The Privilege In Owning a Restaurant

How all the typical signals of privilege affect how you eat

Like high yield savings accounts, privilege has compounding interest.

Being white, able-bodied, male and heterosexual in our society is just about the best card you can pull from the deck.

Having college-educated parents, generational wealth, and access to healthcare on top of that is pocket aces. If you can’t make it work with all those advantages you either had supremely bad luck or you suck. Sorry, there’s no nice way to put it.

These are obviously ongoing discussions in American discourse. It is perhaps unsurprising many of that exact demographic of white, able-bodied, heterosexual men don’t agree with this assessment. And that’s because when all you’ve known is privilege, equality feels like oppression. But this is besides the point and outside my expertise. What is in my purview, however, is the hospitality industry. And I’m here to make the case that privilege in restaurants is very much a thing and nobody seems to want to talk about it.

The hospitality industry is America’s only social safety net. America decries socialism and any sort of “government handout” as weakness.¹ A means to a living, healthcare and housing are things you should have to fight for and earn like Homo erectus battling cave bears on the European continent. The only social safety net we offer is the restaurant industry. Even if your life has gone completely to shit — you’ve just been released on parole, you’ve run away from home, your whole family was deleted in a mass shooting, your industry was just erased by the promise of AI — you could at least claw your way back to stability bussing tables at a greasy spoon.

We welcome all. The restaurant industry is the circus, just with fewer live animals.²

As a result of our open-arms policy, our profession enjoys a portrayal of egalitarianism. All are equal and able to achieve success given good moral fiber and hard work. And it’s not entirely untrue. Establishing a living in the United States as an immigrant in the restaurant industry is a tale as old as Manifest Destiny. Thanks to a long history of immigrants cooking food here, the United States has moved past its shameful history of ambrosia salad and molded Jell-O cakes. There are countless examples of restaurant owners who now earn a beautiful living having started their careers with a spray hose in a dish pit.

This has given the public the idea that food is somehow protected from the inequalities of our society. Great food and great hospitality rise above all. So long as you work hard and deliver a consistently great product, then it doesn’t matter where you started or how you got here. Given the ingenuity and the will, behemoths like McDonald’s and Chipotle can spawn from one humble shop in Anywhere, USA. A great chef can elevate themselves from the most crushing favela. And a Chinese woman can go from losing everything in the Cultural Revolution to becoming a bona fide empress serving Orange Chicken in Tampa Bay.

That may have been the case once upon a time but it isn’t quite how it works now. Much like the American Dream, in order to get the best results; start in the 1970s. But fast forward to today and the restaurant industry is dealing with the same challenges as nearly every other industry; there are disproportionate advantages conveyed to those who have the most resources and maintain the closest proximity to whiteness.

Pecking House was an accident. When I joke that it was an unplanned pregnancy, I don’t just say it for comedic effect. It truly was an unexpected consequence resulting from an act of love. My only goal was to fry enough chicken to pay four months of rent for my family’s defunct restaurant in Queens. Peking House was the springboard for their dreams. It was a place I associated with my father. And I thought it a shame to let it die with him. Five years and two restaurants later, I can no longer use the excuse of our situation being an accident. Once we left Queens, I was the one who was driving. Am I happy with where I’ve gotten us? Not particularly. But I have tried to ride every wave and endure every hardship with as much grace and wherewithal as I could muster.

We were shot out of a cannon into a storm. I rode Pecking House’s hot streak and tried to figure everything on the fly. I did not have any guidance on how to fundraise, build a business, open a restaurant, take on the city bureaucracy or negotiate commercial insurance rates. My parents did it the old school way of turning a job waiting tables into becoming small business owners. Back then, you could start a business with your personal savings and a bank loan. That would be next to impossible today. Unless your savings statement amounts to seven digits. In which case, why the hell are you opening a restaurant?

I’ve made a lot of mistakes. And I’ve suffered a lot for them. I sunk an inarguable fortune into our first restaurant in Brooklyn only to walk by it every day to see it collecting dust. A place that was so vibrant a few years ago, with The New York Times writing articles about how long our lines were, became a place I wrung my hands anxiously over wondering if anyone was coming in. To be clear, I take ownership over all of that. I know what I did wrong and what I would do differently. I’ve spent sleepless years wondering what I could’ve done differently. But I accept Brooklyn’s fate and have come to peace with the tomb. I made bad decisions and was faced with several disadvantages, and I now know how I will approach building a restaurant moving forward.

So let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let’s say Pecking House’s story played out exactly as it did. But instead of trying to get to shore after a shipwreck in a hurricane, let’s say I was able to plan a different route with an actually seaworthy vessel.

This information is largely gatekept or made secret. Successful restaurateurs love to talk about 120-hour work weeks and give anecdotes about cleaning out rat shit in a basement, but they very rarely speak openly about the advantages they enjoyed. It would be somehow shameful. Americans love to talk about bootstrapping, but they hate to talk about how they paid for the boots in the first place. But as is on brand with me, there are no secrets here. I bare my soul to all, perhaps in a misguided attempt at crowdsourced therapy.

Time
The first thing I would have done differently is to take my time. I gave myself a completely unfair sense of urgency to continue the momentum of the business. I was concerned that I would lose my staff and that the dining public would forget about us. While those things are true to a degree, they do not outweigh the virtue of taking your time to build a business and displaying patience. But that isn’t a privilege everyone is afforded. On top of fears regarding staffing and attention, my family and I had a perfectly timed rift just as the lease was ending in Queens. The details will be spared for the book, but let’s just say I had to leave Peking House in a hurry and I convinced myself I couldn’t go home. It was either go back to working for someone else or figure this out now. I opted for the latter. But in hindsight, I should’ve gone with the former. Taking on private chef gigs and mercenary work while I figured out how to build Pecking House would have been the better alternative to coloring all my decision-making with panicked anxiety.

Building a restaurant that stands the test of time takes a lot of time. And time is a luxury that the privileged enjoy. If you have a family that will support you as you marinate on your dreams, it can make all the difference. I’m not even talking about being so wealthy that your family can just mainline you the cash to open a business. I’m just talking about the privilege of being able to live a few months without an income. That is an incredibly rare thing for most people in our industry. You don’t build a lot of buffer making the state minimum wage. But it is essential to planning what you are going to embark on. Ideally, take a year. Take years plural if you can. There are certainly a lot of people who do. Because the right conditions, the right space, the right person can take years to find.

There is no world where I take a year to figure it out. But I and the business would have benefitted immensely from slowing down. And I am fortunate enough to not have family members in need of my income and my care, and of not having a biological clock to worry about.

I would be curious, if given draughts of Veritaserum, what successful chefs would say about how they built their legendary restaurants. Who supported them as they built, who supported them as they planned?

Money
This is the most obvious and is an unconditional indicator of privilege in our society. With enough money you can transcend centuries of institutional racism, and nearly any disability, illness or disaster. Anything is possible in this country so long as you have the money.

Time is money, so the two factors are intertwined, but what I would have done differently is just find a lot more of it. For you restaurant building hopefuls out there, whatever you think you need, double it if you can. Do everything in your power to go above your budget. You’re going to need it.

We’re a private sector but I would be fascinated to read the ledgers if we weren’t. Even friends of mine are reluctant to share their numbers. As with the President, perhaps they are unwilling to admit that some of them received a “small loan” from their father. I was determined not to make such a foolish use of my mother’s savings as to put it into a restaurant, but alas, I had no choice. I raised what I thought to be the right number for a fried chicken restaurant ($500,000). I acquired it in bits and pieces from friends and family and sold them on a dream. And then I had to hit the panic button and ask for my mother’s help anyway as the project went awry. I put in $150,000 of my own money that I earned in a Faustian bargain with a billionaire. And my mother put in $200,000 of her savings to get Pecking House Brooklyn opened.

I am deeply aware of how privileged I was to be able to raise the money at all and to have a golden parachute of my own. It is a shame I reckon with every time I roll up the rusty gate at our Chinatown location. All that money and misery to get us to here; a 10-seat hole-in-the-wall restaurant with a frontage I have to share with the scrapyard where Chinese uncles blast apart old water heaters with hammers and table saws. But I’m afraid that my peers don’t seem to want to display the same vulnerability.

To open a great restaurant in New York City, with beautiful Instagram-worthy finishes, silverware, Zalto wine glasses, a great location, and a wine cellar will cost you millions and millions of dollars. The floor is probably around $1.5 million for your average restaurant of 2500 square feet. There is no ceiling.

I have yet to meet a chef who was willing to say where they got the money and acknowledge how fortunate they are to even be in the same Venn diagram as that much money. I would consider myself as having an upper middle class upbringing and I am incredibly lucky to have minimal student debt from a very expensive private university. I could not even begin to imagine how I could get together $2 million dollars in a responsible manner. I scrounged together $900,000 by breaking every glass window in case of emergency.

If you’re not ready to admit where the money came from, maybe we could at least start the conversation of acknowledging that the vast, vast, overwhelming majority of Americans have no means of getting $1 million dollars together to throw at a dream that has over a 90% chance of failing. The bank isn’t giving that out. Those are pretty bad odds.

Wealth begets opportunities which beget wealth. The wheel turns and turns.

Real Estate
I am of the mind that the land-owning class is ruining everything, but hey what do I know? It just seems like they enjoy no checks and balances, are allowed to dictate what the market is and charge accordingly to their whims. Everyone needs to pay an absurdly high rent to have a roof over their head, hence tenants need a high salary. Because tenants need a high salary, goods and services need to be very expensive. Before you know it only the wealthiest people can afford to live here, the property values go up and the rents increase even further. Round and round we go, landlords are hoovering up liquidity from the plebs in a massive transfer of wealth.

You’d like to believe that you can be successful anywhere in New York, that people will discover you, but it’s very short-lived. Just as with suburban restaurants and a lack of parking, if your restaurant is inconvenient to get to you are not going to become a part of people’s routines. And you desperately need to be a part of their routines. The Tik-Tokkers will come out for you once, but you’ll never see them again as they lead the flock away to the next cheese pull.

So you need good real estate. Problem is, good real estate is expensive. Like unimaginably expensive. I have a hard time imagining a world where Union Square is a shit hole and Danny Meyer can get a 20-year lease and buy the building for Gramercy Tavern for $3 million dollars. But it happened. And it made him a burger-slinging billionaire. Those days are over in New York. And for much of the country. With extremely rare exceptions, you have to pay big for prime real estate. Everyone is too busy and too distracted by their pocket supercomputers. Don’t count on them to take a long train ride out to you. You have to be right in front of their face.

In a world where I have time and money, I would have taken as much time as possible to find the right space. I learned the hard way how quickly legal fees rack up for negotiating commercial leases. After two landlords pulled the plug on negotiations at the eleventh hour, leaving me with thousands in legal bills and nothing to show for it, I was too eager to sign a lease with the first landlord that would have me. Keep in mind how disadvantaged the tenant is. The tenant is almost always going to be the David in this Goliath scenario. They have to make a perfect shot to get out of this thing alive. A real estate management company likely has in-house counsel and is probably not hurting for your rent check. It is but one in a portfolio of dozens. And you’ll recall that there are no vacancy taxes in New York City, though I acknowledge how challenging those would be to enforce even if they existed.

But it makes all the difference. We are situated in Chinatown on the same street as a Department of Sanitation garage, a scrapyard and a shelter for the unhoused and those struggling with addiction. All of us are under the cacophony of the Manhattan Bridge. That is what we could afford. And people often show up with a look of “What the fuck is this piece of shit?” and I don’t blame them. If we were any other restaurant that depended on bustling foot traffic, this show would’ve ended a long time ago.

A prime location in Manhattan can be upwards of $170 a square foot. More than $200 a square foot is not unheard of. After security deposits, first month’s rent and occasional broker’s fees, we’re talking upwards of $250,000 just to get the keys to the building. A quarter of a million dollars you will never see again.

How many people have the privilege of letting a quarter of a million dollars sit in purgatory? Assuming the restaurant even gets to the end of the lease’s natural lifespan. Any other condition of ending the lease almost always means saying goodbye to that money forever.

Help
Now we’re talking about soft costs. We’re talking about hiring people. The success of children in academics depends more on investment than anything else. Ivy League students overwhelming come from the top 1% of income distribution in this country. As Professor Daniel Markovits debates about our so-called meritocracy, the greatest contributor to academic achievement is investment of resources. Private schools average $75,000 per student per annum while your average public school in this country spends about $12,000 per student. Who has the greatest capacity for investment of time, energy, tutors, prep classes, nannies, au pairs, language coaches, sports coaches, music lessons, developmental summer camps and unpaid high school internships?

Well, the same could be said about restaurants. The more we invest in them, the more help and resources we can devote to them, the more likely they are going to succeed. And given our predilection for building restaurant empires these days, it is something that can snowball very quickly.

You can hire the best project managers, architects and designers with proven track records instead of hiring people who just tell you what you want to hear because they want your money. These people free you up to focus on your product and your staffing. They give you the bandwidth to do interviews and press ops. They help you navigate the gaps in your experience.

You can hire PR firms to spam their legacy Rolodex with the goings-on of your restaurants every day. The media wants the clicks and the engagement and they need endless sorts of content. If one publication is saying you’re hot as fish grease, then it tends to echo somewhere else. It can reverberate endlessly. It’s up to you to capture that momentum, for sure, but there are a lot of places that never get the chance. And lest we forget, the media is powerful. It doesn’t account for the nuance of individual opinions and extenuating circumstances. They tell the public what’s good and they believe it. In the aggregate, the dining public trusts the institutions. Sometimes you just need a trickle of an acknowledgement to lead to a stalagmite of accolades.

You can literally hire celebrities and influencers to come to your restaurant, let’s not forget how easy that pay to play option is. And I’ve never confirmed this, but would anyone be surprised to learn that there are famous restaurants paying to have their online reviews “massaged”?

You can hire health department consultants, former city inspectors who prepare you for every possible issue with a pending inspection.

You can hire real staff. You can hire real managers with proven experience. You can hire photographers and a social media team to blast everyone’s feed every day. You can hire operations staff to help set up systems, you can hire expediters to push permits and talk to municipal departments on your behalf, you can hire kitchen designers that help negotiate deals on equipment and ensure proper utility hookups, the list goes on and on and on.

Again, these things don’t guarantee your success. But they sure do help.

Safety Net
Even though Bill Gates creates more carbon emissions than practically anyone with his globetrotting private jet, I appreciate that he is addressing the quandary of his massive inheritance. To paraphrase his approach, “I want to leave my children enough that they feel like they can do anything, but they can’t do nothing.”

If you’re detecting a theme here, the same can be said for restaurants. A certain individual I used to work for loved the aphorism of “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail.” This is just about the most wealthy white guy thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Because that is coming from the mouth of a person who has never encountered inexplicable and uncontrollable barriers to their success. For most minorities, I think the question should be rephrased as “What would you attempt to do if you knew society considered you to be the cultural norm to gravitate towards, would never question your competence, and always gave you the benefit of the doubt?”

They say you should always have six months operating expenses liquid and ready in your business bank account. I don’t think I’ve ever had that in my entire tenure as a restaurateur. I would get bits of advice from others about buying branded packaging, to push merch and to do more offsite events. And I smile and thank them. But what I really want to say is, I can’t afford it. I don’t feel like I can divert a few thousand dollars to getting branded packaging set up and a few thousand dollars more to buy a reasonable inventory at a reasonable price. It is often deciding between repairing something in the restaurant and buying more t-shirts to get our name out there. I do as many offsite events as we can to reach a bigger audience, but every time I show up I see restaurants with full events teams and they are surprised to find that it’s just me and my wife. While chefs are enjoying free drinks and posing for pictures, my peers are surprised to find that I am almost always stuck behind a deep fryer. I don’t have the staff to spare, hiring extra hands would have an impact on the week’s revenue.

A financial safety net is a hell of a thing. It is the bungee cord that allows you to jump off the ledge. I acknowledge I’ve always enjoyed support to some degree. I remember when I decided I would become a chef that the absolutely worst case scenario if I failed was that I go home to work at my family restaurant.³ This allowed me to work for minimum wage for a decade to hone my skills and to build my resume. I remain under the umbrella of my mother’s health insurance to this day. I can’t afford to offer it from my own business. I enjoy dozens of meals and hauls of groceries courtesy of her kitchen. She is beyond generous with gifting and helping us out monetarily. I have tapped her wide network of customers for all sorts of favors and deals over the years for everything from car repairs to surgery. I have had a more rocksteady tether to the platform than most could ever hope for and I am grateful for it.

Safety nets allow us to take and absorb risks. They allow us to invest in things that don’t have immediate pay offs. They allow you to innovate and grow and give you room to breathe. In a different world, I take my time to dedicate an entire fundraise towards a safety net for Pecking House. It would be worth it to take my mind out of survival mode. You can’t grow and overcome your circumstances when you’re just focused on surviving. I would also take this time to note that the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. I wonder who benefits from everyone being in a constant state of anxiety over their finances that limits their ability to advocate for themselves and find better job opportunities (insert Winnie the Pooh thinking GIF).

I applaud so many chefs and operators for their ingenuity and creativity. I have worked with so many people who have created beautiful things in food and hospitality. The media readily celebrates them for their achievements and they deserve it. But last time I checked, no one ever asked how much runway they had sitting in the bank account.

Everything Else
Let’s remember that people still readily use the term “ethnic food”, a term that is unique to the Western world. The food of Western Europe and American diets is the normative center. Everything else is other, foreign and different. And it is a real challenge to get people to see value in it the same way.

New Yorkers will readily overpay for Italian-American food. I would use the example of a pizza chain that shall go unnamed. It sold to private equity for $80 million on the virtue of having a 10.5% food cost. Trust me, you are still paying $30 for a pie, the low food cost doesn’t mean you’re getting a deal. Foods with proximity to whiteness enjoy automatic understanding, appreciation and value perception. There is no questioning of the model, there is immediate acceptance. Meanwhile, every upstart Asian restaurant has to contend with the “I can get this cheaper in (insert ethnic enclave)”. I acknowledge that the collective of cheapskate Chinese-Americans like me are part of this problem.

Even “ethnic” foods that are on the rise have to package their culture in a manner that is palatable to the Western diner. I believe that was Momofuku’s greatest achievement. There wasn’t radical innovation of Asian dishes and Korean food. There was simply a clever repackaging of it that made it cool and accessible. Similarly, this is where the awards culture comes in. In warding off accusations of racism and discrimination, the Guide has done better about going to countries outside of their typical range and acknowledging restaurants atypical of their history, i.e. barbecue stands, hawker stalls, etc. But those who enjoy the greatest success are those who conform to Western perceptions of fine dining. Tasting menus, cushy chairs, forks and knives, a wine list. I’m not saying these are categorically bad things and that they’re not luxurious. They often are. But who created the initial idea and what is the summit we are all forced to climb towards? Who is genuinely being rewarded for breaking away from this trend and trying new ideas?

I had hoped Pecking House could be this quirky little restaurant that cooked a unique style of food in a unique setting. I take responsibility for perhaps being a bit confusing. Our price point existed in limbo between two experiences and so did our style of service. But it didn’t help that we sit at the intersection of two infamously underpriced cuisines; black American and Chinese cuisines. And it didn’t help that we had stools and plastic forks. If I could do it all over again, I would open a full-service restaurant. I would package it all as an ambitious restaurant with all the pretty touches, something people can recognize and associate with value. And I would serve you Chili Fried Chicken on an earthenware plate.

Conclusion
I admit that there probably aren’t a lot of chefs or diners that think this way. I am doing my best to not be accusatory. Most chefs do not consider the complex racial politics of what they’re doing when they make an expensive pizza or steak frites. But I find that it’s something that isn’t talked about and I would encourage you to think about now and again. The next time you go to a beautiful restaurant, I hope you have a great time. I hope you have warm service, good company and delicious food. I hope you have a reasonable amount to drink and wake up in the morning feeling great. I hope you are distracted from the horrors of our world if even for a moment. But I also hope you can ask yourself what it took to get that plate of food in front of you. And I hope you can see that it takes a lot of good fortune and good societal position to give you that experience.

I would encourage you to count the poundage of CO2 on your steak as well, but it will suffice for now if I can get you to wonder how someone was able to pay for that beautiful leather cushion you’re sitting on.

I encourage you to channel your inner 8-year old. Yes, this seat is comfortable. This food is delicious. This place has an arsenal of awards and stars.

But why?

-E-

1. Unless you’re a major bank, corporation or a Latin-American country on the cusp of embracing socialism and the US needs your radical leader deposed and replaced yesterday. Democracy is like Amazon Prime; now with next day delivery via drone strike.

2. Hopefully.

3. I would just like to note that this was literally the last option. This option was a distant second to becoming a chef at a country club in Fredericksburg.