From the Vaults: Eulogy for the Dining Experience
In 2021 I wrote about what we lost during COVID-19 in the world of food, culture, and community through the lens of Anthony Bourdain and Guy Fieri. Three years later it's Bourdain's birthday, enjoy.
Originally published on Medium in June 2021. We still could not really eat together in a lot of meaningful ways then, so forgive some of the more flowery romanticism. I was, and I suppose still am, in mourning.
I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately. In my rotation of tried and true network television staples two chefs stand out in particular: Anthony Bourdain (rest in peace king) and Guy Fieri. Yes, that Mayor of Flavortown Guy Fieri. Their respective best shows — Bourdain’s Parts Unknown on CNN and Fieri’s Diners, Drive-In’s, and Dives (DD&D) on the Food Network — are spiritual counterparts. Bourdain the salt-and-peppered nihilistic foil to Fieri’s platinum bond eternal optimist. So much so that Bourdain actually actively loathed Fieri, and I’m sure would be deeply disappointed in me for positioning them next to each other in this piece. While their personalities diverge in obvious ways, they both are hosts to shows essentially based around the premise: tracking down really good food (and culture) in unexpected places. If you think about it, DD&D is an almost aggressively wholesome premise. Guy Fieri “drives around America” in his candy coated red corvette, absolutely heaping praise on local small businesses doing food exceptionally well in their given locale. I have seen many episodes of DD&D and I cannot recall an instance where Fieri tries something he doesn’t absolutely adore. He not only heaps praise on the food, but the chefs and cooks as well, often giving a welcome boost of business to small businesses struggling in a notoriously tough industry. I will touch on this more later, but keep in mind how difficult the restaurant industry was even before COVID-19.
In Parts Unknown Bourdain does a variation on this theme; imbuing his lust for incredible food with geopolitics, history, and internationalism. He takes his search beyond the borders of the United States and deploys the powerful cameras of America’s largest news network to highlight stories of not only marginalized businesses, but entire peoples and cultures. You would be remiss to find an episode of Parts Unknown that doesn’t critically examine their chosen locale through some sort of sociopolitical, economic, or historical lens, and always from the street up. The cook is an unabashedly proletarian profession, something Bourdain has highlighted since he first rocketed to fame in his New Yorker article Don’t Eat Before Reading This; which became his New York Times bestseller Kitchen Confidential. His book laid bare the grit and rancor that undergirds the entire service industry apparatus, especially bad in the kitchens of New York where he cut his teeth. He has also made extremely clear that he wouldn’t have things any other way. He adores the dirt and the grime. He embraces the 3am revelry, the misfit service industry family that coagulates between the boards of so many now-empty establishments. It is a meat grinder of an industry, and for people like Tony Bourdain that’s part of its charm.
Between Guy Fieri and Anthony Bourdain they highlight the entirety of what makes the simple, collective experience of good food and drink, shared in good company, so sublime. Of course there is enormous emphasis on the food. The harvesting, preparation, technique, etc. They are, after all, chefs. However as any good chef knows, the actual preparation of a dish is only part of the equation. Once the dish is prepared and thoroughly fawned over, Bourdain and Fieri take their seats. Whether that’s on a short plastic stool in Hanoi with President Obama, a 3 Michelin Star restaurant in Marseilles, or a trailer in Kentucky, the principle remains the same. The actual food makes up only one third of the experience Bourdain, Fieri, and so many others spend their life chasing.
The experience of a good meal is made up of three elements: there is of course the Good Food, but it is vital to not also neglect the two other elements of Good Drink and (arguably most importantly) Good Company. Bourdain and Fieri understand this more than most. In their shows they understand and highlight the art of hospitality, often putting themselves at the whims of their gracious hosts and allowing them to do what they do best. This could mean being welcomed into someone’s home and being served by their family, or it could mean highlighting the role of the professional server in fine dining establishments. No one’s efforts went unseen, Fieri and Bourdain made sure of that.
I mourn the tragic loss of Anthony Bourdain on a regular basis. I also can’t help but think how depressed he would be were he alive today to see the state of the culinary world and the service industry. These experiences that Bourdain spent his entire life devoted to; the culture, the joy, the food, the drink, the song, the laughs, the tears, the anecdotes, the tattoos, the hangovers. All of these joyous ingredients mixed together into a tall cocktail of an evening, that was his vice. It was what he lived for. It was what many of us lived for.
It is with a heavy heart and very little exaggeration that I say that that world is virtually gone now. From street food to fine dining to family dinners, the COVID-19 pandemic and our government’s response (or lack thereof) has eviscerated the restaurant industry. I can only speak to the American perspective, as I have only worked in American restaurants and Bourdain and Fieri were (and are) American chefs. So I think I’m qualified to say that things are really, really fucking bad here.
I live in Seattle, Washington. I was born and raised in the suburbs north of here and have called the city home since 2014. My dad has worked in food and wine my whole life. He cut his teeth in restaurants around Seattle after graduating culinary school before turning to the world of wine. When I was a child in the late nineties he had achieved the position of Sommelier at the Salish Lodge, a hotel and resort you may recognize as Twin Peaks’ Great Northern Hotel. However we lived 45 minutes away from the Salish and he was trying to raise a family, so he took a wine rep position with a wine merchant in Seattle. He did this until he lost his job in 2008 when the recession hit. He found another similar job at a different merchant, and held that job until the company started to go under in 2019. He got a job with another merchant before being laid off when COVID-19 hit. He then worked at a grocery store where he was previously the once-a-week wine steward, now a full time grocery store worker. Only recently has he returned to his job with a wine merchant as the raging virus starts to subside. Being the service industry lifer that he is, he’s never made a ton of money, and what money he has made he’s put right back into the industry he loves so dearly.
When I lived in Seattle before COVID-19 we started a bit of a tradition. About once a month my dad would tell me to look at the restaurants in Seattle and pick one that sounded good and wasn’t too pricey. It could be a new place or just a hole-in-the-wall we had never tried before. I would pick a restaurant, he would pick me up, I would put away my phone, and we would enjoy everything there is to enjoy about a good meal, good drink, and good company. We would talk at length about the food, the drink, the service, the ambience. We would eat and drink generously, and tip even more so. He would drop me off back at my apartment, I would thank him for the meal and tell him I loved him, and we would do it again at a different restaurant the next month.
This became so embedded in our relationship that he once drove down to Portland from Seattle after getting off work just to join me for dinner at a restaurant he had been dying to try, the now closed Pok Pok. I was working in the film industry at the time and shooting a movie down there. The restaurant didn’t take reservations for less than six people and I could not put our name on a list until all members of our party were present, so when he got there we still had to wait about an hour. He was very annoyed, very hungry, and undoubtedly tired. However, we eventually got seated and all was well, the fish sauce wings were worth the wait.
This experience is impossible now. I mourn not only the loss of one of the few remaining bonding traditions with my father, but the loss of an entire industry. Anyone who’s worked in the service industry is familiar with how close the staff of a bar or restaurant can get, and I feel for these families and social bonds as well. Not only are these places of employment \closed, so too is their access denied to potentially vital social bonds of friendship, kinship, and family.
Those bonds and shared passions are what knit together a deeply exploitative, unrewarding industry that takes an enormous physical and mental toll on people. The service industry is one of many industries in the milieu of capitalism that preys specifically on either people’s passion for the job or need for a paycheck to live. This desperation is fully exploited, and we all know that. Many people are lifelong servers or line cooks because it’s an entry level job that they got good at, but the vast majority of service industry lifers are there because they love the craft, literal guts and all.
Right now our government is actively destroying this craft. We are over one full year into a pandemic that locked our cities down, stripped us of social connection, and shuttered our places of employment. We could have paid everyone to stay home, we could have provided small businesses (especially those in the service sector) with direct cash injections to keep the lights on while their doors were closed. Had we done this, we might not have had to say goodbye to so many beloved institutions. This is what they did in New Zealand, and they can attend concerts.
Instead we have a cruel, indifferent government who let us die. We died in the hundreds of thousands and are continuing to do so, and the site of one of the most fundamental human experiences — the joy of the shared meal — is dying with it. I know restaurants are a relatively modern invention, and it’s worth noting that our ability to have these shared meals in the comfort of our own home is also completely foreclosed on. Until very recently, no one in America could have a dinner party with extended family or have a few friends over for a meal and some wine without risking death. It did not have to be this way.
There are so many profoundly, compounding, tragic aspects to this story. Let us not forget that most labor that goes unseen and under-the-table in kitchens is done by undocumented workers, often refugees or immigrants from Latin American countries. They are without employment right now and can’t claim government benefits. This also goes for the millions of restaurants in this country run by immigrant families that are being absolutely crushed right now. Some restaurants have managed to stay open and are doing takeout; both a pale imitation to the dining experience and a vector rapidly being driven by hyper-exploitative gig work. However, many more restaurants have not been able to stay open.
I wrote the first draft of this article in December 2020, when 624 restaurants and bars in Seattle alone had permanently closed due to the COVID-19 shutdown. Nationwide the number was closer to 110,000, with the industry being described as in a state of “freefall.” I again cannot overemphasize how much things did not have to be this way. This is and was an unmitigated disaster perpetuated by a careless government uninterested in helping its people. These are people’s livelihoods, their families, their best friends, their lovers, their homes, oftentimes all at once. A good restaurant is so much more than a place of employment for its workers and so much more than a restaurant for its customers.
It is now June 8th, 2021, the 3rd anniversary of Anthony Bourdain’s death. Things are both looking a lot worse and somewhat better. In May of this year it seemed thousands of restaurants declared that “no one wants to work anymore” ignoring both the astronomical death rate of line cooks during COVID-19 and the historically atrocious wages and working conditions of kitchens. The reality isn’t that no one wants to work, it’s that no one wants to be this exploited anymore. As such, the restaurant industry has faced a rapid reckoning to keep kitchens staffed. All of a sudden — at least in Seattle — restaurants are offering $18/hr starting wages, full benefits, and hiring bonuses. In my 5+ years in the industry this was completely unheard of, and now suddenly it’s the norm. As I am about to temporarily re-enter the industry myself I am of course thrilled by these new labor standards, although unspeakably furious that it took the literal life sacrifice of thousands of line cooks to get there.
Usually at the end of a piece of writing that gets political like this I’ll end with some polemic about what we can do to change things or who we need to be mad at. Obviously be mad at the government, but if I’m being honest I don’t know how people are going to recover. The damage has been done. The government could(and absolutely should) increase aid to small businesses and restaurants, but it’s too little too late for the 110,000 that have already closed permanently.
The service industry is made up of tight bonds and precarious people. Those I worked with in my line cook days were usually battling a few demons at once. Whether it was a criminal record, alcoholism, child support, or some other unspeakable hardship, the restaurant was the equalizer. We provided it with our sweat and labor, it provided us with good food, good drink, good company, and if we were lucky, a meager paycheck.
In an act that wholly embodies the spirit of the industry that I’ve been trying to convey, the only saving grace for the restaurant industry has been its bonds with each other. Particularly, those with means redistributing it to each other. The Mayor of Flavortown Fieri himself has raised over $21 million directly for impacted restaurant workers, because we have our back when no one else does. Some have described this move as doing “more than congress,” and they would be absolutely right.
Despite the best efforts of the Mayor of Flavortown, the situation is still unbearably dire. Unable to actually go out until very recently, I just sat and got stoned and watched these experiences on TV, passively mourning one aspect of a life we no longer had access to through no fault of our own. I can’t help but watch DD&D and think that so many of these restaurants must be closed now. I truly hope Fieri was able to save at least a few of them. If this pandemic response in the United States has taught us anything, it’s that we need to — and can only — rely on each other.
As such, I’m sorry I don’t have a rousing call to action, no Congress member to call. I miss Anthony Bourdain; I miss cooking for my friends and family, I miss running to the grocery store at 1:50am after getting off the night shift to grab the whole line beer before 2am hit, and I miss meals with my dad. I miss good food, good drink, and good company, and you should too.
2024 Epilogue:
It is now three years later, on what would have been Anthony Bourdain’s 68th birthday. I inadvertently celebrated this occasion by finally getting a tattoo of Anthony Bourdain’s chef coat logo last week, ironic not in the least because while I am now back in the service industry I’ve switched teams to the much maligned Front of House (FOH.)
In ways, the situation from 2021 has greatly improved. Restaurants are, to a degree, back. Wages are at a historic high in the industry—with most jobs I see starting people at around $20-$21/hour—yet like all wages today are having trouble keeping pace with inflation. Cooking is better money than it used to be, but the money barely goes further. Shortly after writing my 2021 version of this piece I started working in a Lebanese restaurant in Seattle, Mamnoon, that Bourdain actually visits on his Seattle episode of Parts Unknown. That was probably the best kitchen job I ever had. Tips were pooled between FOH and BOH, so everyone made about $26/hour on a decent night. There was no yelling or room for egos, there was little hierarchy, and oddly enough no drug use to speak of. There was a very kind and enthusiastic chef leading the team through service night after night. All of this was a welcome breath of fresh air to me after years of the more common low pay-high abuse situation we all grew used to in the industry. The chef and team at Mamnoon made it very clear that again, things did not have to be this way. I was happy, and then I moved back to New York.
I finished grad school with references and a degree prestigious in academia yet useless in the brutal world of wage labor. It wasn’t long before I found myself—now over 30, $200,000 in student debt, with the ankle injuries and softness that comes from rapidly onset aging and a few years in an ivory tower—once again donning an apron in the mirror of a cramped kitchen storage area. I had a brief stint at a restaurant in the West Village ran by a deeply condescending and miserable chef who rested on his Eleven Madison Park laurels. I got sick shortly after starting there and had to miss two shifts, they responded by cutting all my shifts for a month. The pandemic and its protections were so far in the rearview they were starting to look like a mirage.
I quit shortly after. I needed money, but I could find it elsewhere. After a few more grueling trails in buzzy restaurants who demanded the world for low pay in the most expensive city in the country, I had had enough. I missed cooking, but not in whatever form this was all taking. I grumbled about this over a beer and a shot at my regular neighborhood bar, mentioning how I should be looking for barback work instead so I could at least make tips. Two days later I got a call asking if I wanted to cover a barback shift. I have now been working there since February, and I start bartending in August.
I can’t help but feel a little like I betrayed the kitchens that I gave so much to. One of my regulars is now a line cook at Le Bernardin, hallowed 3-Michelin Star restaurant ran by Eric Ripert who was famously Bourdain’s best friend. The other night over multiple Miller High Life’s I spilled this guilt I had to him about leaving kitchens and he looked at me with a pained expression of deep understanding, slight resentment, and more than a little longing. “I really get why you got out” he said. “It’s just all I’ve known, it’s too late for me.” It was odd to hear a relatively young cook working at possibly the best restaurant in the country speak this forlornly about his chosen profession, but of course I also get it. The kitchen is not a kind place, it will not love you back.
My friend did tell me he had his first run-in with Ripert the other day. They were taking an elevator together, Eric Ripert asked if he enjoyed working there and he said “yes, chef.” Ripert kind of smiled and asked “are you learning?” To which my friend replied “yes, chef.” “Good” Ripert replied, “that’s all that’s important.”
But the ravage of time and a pandemic is unkind. We have made it back out of the dark at enormous cost, none of it is quite the same. Your favorite meal at your favorite restaurant doesn’t taste quite as good anymore, your favorite chef has likely disappeared or become a monolith, and no one can regularly afford to eat out. As far as my dad goes, he was injured on the job over a year ago. After multiple surgeries and months of recovery his workplace then fired him. He’s now looking for new wine rep jobs and suing his old job. He will be 60 this year.
I have learned a lot from kitchens over the years. I have learned a lot from my comrades and my injuries, the chunks of flesh I am permanently missing and the sweat that it feels like has never left my brow. I have learned a lot from the huddles in the walk ins and even the mid-rush berating. I have learned a lot from Anthony Bourdain and I have learned a lot from my regulars. Even though I’m no longer in school I am very much still learning, and that’s all that’s important. At least, it’s all you can do.