The Future is Human

Just less of them.

I acknowledge that I can be a bit negative.

I’ve just always been this way. There’s a misanthropic boy-pretending-to-be-an-old-man residing within me and he calls the shots. He has been a good friend to me. Fiercely loyal, maybe a bit possessive. But despite his good intentions in wishing the world were a better place, I acknowledge that he is kind of a tough hang.

He don’t call the shots anymore though.

It’s taken literal decades for me to be able to confidently say this, but I no longer live with depression and substance abuse. It’s taken a great deal of therapy, medication, acquainting myself with rock bottom and sobriety, but I think I can finally tell that hurt little boy inside of me to go to bed.

My Substack does not make that clear. I acknowledge that I complain, criticize and condemn a lot.¹ Going by my writing, I sound like someone doing their best David Foster Wallace impression and I don’t mean that in the literary sense.

But I am actually doing quite well! I can hold genuine optimism without irrational anxiety and I can endure setbacks without circling the drain in self-loathing. What more can you ask for in life?

I think that my writing will always have subtle notes of mental illness and a waft of grievous trauma. I acknowledge that these things make me something of a bummer. But I’d like to start sharing my more hopeful spirit. I would like to talk about something a bit more productive rather than demand shame from everyone.

I find that I am asking myself this;

What does the business model look like for the restaurant of the future? Because the current model is not only obsolete, it’s crumbling like a cookie. What if we could upend how we’ve been operating restaurants and build something entirely new?

The labor model for restaurants has not had meaningful change since the Emancipation Proclamation. And it should probably figure out where it’s going as the rest of the world cozies up to the prokaryotic seedlings of Skynet.

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I get this question a lot these days and at first, I refused to invest too much energy into it. But eventually, I had no choice but to finally give it some thought.

“How do you see AI affecting the restaurant industry?”

I never thought about this because I don’t use AI. At least not intentionally. You can count on me to be about 5-7 years behind in technology adoption. I didn’t get an iPhone until 2013, and I did so only under the threat of banishment from my friend group. If I had it my way, we’d still be using landlines and going to Blockbuster every Friday. But then again, I found my wife the same way we find sandwiches on DoorDash so maybe it ain’t all bad.

I don’t really see AI starting the F&B revolution anytime soon because the thing about our industry is that it isn’t so easy to replace the humans. AI, for now, is a tool. And I am told that it can be a useful one. It does all of the things chefs are notoriously terrible at; written communication, performance reviews, accurate recipes and math. Restaurants rarely make enough money for those tasks to be specialized so no one is losing their job just yet.²

As for robotics, venture capital is pouring money into the next slop bowl factory that can figure it out but I don’t see that either. Even if you could train a set of mechanical arms to chop your salmon salad with half Spicy Cashew, half Green Goddess and full-fat hospitality, none of these companies are willing to drop the price enough to entice humans to buy something made by a particularly clever KitchenAid.

All that being said, the tech bros are addressing a real issue. It is harder than ever to find, train and keep good humans. And there are a lot of reasons for that.

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How It Currently Works

Restaurants are not where to look for elegant or efficient solutions. For almost the entire history of professionally cooked food, improving food has meant adding money to it. Sometimes that means sourcing a cow that lived a life exclusively eating grapes, has a first name and a DISC assessment. But most of the time that means injecting more labor. What is considered to be the pinnacle of our craft — the Michelin-starred restaurant — is really an exercise in adding as many human details as possible into 35-40% of the agreed upon price tag.

Every manager, porter, dishwasher, line cook, prep cook, sous chef, bartender and hostess, in the aggregate of their combined wages, needs to be in that range.

In culinary school, you are taught that labor is a variable cost, i.e. you allow it to fluctuate with the amount of revenue you are taking in. But that never made much sense to me. I have always looked at labor as a fixed cost. And with few exceptions, I would argue that we should all look at labor as a fixed cost. Even in America — land of the tip credit, home of the gratuity not included.

I think the traditional logic for variable costing goes that you adjust your labor depending on what day of the week it is. Makes sense. You will cut some of your hourly workers if it’s slow and you’ll add an hourly worker or two if it’s busy.

I don’t like cutting employees early. Humans aren’t food processors. You can’t simply move them around and put them in and out of use at your leisure. They have livelihoods and rents to pay. Getting cut has happened to me plenty throughout my career. I am initially excited by the notion that I could be outside having a cigarette in the next 10 minutes, but I always cursed myself upon receiving my next paycheck. I have always strived to give my employees a consistently dependable wage.

That’s a double-edged sword. During the slow months, the labor budget can dangerously inflate. But during the busy season, it can be compacted into a neatly wrapped packaged if you’re smart. The unquestionable benefit however is that, in my experience, it has greatly improved employee retention. Your employees are a lot less likely to jump ship if they know the one they’re on is going to remain steady.

This is an uncommon perspective in our industry. The standard remains that labor be 30-35% as a variable cost.

This is important to understand as we continue the discussion. This has been the business model for restaurants for decades if not centuries. And that used to be fine. Our world used to change by degrees. Like megafauna, restaurants can comfortably plod along with gradual shifts to the ecosystem. But now the world moves at a blistering clip with new extinction events every decade. And most restaurants are going to be too slow or too stubborn to adapt.

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Cost of Living vs. Cost of Production

Labor used to be pretty cheap. And thus eating out felt reasonable. It didn’t used to feel like an event you had to plan and save for. New York City was a wondrous place of spontaneity and low-stakes experiences.

It remained that way for most of the City’s existence. The cost of living crept up at the pace of orogenesis, so everything around it was mostly able to stay in step; taxes, rent, wages, cost of goods, value perception, etc. The legendary pizza-subway index was consistent for decades. But throw in a pandemic, unfettered capitalism and the punishing speed of our constantly-online society, and we now have a real problem on our hands.

What the customer perceives to be a reasonable price for professionally cooked food is wildly out of sync with what it actually costs to make.

The pressure is coming from all sides. Rents are absurdly high because your average commercial tenant isn’t a small business owner anymore. It is an endlessly-funded corporation or startup that has risk spread across hundreds of locations. And now your average commercial landlords are similarly large companies. From personal experience, it's a lot more difficult to negotiate with a faceless private equity board than it is with a singular human who is a part of your community.

Cost of goods spiked intensely because of the pandemic. You won’t believe it but when corporations raised prices on us due to supply chain issues, the prices never came back down. The extra pinch is all the American imperialism happening in the Strait of Hormuz. And you should view this whole thing as a tripod. If cost of goods and rent are going to increase, then wages need to increase to maintain the balance.

This three-legged stool has always been a bit wobbly. And it always will be. The shortest of the legs is always the wages. But historically, they were enough to keep the whole thing from falling over. Now the disparity is so great the thing is on the verge of collapse. The federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour. That is the price of a singular coffee with regular ole’ beef milk at a Hungry Ghost.

So to summarize; ingredients are more expensive than ever, paying rent feels like trying to scale the north side of the Wall, and wages are rising to try and attain balance. The wages are now painfully high for a restaurant and yet they’re still not high enough for anyone to be able to afford to live here. My first job in New York City in 2011 had me earning $9.50 an hour. And now I see entry-level line cook positions at $21 an hour. And yet quality of life for the modern line cook has only gone down. In order to survive as a line cook you need help, a second job and/or Jesus.

There is only so much we can do about the price of goods and commercial real estate. And by so much I mean fuck-all. So maybe we have to rethink the sort of food we cook, the entire way we organize a professional kitchen, and what constitutes reasonable full-service hospitality to adjust to our current reality.

The solution so far has just been to keep raising prices. I acknowledge that it’s a lot easier to change numbers on a menu than restructure the entire flow of labor. Hell, a lot of restaurants can get away with going over the old menu with a dying Sharpie. But I would argue it’s time to really start thinking about reducing the number of bodies it takes to run a restaurant.

There aren’t all that many bodies out there anyway.

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The Dreamers Are Out

Bring back the career server. Some of my favorite people to work with are the crusty men and women who know they’re going to be pouring coffee and polishing cutlery for the rest of their lives. There’s a shared sense of cynicism that really unites us. I could do with less bright-eyed dreamers who go through life like every day is Christmas. That sort of naiveté is really grating during the crush of a dinner service.

But holy Bourdain were there a lot of dreamers back in my day.

Thanks to Father Tony who art in heaven eating pho, a horde of overeducated and privileged people signed up to become chefs in the mid-Aughts. And I was one of them. Bourdain made it seem like there was this path to celebrity and passionate small business ownership while working with knives and brandy-licked flames. That was pretty damn exciting compared to entering patient survey data in a cubicle.³

This was nowhere more evident than at Gramercy Tavern. During my time there, the amount of expensive liberal arts degrees in that kitchen was staggering. The privilege we all had to chase job fulfillment makes me a bit nauseous to think about. That’s a lot of poorly addressed student debt.

I’m not sure what other industries have experienced such a strange revolution. Seemingly overnight, professional kitchens went from being staffed by reformed convicts to people who were proud to be the social chair for their a cappella group. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the dreamers washed out due to the fact that life as a chef sucks pretty bad. A lot of them became servers and sommeliers as a compromise. And then all these dreamers went on to open restaurants and run their own kitchens. This is why you can find micro mizuna in St. Louis. But this disrupted the traditional labor pool which was and largely still is, immigrants from Central America.⁴

The dreamers have risen to the top like whipping cream, bloated with the dairy fat of privilege, and now there is an overabundance of executive chefs, restaurant owners and beverage directors and an utter scarcity of career servers, line cooks, butchers and prep gods.

And I am complicit.

It was good times in a lot of ways. You had these 30-person brigades full of really driven and talented chefs in a very specific window of their lives. We were all giving 150% and leaving HR nightmares everywhere we went because we formed incestuous puddles of Jameson-inflected bathwater at every bar we frequented. But I’m not sure that sort of kitchen is sustainable or even possible anymore. And I’m definitely not sure that you need everyone in the kitchen to know what an allumette is.

Let’s just be realistic. Even if you do find a good dreamer, they are unlikely to stick around. They’ve got a New American small plates wine bar to open in a mid-Atlantic city. These sorts of folks were the bulk of the chattel that kept restaurants like Eleven Madison Park running. The amount of times we were threatened with the supposed pile of resumes knocking on the door makes my eyes roll. But it doesn’t work at that scale anymore and we need to drastically shift this perspective.

Instead of building kitchens on highly ambitious, privileged but very temporary labor, maybe let’s start looking at it as building lifelong skills and careers. Instead of expecting someone to walk in the door a close-to-finished product, how about we think about teaching someone a trade from the ground floor up. Not everyone is going to stick around forever and not everyone is going to give you a great return on investment. But the chances of everyone having a mutually beneficial relationship are going to be a lot higher if you start with the intention of prioritizing someone’s growth as opposed to lamenting their lack of ability.

That sounds a lot better to me than shoving a fresh pile of culinary school meat into the grinder every year.

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“Unskilled” Labor

Erase this term from your lexicon. Professional cooking takes a great deal of skill and training. But because we are force-fed 45 second reels that make cooking look easy and because a lot of you have held a successful dinner party a few times, you don’t fully understand the difference between home cooking and professional cooking.

I’m not even saying this as a point of prickly pride, it’s just not apples to apples. There’s a massive difference between making a Beef Wellington for a dinner party and making enough for 200 diners every night. It’s the difference between going 8 of 11 at the YMCA and the NBA, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. If I airlifted you from your desk and inserted you into a fully-stocked grill station at Luger’s — somewhere you can open every steak you cook and its acceptable to send something that is half leather, half raw — I wager you still have a really bad night despite your legendary Sunday barbecues for the fellas.

Cooking is not yet an easily replaceable skill. And despite the terribly pay, it is still a highly desired skill. Humans want food made by humans. No matter how good the robots get at butter-basting a piece of fish, there will always be a romance to something being handmade. The robots are only going to gain ground in the sorts of places where people are thinking of the word “calories”.

As they say in the kink community, if it’s going in my body it’s either “Fuck yes!” or it’s “Fuck no!” This is a no-kink-shaming space but most people aren’t terribly excited to have a mechanical arm put something inside of them.

As much as I would love to field an assembly line of intelligent fryer baskets because they wouldn’t argue with one another, I don’t think robotics will ever have a meaningful share of the restaurant market. A slop bowl at your desk just to get some calories and fiber? Okay, whatever, I’m not going to pick nits about something I ordered off of DoorDash. But as for restaurants where you’re celebrating your mother’s birthday or trying to get laid, I think we will always want food cooked by other people.

So robotics is not solving the restaurant industry’s labor conundrum anytime soon. The demand for skilled labor is greater than ever, it’s just that the economics haven’t caught up. As a result, the labor pool has been shrunken and diluted. Any labor you do employ will need the dignity of a living wage, and what is considered a living wage has changed considerably. And all of this has to fit into a business model your customer will never understand.

What does the restaurant of the future look like?

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The Once and Future Restaurant

I don’t think the restaurant industry is doomed but I am skeptical that we can continue to do exactly what we’ve been doing and expect everything to be great. There are obviously a multitude of factors that affect restaurant profitability but the three biggest levers of food, labor and occupancy are all undergoing stressors and change. Hoping for a silver bullet to come out of the Y Combinator is probably not the best strategy to stake our livelihoods on.

I’m not sure there’s much we can do about commercial real estate or beef futures, but I do think we have control over how we manage and train our employees. And I think if you do it right, and eschew some of the “rules” that have been forced upon us, you could reduce your payroll while still providing good livings for your people.

It’s difficult to make reductions to the dining room experience without your customers noticing. To retrofit an existing dining room layout and its team is admittedly a tall task. But if I were starting from fresh, I would challenge all of our preconceived notions of what constitutes elegant hospitality. I am designing a dining room that can plug-and-play employees with minimal training.

I would look for a dining room no bigger than 1500 square feet with an open kitchen window so as to have uninterrupted lines of sight from every vantage point. The more eyeballs that can passively access the dining room the better. I wouldn’t necessarily count on your sous chef to clear tables, but if they can notice three or four parties that are ready for their next course and fires it early before needing a server to do it, that’s a lot of time saved over the course of the week.

I would maintain a single elevation across the entire room and run food on wheeled carts. I’m not talking some clanky dim sum jalopy with an auntie yelling at you from behind the wheel. You can get a sleek, modestly priced cart and cover it with a tablecloth to run food. The way we currently do it, it takes four to six human interactions to clear and run food to a table of four. That’s way too many. Even if you can just use the cart to get within 15 feet of the table as opposed to running it from the kitchen, that’s a mobile operations base worth establishing in my opinion.

And these are personal preferences that aren’t going to fit an ambitious Michelin-bait restaurant, but I’m done with table crumbers, bottled water, Bordeaux glasses, smoke machines, spiels about the farm you supposedly got this produce from, show plates, amuse bouche, Canard à la Presse and using fire as if putting on a magic show for six year-olds; Baked Alaska, Crêpes Suzette, Steak Diane. These dinosaurs have been irresponsibly revived so many times that it feels like we’re living in the Disney version of Jurassic Park.

The modern kitchen could use an entire overhaul. So many of the established “rules” can be intelligently broken while still serving great food. In culinary school, we are taught to worship Joël Robuchon. The stories were mythical. Never was there a more demanding chef or a more decorated hero. I heard he had chefs use a pastry brush soaked in wine to deglaze the edges of reducing jus de volaille. I heard that he had the lunch brigade throw everything out and that farmers were paid to come back in the afternoon with entirely fresh produce.

True or not, these stories have had lasting impacts. Chefs are obsessed with this nebulous idea of “freshness” and “harder not smarter”. Dan Barber wants to walk with you hand-in-hand through his Rockefeller-estate-turned-restaurant and feed you pea pods off the vine. Dave Chang, despite having a pitiful resume and about as much technical artistry as can be found in a small college town’s pan-Asian restaurant, is always preaching that great cooking is about doing things the most difficult way possible.

And it simply isn’t true. It is just what has been.

Chefs love to brag about their restaurants cooking “everything from raw”. That means every time someone orders a lamb chop, the meat chef pulls out a rack of lamb, seasons it with salt, heats up a pan and starts searing and turning the rack, bastes it with butter and herbs, rests it and slices it precisely when it is ready to go onto your plate.

It’s certainly very romantic and it’s good training. Every chef should be able to cook proteins from raw. But it’s horribly inefficient. Just as nobody uses breech-loading rifles anymore, I’m not sure we should be investing a lot of time into the skill. There aren’t a lot of humans that can manage a menu of five proteins and are able to cook all of them from raw to perfect doneness anyway. It took me about 7 years to get there. Good luck finding line cooks these days that have the luxury of training for 7 years.

Instead of turning red in the face and screaming at a new cook for their inability to do something they have no practice at doing, why don’t we think about how we can set chefs up for success? You can still teach someone a lot about cooking using sous-vide, reverse-searing, CVAP ovens and hot holding cabinets. And you’d be teaching them to think outside of the antique box we’ve stuffed our industry into.

Chefs love to brag about how everything is thrown away at the end of every night and that they begin each day with a clean slate. It’s not that it necessarily makes for better food, it’s about establishing a culture of irrational excellence. It’s certainly a much easier management style to instruct everyone to empty their refrigerators at the end of each service, but I think we can aspire to a lot more nuance and a lot less waste. I would rather focus on training everyone to be able to assess quality and to learn what can be kept and what cannot. I would rather teach my cooks what to do with a leftover squash puree than throw it on the floor in front of them because it was a day old.

I would ban tweezers. Everyone carrying a set of tweezers just means they’re going to waste time plating food that is only getting further away from its optimal condition. Your cooking dexterity will be much better served by spoons and small spatulas.

I would stop excessively trimming proteins to form cute isosceles of duck and rhombi of halibut. I would teach cooks to just learn how to make a puree properly so that you don’t need to ram it through a chinois. I would teach cooks how to manage and create prep lists, use professional written communication with their teammates, how to forecast ordering for the entire week and how to prioritize efficient systems over “sexy” food.

And in no particular order; stop making your own ketchup, give up on the notion that house-made is always better than outsourced, embrace bargain proteins, if you’re going to value knife work make it count, and learn to speak Spanish. If you can’t onboard an employee in Spanish and you run your own kitchen, I give you an F for growth mindset.

The persnickety chefs would say that this is “hack” cooking but those are also the chefs who complain that there aren’t any “real” chefs anymore. If embracing technology and streamlining systems means I have a lot more kinds of cooks available to me and they are a lot more likely to succeed, then I will gladly embrace the notion of “hack” cooking.

The old heads think the new generation is soft because they can’t make a pâté de campagne without a recipe or make brioche from scratch. These are very admirable skills. But just as modern chefs aren’t entering a world of royal courtiers and absolute monarchies, most of us don’t work at a skillset of building fires, foraging wild mushrooms, tanning beaver hides, or dragging foals out of a mare’s uterus. The modern human with their face glued to a phone is about the farthest thing from a frontiersman. The modern chef is not going to start their culinary odyssey at the age of 16 whipping egg whites for the poissonnier’s consommé

I would argue it’s time to accept the reality we are facing and begin preparing ourselves, and the cooks in our charge, for the world we are living in. We may not like that world. I sure as hell don’t. But after decades of doing everything the hard way, I not only lack the energy to swim against the current, I think I’m beginning to grasp the wisdom that it might be a waste of everyone’s time.

The future of restaurants is human because restaurants are inherently about real human connections. Sex work will get an AI robotics revolution before cooking will. The humans that are doing the work of serving and making food are facing very unforgiving circumstances. Instead of lamenting that things don’t work the way they used to, I think chefs need to take a step back and reconsider the entire enchilada of the business model, the physical space, the math and most importantly, the humans that make it all come together.

Love,

Eric

1. And to be a doomsday prophet. I realize no one really subscribes to restaurant newsletters to hear about how the collapse of the Thwaites Glacier will herald the decimation of our species but if I don’t connect the dots to your next steak dinner, who will?

2. Except that poor woman who used to teach us CIA students how to do food costing. I hope she quit drinking.

3. And the subprime mortgage crisis.

4. We don’t have time to get into the United States government’s disenfranchisement of Central and South America, but if it were all a carefully scripted plan to maintain a dependable group of underpaid people mowing our golf courses, cooking our food and cleaning our hotels, would you be all that surprised?