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COVID Changed the World But Not Restaurants
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Five years ago, every dining room in New York went dark. After weeks of coronavirus anxiety, Bill de Blasio ordered the shutdown of all restaurants on Sunday, March 15, and almost instantly more than 200,000 people were out of jobs. Restaurant workers, in New York and nationwide, were especially vulnerable to the impact of COVID. The undocumented had to fend for themselves, but those on enhanced unemployment suddenly found themselves with time they never had before to think about the industry: The abuse, sexism, and racism that had been taken as a given didn’t need to be part of the job. “It did feel like, We’re almost starting from zero, when things reopened,” says Kelly Sullivan, a Manhattan bartender and co-host of the industry podcast FOH. When she went back to work in 2021, she felt, service looked so different that it was possible to imagine it being better: “It really felt like, Okay, if you’re going back to work, you really have leverage. And then what happened? Genuinely, I’m trying to think where did the momentum go?”
Plenty of time, energy, and money were spent wondering how the pandemic could forever change restaurants for the better. But looking around now, it barely moved the needle. Sure, reservations are more annoying and wages have risen a bit. Prices rose considerably too: $24 cocktails have been normalized, and the dollar slice is dead. But speaking with people who work in New York, it’s hard to identify anything about the restaurant experience that feels significantly changed from the era before COVID. “I can’t even really remember what was being put on the table. I know people were sensitive to sort of the overall plight of the restaurant worker, but I don’t know,” says Max Eddy, a sommelier downtown. “Inflation and the affordability crisis railroaded all of that stuff.”
This is not how things felt in the spring of 2021. The vaccine rollout was euphoric for New York. Governor Andrew Cuomo bowed to demands to add restaurant and delivery workers to the list of those eligible for early vaccination, and as restaurants opened back up, there was a sense of optimism. A “worker shortage” plagued the industry, and operators complained that no one wanted to work; they couldn’t compete with enhanced unemployment. Leverage was, for once, on the side of labor. Career waiter Mack Harden wrote on this site, “If restaurateurs expect to change nothing and return to a time when they could count on a huge stack of résumés from highly skilled individuals who would put up with all manner of abuse for meager pay, they are mistaken.”
Harden was right that restaurateurs couldn’t count on all of these skilled individuals returning to the industry: Many left in a “draining of lifers,” as one vet puts it. Those who returned had quickly soured on enforcing new COVID rules, which made them feel like cops and created tension with customers. But as far as employee welfare is concerned now, the most substantial change that some workers would point to was a new ability to take sick days. “I never took a day off ten years ago when I was working as a manager — it just was unheard of,” says Nikita Malhotra, who runs the restaurant Smithereens and consults on the side. (One fine-dining cook says his restaurant group offers four-day workweeks to help staffers prioritize work-life balance, but policy changes like that are rare.)
Pay was better — cooks could command wages of $21 to $25 an hour — but any gains were offset by historically high inflation. It took until this past summer for the industry’s workforce to return to pre-pandemic levels (approximately 322,000 in the city), but it’s still being built back, if not in numbers then in experience. “There is a resurgence of a lot of people being interested in cooking, but everyone is extremely unseasoned,” says Halley Chambers, a co-owner of Margot in Fort Greene. Finding skilled managers, others say, is a persistent issue except at the top places. “Everywhere else, you’re seeing applicants who largely don’t have a ton of experience,” says one server who asked us not to use her name. Fear of offending the wrong people in the industry by speaking candidly to a journalist still persists, apparently.
If there has been a change for the better, it’s that workers are able to create clearer boundaries of acceptability with customers. Before 2020, Schuyler Wayne worked in places that emphasized a “customer forward” approach regardless of how those customers acted. “I think a lot of the veteran servers were like, I don’t have to do this. They realized they had more power than they thought they had,” he says. But even that change in thinking feels as if it’s fading away. While Wayne says more staff are comfortable speaking with their management about handling difficult customers, “it’s kind of going back to ‘The customer is always right,’” he laments. “It’s a slow shift.”
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