In an excerpt from his book 'The Next Supper,' Corey Mintz calls for a future in which workers are celebrated above chefs
A year ago, Amanda Cohen’s restaurant offered only a tasting menu. From Tuesday to Saturday, the 50-seat Manhattan room served about 85 people for dinner, ensuring that diners had a table for three hours to leisurely enjoy 10 courses of elegantly plated seaweed caviar with crème fraîche, towers of foraged greens, tomato tarts and tomato lollipops, mushroom mousse, fennel tajine, carrot burgers, corn pasta, beet yakitori, and other exquisite creations made without animal products.
Dirt Candy’s average check size has shrunk to a small fraction, with revenue hovering around 35 percent of where it was a year ago. “If I didn’t have government money, I would be hemorrhaging,” says Cohen, who has been able to rehire six of the 35 staff members she had to lay off when she closed in March. “I’m able to pay rent because of the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program]. In October, when my PPP runs out, I’ll have to be renegotiating with my landlord. There’s no way I can pay that.
I never again want to hear about how great a chef is unless it’s about how great an employer they are. I never again want to hear about how great a chef is unless it’s about how great an employer they are. We have been celebrating a clichéd, larger-than-life concept of a chef — brilliant, abusive, insulting, demanding, loudly cruel — for the past 20 years. We have promoted the idea that this is what a winner looks like in the world of restaurants, filtered through the TV trope of the screaming mentor who will change your life and the ubiquitous print profile of the “difficult genius.
It’s possible that the pandemic could usher in a new age of the simple neighborhood restaurant, the type of place that is common in France: 20 seats, 10 menu items, two servers, and two cooks. In the early 2000s, before the legitimate small-plates trend, American restaurants tried to make tapas happen. Outside of a society where people go out to eat at 10 p.m.
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