-like criticisms of gentrification, changing social relations, etc.

And I'm saying this as someone who went to Prune, twice, to see what the fuss was all about. I mean, another of their claims to fame was that Hillary Clinton ate there. The cooking was amazing. But the political economy of restaurant industry and how managers or head chefs think about their turf is a separate issue. The litmus test I think is whether a chef is for labor unions, and that discussion is conveniently omitted in favor of not wanting to perform means-testing between the 23-yo employee who has his apartment and the employee who has a family and rent to pay.
posted by polymodus at 12:28 PM on April 24, 2020 [25 favorites]

wait with the sales tax till the crisis is over. It's a state loan

In a crisis there’s often relief to pay collected sales tax. But that’s not license to use the collected sales tax for other purposes. It’s relief from the administrative burdens of filing and remitting those taxes until things are up and running again.

It’s like saying it’s not embezzlement if you pay it back before they find out. It might be common, but still not legal. Most states don’t have a very aggressive audit wing for taxes (much like our currently gutted IRS), but NY is not one of those states. So while I would probably do the same, I would absolutely not tell people about it.
posted by politikitty at 12:29 PM on April 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

She packed Ziploc bags of nuts, rice, pasta, cans of curry paste and cartons of eggs, while music played from her cellphone tucked into a plastic quart container — an old line-cook trick for amplifying sound.

Tricks for amplifying sound from a cell phone described as old... I still think of cell phones, especially those that capable of playing music as new.

Now I feel old.
posted by Fukiyama at 12:37 PM on April 24, 2020 [11 favorites]

The idea of wanting an Italian-style social setting at a restaurant (patronized by artists and and imagined working class who eats at a neighborhood diner on off hours) is also laden with class and racial privilege. It's a valuable ideal, but it's not one that is free of its own cultural and social capital--the rustic artisan.

This is a much better phrasing of what rubbed me wrong about Prune. And, moreso, there were places in the East Village where this was happening already - 7A, Yaffa, Sidewalk (which I'll admit I hated), Life, Odessa, Kiev, Velselka. But none of them fit with embedded style and cultural markers of this narrative. Some times the artists & working class people in your neighborhood don't always conform to your preconceptions.
posted by 99_ at 12:40 PM on April 24, 2020 [3 favorites]

Some staff members remained behind to eat with one another, spending their money in house.

Not in the industry (well a few months on a pizza line long ago) but agreeing with They sucked his brains out! and confused, I thought restaurants fed their employees, maybe not full fancy preparation with white table cloth but I've seen some through a window sitting around before open chowing down.

But how is the entire world not going to change significantly? A lot of stuff is not coming back, and not the way it ever was... will there be required 6 foot spacing everywhere? Some restaurants had 3 tables in a gap that size. Can a restaurant work economically reducing the floor from 100 to 20/30 patrons?

Hopping for an incredibly effective vaccine that everyone gets but even then there's going to be a lot of nervous folks both epidemiological and financial, and looking at yeast being scarcer than TP, many discover baking isn't actually an esoteric mystery.
posted by sammyo at 1:40 PM on April 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

Big-name chefs need to do more for the employees they laid off

Seattle's Tom Douglas dropped almost everyone off his payrolls quickly, and did not give those being let go any time to prepare. When the lockdown is over, I hope we in Seattle and those who visit the city remember what he did to his people.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:40 PM on April 24, 2020 [21 favorites]

All the pearl clutching about gentrification misses the point: this was a person who created something and now has to decide if it's worth it to keep going. The restaurant business has gotten harder over the years as costs rose, while diners resisted paying more for the experience of eating out. Now, restaurants are taking a beating with the COVID restrictions with very little support. The PPP loans, for example aren't going to help much. How do you pay a staff when you're not even allowed to open?

Restaurant owners, just like after 9/11, just like through the recession, are going to do this on their own.
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:03 PM on April 24, 2020 [14 favorites]

Yes, re Tom Douglas! I was shocked how quick he threw his people out on the street. I'm never eating at one of his restaurants again if he does manage to reopen after this. And I hope he won't. He made his name and his riches off Seattle and the second the going got tough for the city he was the first to throw in the towel.
posted by potrzebie at 2:29 PM on April 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

Big-name chefs need to do more for the employees they laid off

David Chang, called out in that Eater article, opened up a Momofuku employee relief fund on March 20 (the day of NY's shutdown order) and is running a pretty massive silent auction fundraiser for it right now.

Also re: the sales tax, Hamilton said "If I triaged the collected sales tax that was sitting in its own dedicated savings account and left unpaid the stack of vendor invoices, I could fully cover this one last week of payroll..." Admittedly, that's not 100% clear (since it says "and" rather than "but"), but it at least sounds like the opposite to me. Maybe a tiny bit of care before suggesting a person is committing tax fraud? Even if on the grounds that most people are not dumb enough to admit in NYT articles that they're in the middle of doing so?
posted by praemunire at 3:45 PM on April 24, 2020 [6 favorites]

It's a well-written and heartfelt piece, but like most NYT articles, it plays on some level to a well-off audience, people who are able to work from home and who can usually afford to patronize higher-end restaurants, miss doing so, and so there's a fair bit of unspoken privilege in the undercurrent, in that respect. Possible tax evasion is just a sliver of it, really. Maybe this is one angle of the eclipse of the chef-as-hero or -as-celebrity, or the epidemic will lead more people to get a first-hand sense of how service work is compensated, and "foodie culture" will evolve to deal with how people's habits and desires change, in response to that.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:07 PM on April 24, 2020 [7 favorites]

The idea of wanting an Italian-style social setting at a restaurant (patronized by artists and and imagined working class who eats at a neighborhood diner on off hours) is also laden with class and racial privilege.

This comment stuck in my craw all afternoon. I think it's easy to point fingers and call people out on issues like this. It's a lot more difficult to point out a better way forward when it comes to opening a restaurant. People open restaurants at a very high personal risk to themselves. The business in very hard. Margins are laughably thin, the hours are brutal, the amount of responsibility it much higher than most people would be willing to dedicate to their jobs. In fact, Hamilton makes this point in the article you all just read. She didn't open Prune out of a misguided sense of "privilege", she opened Prune because she believed it should exist - that people would appreciate it.

It strikes me as deeply unfair to kick someone who is clearly been knocked down. Especially when that person is writing to communicate the deep struggle they are experiencing. And moreover, this isn't just her experience. No fewer than three restaurant owning friends sent me this article in the last 24 hours.

We're in a moment where the hard work of many people is evaporating in front of their very eyes - and worse, no one seems to be interested in helping. Maybe we can hold off on the speeches about who deserved to open a restaurant in what neighborhood for better times.
posted by elwoodwiles at 5:23 PM on April 24, 2020 [39 favorites]

Re:sales tax. I considered that possibility except later she states “For sales taxes, liquor invoices and impending rent, I hoped to apply for a modest line of credit to float me through this crisis.”

Which is a pretty clear indication she did not have the funds to remit the already collected sales taxes. I’m not surprised she put it in a bucket with other unpaid expenses that can take a backseat to wages. But unlike regular debt, or even income tax, collected sales taxes are not property of the restaurant. Most people don’t actually understand that distinction.
posted by politikitty at 5:31 PM on April 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yeah I also have a business I’ve put everything into over the last 12 years only to see it evaporate completely and how and when we can start again is extremely unclear. I thought this really covered a lot of my idealistic feelings of why we started in the first place and was realistic about re-assessing the spots where it doesn’t work and trying to integrate that into however we move forward. I don’t run a restaurant and don’t live in NYC but this resonated with me a lot. I’m sure it’s not, and she’s not, perfect, but it was a good read for me today.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 5:43 PM on April 24, 2020 [11 favorites]

I had two very distinct and different responses to this article:

1) I respect restaurateurs. It's a brutal business and people do it because they love it and because they love the people they serve. I can't imagine giving my life and my savings, such as they are, to such a high-wire act, and I respect those who do the way I respect poets and musicians and public elementary school teachers.

2) But the "good old days of 1999 New York when chickens crowed on my block" stuff is obnoxious, and it goes on too long at the end of this. Whenever you were young and in love was always A Simpler Time before Gentrification or whatever ruined everything. If you want me to mourn for a lost New York I'd rather read Edith Wharton.
posted by sy at 6:10 PM on April 24, 2020 [7 favorites]

Which is a pretty clear indication she did not have the funds to remit the already collected sales taxes.

Ah, no: if she knew a loan was coming to cover the taxes, then she could use the cash on hand for the immediate needs she was obviously facing (like payroll). Whereas, if not...
posted by praemunire at 7:13 PM on April 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

Some staff members remained behind to eat with one another, spending their money in house.

This was the one thing that kinda bothered me, reminding me of working as a dishwasher and busser in my earlier years. Can't put my finger on it, exactly, but buying a meal where I worked felt a bit like being given scrip to spend at the company store

But maybe it was a gesture of loyalty to the restaurant they enjoyed working in, and a goodbye to that "family"? And they have to spend money to eat anywhere anyway, so why not keep it in-house if they damn well feel like it? Nobody forced them to stay there and eat, geez.

Anybody who hasn't worked in a restaurant at some point: Are you aware at all of how hard restaurant work is, and how horrible some places are to work? Do you have any inkling how grateful employees can be to find a restaurant that doesn't suck to work at - where the boss really appreciates the shit you do day in and day out?

I'm no apologist for the restaurant business in general or the author specifically, but I'm flabbergasted at how eager some folks here are to interpret the article in the worst possible light.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:37 PM on April 24, 2020 [35 favorites]

California is specifically letting businesses use up to $50,000 as collected taxes and treat it as a bridge loan.

I really loved this piece. It was also a good contrast to some of the articles heaping too much praise on some businesses justifying risky behavior to generate meager revenue.

But I am also one of those reading from the perspective of as a (non-restaurant) small business owner.
posted by jimw at 9:46 PM on April 24, 2020 [5 favorites]

Nobody forced them to stay there and eat, geez.

I don't know if you've ever worked in service, but I honestly don't recall ever getting the kind of shift break that would have let me easily leave the restaurant and find somewhere else to go eat an inexpensive meal, that I'd have been able to afford on minimum wage.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:09 PM on April 24, 2020 [3 favorites]

I have indeed worked in multiple restaurants - some I couldn't wait to walk away from and other places I wanted to stick around a bit and say goodbye to people I'd enjoyed working with.

Claiming it was a shift break is egregiously misreading the article, which explicitly states they had just gotten laid off. "After the meeting ... Some staff members [who were explicitly not working the last shift] remained behind to eat with one another".

Whatever your own service experiences were, that article doesn't seem to be about a restaurant where the staff was dissatisfied.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:25 PM on April 24, 2020 [13 favorites]

They might as well eat with people the already shared exposure with, given that this was a sudden shutdown due to pandemic.
posted by clew at 11:51 PM on April 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

We need to abolish rent.
One of the many things I struggled with explaining in my online class today, is how rent-seeking is a pest on our age. I think I could have easily explained it in a classroom Q&A, but when things are on record there are right-wing crazies ready to complain to the dean...

If your ideas are good, you should not fear criticism. If they are bad, you should welcome criticism, and so improve them.

I don't quite understand how abolishing rent on commercial space would work. Of the few would-be restaurateurs I've known, few to none would have been able to buy outright or even mortgage the space necessary for the establishment.

So - if not the restaurateur, who would be building these rent-free commercial spaces? How would they be allocated, who chooses which joint gets this rent-free space? Would they be subject to real estate taxes (just another form of rent)? If restaurants, would the equipment (often rented in our current world) also be rent free, and if so, who would provide said equipment? Are there examples of this having been tried successfully? (Even Cuba charges business owners rent.)
posted by BWA at 4:43 AM on April 25, 2020 [7 favorites]

I don't quite understand how abolishing rent on commercial space would work.

I don't imagine we should abolish rent, but we should make rent-seeking as a main source of income very difficult, and tie the rents to the real costs + a fair income. What is happening in some cities all over the world is speculative rent-seeking and it makes life for most people intolerable. It also makes the cities less functional from an economic point of view: if normal workers can't afford to live in the city, and normal services can't can't afford to run without extreme exploitation of those workers, your city will be vulnerable to stuff like pandemics and economic crashes.

In Copenhagen, rents have been over the roof because of airbnb, and they have instantly fallen to a more fair level after the virus. I hope when the future arrives there will be a much stronger restriction on airbnb - so people can't have a sneaky "hotel" of 20 or more little apartments that they let out through the service. In the same way, it should be limited how many big chains can operate in an area, blocking out small businesses including restaurants. There can be a market, but it should be a regulated market.

I'm not entirely against some level of gentrification. As someone who has lived in a real slum, I cannot find the romance. But there is a big bracket between roosters on the rooftops, mildew in your bedroom and no heating, and then Times Square. At the Times Square level, the city has been reduced to an outdoor shopping mall, servicing the suburbs, and in the case of NYC, the international elites. Many of the famous restaurants in Manhattan only cater for that elite, they are financed by that elite, and they depend on workers who are underpaid and live in the boroughs. But that is not Prune. Gabrielle Hamilton is famous and on Netflix, but she is not doing what David Chang is doing (no offense to David Chang).

I lived in Manhatten in the -90's and I can remember the energy and romance of that period in time. But it was already disappearing, and in many ways it was for the better. One of my friends in the East Village had a landlord who set fire to her apartment, both to collect the insurance and to get her out so he could raise the rent. Nobody wants to go back to that, I think?

In TFA, Hamilton mentions how the US wage system is unfair, because it is dependent on tipping. Here in Europe, every country has some form of regulation that means everyone has a living wage and healthcare. The actual systems are different between countries. Still, there are restaurants! They are more expensive than in the US, and people eat out a bit less, but at the end of the day, there is a safe system. You cannot compare René Redzepi with any US celebrity chef, because his staff is not going to be without income or healthcare in this time. In the US, I think it would be great if the Corona crisis could lead to a re-think of the wage structure.

Back in the very old days there was a thing in West Berlin, where an investor could build an apartment building and get very favorable tax conditions if he kept the apartments at a certain size, and kept the rent at a certain level. Then after 20 years, he would be free to do as he liked with the property (though existing renters had protections). That meant that there was an incentive to build high quality housing as a pension scheme for middle class business owners, including restaurateurs. Source: I have designed such a building and it is there, but I won't tell you where because I was young and unexperienced... The apartments are good, though. I think the program has ended, but it was a good way of balancing between private enterprise and public good.

About teaching controversies: I've been fired from a job I loved and was proud of partly because someone was able to abuse complaints that weren't even legally filed (and the student was horrified to learn that her opinion was used in that way). I'm not experimenting ever again. Sorry.
posted by mumimor at 5:54 AM on April 25, 2020 [25 favorites]

but I'm flabbergasted at how eager some folks here are to interpret the article in the worst possible light.

Really? That's Metafilter's specialty.
posted by averageamateur at 9:26 AM on April 25, 2020 [18 favorites]

I guess it's weird to me that so many people would be so willing to be credulous about what is basically an op-ed in the NYT.
posted by 99_ at 9:48 AM on April 25, 2020

This article made me cry. I’m sure nobody’s perfect, and I’m not from NYC so I can’t weigh in on the relative merits of Prune in the East Village versus some other displaced/under-resourced venture. But Gabrielle Hamilton built that place, and made it an extension of herself. She’s stayed in business and made a life for herself and her employees far longer than many people in the restaurant industry have managed. She now finds herself at sea, like so many other people, and she wonders if this is the end of a thing she’s spent more than half her life building and maintaining. She’s a middle aged woman with dependents, debts, no health insurance, no clear way forward. My heart goes out to her. That’s it.
posted by little mouth at 10:50 AM on April 25, 2020 [20 favorites]

Claiming it was a shift break is egregiously misreading the article, which explicitly states they had just gotten laid off.

To be clear, I am not claiming it was a shift break, but I am expressing why I felt uncomfortable about people getting fired, who are being charged for a meal at that moment by the same person firing them and why I felt that expressed a position of privilege, coming from that same person, writing to a largely well-off audience that patronizes high-end restaurants.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:54 PM on April 25, 2020 [5 favorites]

I honestly don't recall ever getting the kind of shift break that would have let me easily leave the restaurant and find somewhere else to go eat an inexpensive meal

And now I'm done, because I've said everything I feel like saying about this article.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:56 PM on April 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

Only once was I on-staff at a restaurant on its closing day. Tex Mex went out of style. I’d been there for almost five years. First as a waiter, then into bartender, then back to the floor again. We couldn’t bear to leave that last day. When Hamilton wrote of that final service, I remembered ambling around aimlessly, trying to remember to grab my shoes, extra aprons, and tidying up. I don’t know why I wanted to tidy up. And yeah, we paid for our meals. We insisted and the owner gave in and said yeah, but he applied employee discount and comped the drinks and desserts. I’m sorry that the places you worked at, They sucked his brains out!, didn’t have that kind of camaraderie. . . but we did. So no need for you to feel uncomfortable for us, okay?
posted by lemon_icing at 2:20 PM on April 25, 2020 [11 favorites]

I was only saying why charging people for a last meal when they are getting fired made me feel uncomfortable, relating that from my own perspective. I honestly don't see why pointing that out should have been a problem. You definitely don't see things the same way, and that's perfectly fine, as well.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:28 PM on April 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

Prune itself is de facto a crafted image that puts forth a privileged cooking-as-idyllic-culture without examining its own positionality while leveling class-like criticisms of gentrification, changing social relations, etc.

Ma'am, this is a Wendys.

-----

We need to abolish rent. [etc.]

This is a derail, but this is one issue where the replies always take the form of, "I don't personally know how this could work (or I have an interest in it not working) so it must be impossible." Rent is universally seen as an instrument of cruelty and exploitation (how many Russian novels would have gone unwritten without it!) We are a creative and industrious species. I'm certain we can figure this out.
posted by klanawa at 10:56 PM on April 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

"I don't personally know how this could work (or I have an interest in it not working) so it must be impossible."

Suddenly critical thinking is bad?

Nobody has said this is impossible. It sounds great! Free housing! Awesome! No more slum
Lords. Great.

It is, given how the entire world currently works, highly improbable. And it’s up to the people who suggest it to explain. That’s how these things work.

I mean, I can say “We should invent the matter transporter!” And it’s pretty reasonable for everyone to ask, “sure, but how?”

And it’s unreasonable for me to reply “Use your imaginations!” Or to say “Clearly you are in the pockets of Big Use Your Legs To Travel!”

Nobody has explained in any detailed way how this will work. Just sort of vague generalities that just reveal more and more endless “hows.”

The slogan “abolish rent!” is one of those dramatic leftist applause lines we see every other week here, that when the cheering settles nobody has figured out out how to do. Not without some magical total reordering of world society. Which also nobody has figured out how to do all that reliably.

And where to draw the line? My 77year old mother-in-laws only income right now (Well, she’s not charging rent during the pandemic) other than social security is a rental property. My god. She’s evil! Do we string her up in the care facility? Or drag her out of there first?

And the idea that renting things you own to other people is an inherent evil or not “work” is pretty god damned absolutist and silly. So car, bike, canoe, partY tent rentals are evil? Or not work? Really? I ran a bike rental for a while. It’s a fuck ton of work.

And yes. I’m sure there all sorts of qualifiers and ethical exceptions to the “slogan” and what everyone really meant was homes and blah blah blah. If that’s what you have to after every slogan is retreat into endless details or evasions. Well. That is sort of the problem, isn’t it?
posted by Everyone Expects The Spanish Influenza at 12:32 AM on April 26, 2020 [10 favorites]

Nthing what a great read, but some of the comments here... Let's not do nuance, just be ungenerous and take every opportunity to drag out favorite arguments.
posted by blue shadows at 12:59 AM on April 26, 2020 [5 favorites]

I think some of the writing was nice, but I found it bothersome in a particular way that some of us have pointed out in a better way than I will.

For me, reading the term "waterboarding" (a technique used specifically on people that look like me) as a literary technique to evoke how tough it is to be overwhelmed by the concerns of your own employees (among others)... that was the moment I knew I was in for an ode to a specific type of life in NYC that I'll never know.

Btw, I grew up in Jersey—not too far away from all of this, but very far away from it in a sense.
posted by el gran combo at 1:43 AM on April 26, 2020 [4 favorites]

Thank you.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:51 AM on April 26, 2020

Nthing what a great read, but some of the comments here... Let's not do nuance, just be ungenerous and take every opportunity to drag out favorite arguments.

That's a little uncharitable. She talked about 'her' restaurant repeatedly, and uses 'I' like two dozen times in the conclusion of the essay without ever mentioning her staff. She owns the place, fine, she has the right. And I have the right to just look at her like another affluent (for all her handwringing about her the finances of the business, I'm willing to bet my stimulus check her personal balance sheet is comfortable) white woman with two best selling books, at least one broadcast deal, and the ability to get an entirely sympathetic, self-penned essay published in the New York Times and I don't need to told I'm hobbyhorsing by pointing out at the very least someone there could have said 'maybe a sidebar interview with one of the staff members?'
posted by 99_ at 12:48 PM on April 26, 2020 [4 favorites]

But to me _99, it sounds more like you had, as you alluded to, a friend or friend of a friend with a personal grievance against the owner/author and that is coloring your response. I get the class thing but that is a broad brush.Yes, giving more explicit credit to the staff would absolutely be nice at the least, but I still get the impression that she did care for them.This is an eloquent essay that stands in for more than just the restaurant industry at this time.
posted by blue shadows at 1:51 PM on April 26, 2020

She talked about 'her' restaurant repeatedly, and uses 'I' like two dozen times in the conclusion of the essay
It's a personal narrative, for God's sake! About a restaurant she owns and has owned for 20 years.

'maybe a sidebar interview with one of the staff members?'
You've made it very, very, very clear at this point that you think Hamilton is a Bad Person. And, fine, that's a valid opinion to have. But you seem to to be misunderstanding the the kind of piece this is. It's a first-person essay in the Sunday Magazine, where Hamilton has a regular column. It's not a breaking news story. It's not an Op-ed. Personal narratives published by the magazine generally don't have "Counterpoint: The Author of This Essay Is Actually a Shithead" published alongside.
posted by neroli at 2:09 PM on April 26, 2020 [10 favorites]

Some of my disdain stems from publicly available fact that she characterized a deal with Ken Friedman (who in my estimation is the absolute nadir of a deep valley of shitheel chefs and owners) as “As everyone knows, it is a bittersweet truth. Everyone is a better spouse their second time around.”
posted by 99_ at 2:27 PM on April 26, 2020

One of my FB friends posted a link to this article and one of Hamilton’s neighbors (who claims he lives in the same building that Prune occupies and has first hand knowledge of the situation on the ground) laid into this piece VERY hard, which was followed by a number of other people from the neighborhood who seconded the appraisal. I’m not going to rehash the complaints here because it’s secondhand and arguably hearsay, but they raised serious doubts about the restaurant’s supposedly precarious financial situation and, for what it’s worth, I found them to be entirely credible.

In light of that, it’s almost impossible for me to read this as anything but Hamilton using her prodigious writing talents and platform to market herself, Prune and/or other business endeavors as worthy of our support/charity and not just a perspective from a struggling restauranteur. I’ve hesitated to mention this but given the NYT’s cultural reach, I think a skeptical read is entirely fair and probably warranted in this case.
posted by dhammond at 3:36 PM on April 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

The idea of wanting an Italian-style social setting at a restaurant (patronized by artists and and imagined working class who eats at a neighborhood diner on off hours) is also laden with class and racial privilege.

This comment stuck in my craw all afternoon. I think it's easy to point fingers and call people out on issues like this. It's a lot more difficult to point out a better way forward when it comes to opening a restaurant.

Sorry, I flatly think that's a predicable, subtle, classist-fragile and racist defensive response to what I actually wrote. It is not at all controversial in a progressive space to say that restaurants are sites of class and race privilege. Since the author's—who is a restaurant owner with a master's degree in writing getting this piece published in a globally read newspaper (read: social capital)—thesis poses the question of whether artisanal capitalism is worth it, then such a point is apt. My view happens to informed merely as someone who spends time looking up sociology papers on restaurant culture.

The idea that someone is suffering so they're off the hook on structural issues or problematic views, or some degree of interrogation of their ideas rather than merely sympathizing with their suffering, is also a classist reaction. The way to challenge that limiting belief is to ask, well maybe if they consider the sociological or leftist dimension, they would see their struggle quite differently.

BTW according to articles when her first memoirs came out, Prune's lease doesn't expire until 2036.
posted by polymodus at 3:54 PM on April 26, 2020 [5 favorites]

It is not at all controversial in a progressive space to say that restaurants are sites of class and race privilege.
I'm not sure Metafilter is this place, though. This feels like a disconnect between "the room you want" vs. "the room that is". Like, I'm with you on not wanting to take presentation-as-given, but you're fighting an uphill battle against a gradient that's more inclined towards this being warm and comforting. I can't say where the line is between "fighting the good fight" vs. "doing unsavory things to the punchbowl" (it's been a long-fought line and I don't know that we'll ever have an answer), but it feels like this is getting to where people are digging in and it's getting counterproductive.

(that said, I could entirely have a wrong read of things, so grain-of-salt here)
posted by CrystalDave at 4:19 PM on April 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

There's a difference between empathizing with the author's difficulties, and sympathizing with them to the degree that constantly enables classist rhetorical points. This isn't just left-vs-center politics; if the author was inviting a question of "what is socially valuable" in the thesis of the piece, then one shouldn't expect responses to be merely sympathetic ones. To do so is a subtle form of classism. The alternative is a discourse of what's problematic, meaning, warts and all.
posted by polymodus at 4:27 PM on April 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Further meta conversation about this conversation can go to metatalk; people can sympathize with the author or criticize her, there's room for both takes on the article which of course strikes people in different circumstances in different ways.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 4:43 PM on April 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think it's both true that Hamilton is an individual with issues and that her piece speaks eloquently to the heartbreaking (at least to me) concerns of restaurant owners, and small business owners in general.

I feel like I have a weird perspective on this since I am a restaurant-obsessed New Yorker, I have been to hundreds upon hundreds of them in my life here, I grew up less than a mile from Prune, but I have never actually been interested in going there. On the other hand, I hardly every remember books I read but Blood, Bones & Butter, which I read when it first came out, is as vivid to me as anything. I remember just wanting to beg Hamilton not to be so stubborn and make things so hard on herself. She is definitely a character, and not entirely in a good way, but I feel for her.
posted by ferret branca at 8:41 PM on April 26, 2020 [3 favorites]