Foodies Clan

Five years ago, both diners and restaurant workers pushed back against efforts to go tip-free — efforts that could play out differently in a post-pandemic world

One year after we first spoke in July 2019, Andrew Hoffman tells me I need a “disclaimer” for this piece. “This article was started pre-pandemic. Back in the Great Before,” jokes Hoffman, co-owner of Berkeley’s Comal and Comal Next Door, who eliminated tipping at his table-service restaurant around six years ago. I like that, I reply, repeating “the Great Before” with sardonic gusto. Hoffman laughs. “Take that playbook from the Great Before and throw it away,” says Hoffman. “You don’t need it anymore.”

Since COVID-19 spread through the United States, millions of food service workers have been laid off or furloughed, and those who are still employed are risking their health each day by returning to work. And despite all the pivoting — to delivery and takeout, to corner stores or bottle shops, to outdoor dining — between a third and half of all independent restaurants will shutter as a result of the pandemic. This economic reckoning comes commensurately with a social one, as calls amplify to address systemic racism and anti-Black violence following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, and, more recently, the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Depending on who you ask, these crises make right now either the worst time to talk about tipping, or render it a conversation that has never been more urgent.

The case against tipping is compelling: It facilitates racism, sexism, and widespread wage theft; perpetuates a growing income gap between front- and back-of-house staff, particularly in cities like New York and San Francisco; and contributes to a stigma that service work is transitory. “No matter how you do it, tipping hits BIPOC workers in the pocketbook, it exposes more female workers to sexual harassment, and it keeps all workers from making a steady, solid salary,” says Amanda Cohen of New York City’s Dirt Candy, a longtime anti-tipping advocate.

Around the U.S., independent restaurateurs are newly experimenting with no tipping: from Hunky Dory in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which re-opened in July with menu prices that include gratuity, to Colleen’s Kitchen in Austin and Last Resort in Athens, Georgia, which have in recent months instituted service charges that, they say, will help provide fair and stable wages for all staff. “Before the pandemic, tipping was baked into the industry and we all inherited it,” Cohen says. “Right now, no one wants to go back and consciously, purposefully inflict its inequities on their staff.”

The end of tipping has been heralded before, and not all that long ago. In 2015, acclaimed restaurateur Danny Meyer announced that he would eliminate gratuities throughout his sprawling Union Square Hospitality Group, hoping to narrow the stark income disparity between servers, who received tips, and cooks, who did not. “I hate those Saturday nights where the whole dining room is high-fiving because they just set a record, and they’re counting their shekels, and the kitchen just says, ‘Well, boy, did we sweat tonight,’” Meyer said at the time.

Meyer’s move came on the heels of decisions to eliminate tipping by several Bay Area restaurateurs who, for similar reasons, did away with gratuity over the prior year: Berkeley’s Comal; Oakland’s Camino (now closed) and Homestead; and San Francisco’s Trou Normand, Bar Agricole, and Zazie. While other New York chef-owners, like Cohen, had banished tipping earlier, Meyer’s decision marked a tectonic shift: As the founder of Shake Shack and the CEO of a dozen-plus New York restaurants, if anyone could lead in putting tipping to rest, the thinking went, it was Meyer.

Other influential New York players, including David Chang and Tom Colicchio, acted around the time that Meyer did, resulting in a full-fledged “no-tipping movement.” Within months, Andrew Tarlow announced that he would go gratuity-free throughout the Marlow Collective, his restaurant group that helped define dining in a gentrified Brooklyn; Tarlow even designed an open-source logo for demarcating no-tipping venues, of which Gabriel Stulman made use after banning tips at Fedora, one of his then-six downtown restaurants. In the East Village, USHG alums Jonah Miller and Nate Adler likewise pledged to eliminate tips at their restaurant, Huertas.

By May 2016, data bore out the beginnings of a cultural shift. An American Express survey released that month found that of 503 randomly sampled restaurateurs, 18 percent said they had already adopted no-tipping policies, 29 percent said they planned to do the same, and 17 percent said they would consider implementing no-tipping if others did. The EndTipping subreddit, one of the more complete records of no-tipping establishments from the time, listed more than 200 restaurants that were, at one point or another, without gratuity. Although these comprised a sliver of the roughly 650,000 restaurants across the country, momentum appeared to be building.

Until, it seemed, the wheels came off. Most of the restaurants that participated in the Meyer-catalyzed no-tipping movement had, by 2018, returned to gratuity. Meyer, whose organization never fully recovered from the shift to what he called “Hospitality Included,” capitulated earlier this summer, announcing that he would bring back tipping to USHG. Thus tipping won, and decisively.

Now, facing a potential reset of the entire restaurant industry, no-tipping could once again be on the proverbial table. “The big reason why people didn’t switch to getting rid of tips was because they were scared that they were going to lose their staff. And then they were scared that they were going to lose their guests. And now they’ve lost both,” Hoffman explains.

But if the post-pandemic restaurant industry stands any chance of successfully moving beyond gratuity and toward more equitable compensation methods, it is worth asking: What exactly went wrong before? What went right? And how, if at all, can sustainable change be made?

When the Brooklyn restaurateurs David Stockwell and his wife, Carla Swickerath, opened their modern Italian-American bistro Faun in August 2016, they debuted as a tip-free establishment in part because, Stockwell said, “it seemed like we were going to get in front of a rising tide.”

The anti-tipping cohort of the mid-2010s largely consisted of restaurants like Faun: moderately priced, casually upscale table-service spots that promised a mix of hospitality and affordability. By contrast, fine-dining establishments already had a history of no-tipping, as their guests expected to pay top dollar and were therefore less likely to resist prices that included the cost of gratuity or an automatic service charge — although this willingness was not entirely without exception. Still, these restaurants were largely not considered part of the tip-free trend, and neither were the fast-food and counter-service venues that traded primarily on price and often forewent tips anyway.

And in the case of Faun, Stockwell found himself explaining to guests why menu prices were higher than those at comparable restaurants. “Once you get people to understand that you’re gratuity-inclusive, there’s still the next level of this visceral connection with numbers on a menu,” he told me last summer. “When entrees are all up in the 30s versus in the 20s, it doesn’t matter if [customers] know that you are gratuity-inclusive.”

Stockwell and Swickerath waited for other restaurateurs to follow suit. But several early adopters had already reversed course, including Craft, Fedora, and Momofuku Nishi (which has since closed entirely). “It was a miscalculation that this tide was growing,” Stockwell confided. Despite positive reviews, by winter 2017, Faun was struggling. Stockwell was unsure if the restaurant could survive the coming January, with its crowd-killing short days and frigid temperatures. He didn’t want to revert to tipping, but he felt his hands were tied. “So many times that you are operating as a business, you realize, ‘Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?’”

Faun reintroduced tipping the first week of January 2018. According to Stockwell, the effect was striking. “Immediately, it made this whole thing possible,” he recalled. Although he and Swickerath would have preferred to remain tip-free for ethical reasons, he said that ultimately, “we couldn’t let the ship keep sinking.”

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Mike Fadem was confronting a similar challenge: determining the “right” price of pizza — one that factored in gratuity but also didn’t cause guests to mutiny. In October 2016, Fadem and his partners Marie Tribouilloy and Gavin Compton opened their Bushwick pizzeria, Ops, as a service-inclusive establishment. Before this, Fadem spent seven years climbing the ranks at Tarlow’s Marlow Collective, where, as a manager, he had helped oversee Roman’s 2015 transition to tip-free. Based on that experience, he knew that Ops couldn’t simply raise menu prices by 20 percent across the board. Instead, he calibrated his opening prices to those at comparable pizzerias, and played primarily with the cost of wine. For its first two years, Fadem says, Ops did not turn a profit.

Despite the financial challenges, and watching Roman’s and the rest of the Marlow Collective revert to tipping in December 2018, Fadem and Tribouilloy were hopeful they could make tip-free work. Still, Fadem remained a realist about tipping’s prevalence when we spoke last July. “I think a lot of people don’t see the system as being broken, or anything. And a lot of people love tipping,” he observed. “They feel some kind of power.”

Time would prove him right. In September 2019, still unprofitable, Ops abandoned gratuity-free. “It just wasn’t working,” Fadem said later that month. Ops’s labor costs were too high, and Fadem and Tribouilloy were unable to reward longtime staff members with higher pay. Introducing tips, Fadem said recently, allowed them to give “every staff member a substantial raise.”

Ultimately, the issue was guests’ perception of value. “In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work,” he says. “People are happy to pay $25 for a pizza if it’s $20 plus tip, but if the menu reads $25 for a pizza you’re looked at as ripping people off, even if it’s the right price for the cost of getting the food to the table.”

But diners alone didn’t doom the mid-2010s anti-tipping movement; workers who saw lower earnings were also reluctant to embrace the shift. At Faun, for example, Stockwell started servers at $25 per hour when the restaurant was tip-free. Even then, he says, it was “virtually impossible” to compete with what servers could make at a “similarly ambitious local restaurant with tips.” If a tipped server could make $40 to $50 an hour, or up to $350 over the course of a seven-hour shift, why do the same work for half the money?

At Huertas, USHG alums Jonah Miller and Nate Adler struggled to increase back-of-house wages as much as expected after going tip-free in December 2015 — they sought to reduce the kitchen-dining room wage disparity by raising cooks’ wages by $2.50 an hour. “We did pay cooks more than we had before, but in many cases not a full $2.50 per hour more,” Miller said last summer.

Even Meyer grappled with staff departures at USHG, in addition to reports of a corresponding decline in service quality and an inability to close the wage gap. In 2018, Meyer stated publicly that 30 to 40 percent of USHG’s long-term staffers quit following the phased introduction of Hospitality Included across the group’s restaurants. In the aftermath, the company continued to confront staffing issues caused by HI, according to a USHG front-of-house employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in both July 2019 and this past March.

“There hasn’t been a fix in the morale,” said the USHG employee, in part because of decreased front-of-house compensation as compared to pre-HI rates. The employee shared an internal USHG memorandum, which showed a comparison of 2018 average hourly pay from multiple USHG restaurants with HI against the average hourly pay from two USHG locations without the policy. Servers’ average hourly pay was $26.13 with HI and $32.88 without, a difference of $6.75; bartenders’ average hourly pay was $29.88 with HI and $35.23 without, a difference of $5.35.

As a result of reduced earnings, it was harder to hold onto staff at restaurants like Blue Smoke, one of the last Meyer restaurants to move to HI. Employee trainers left, and managers leveled up inexperienced hires even if they were not ready for additional responsibility just to get “bodies on the floor.” Another part of the problem was a perceived take-it-or-leave-it mentality that ran contrary to USHG’s ethos, and that made some staff feel replaceable. “It just sort of felt like, if [HI] doesn’t seem right for you, it’s totally okay if you leave,” said the employee.

USHG was not especially effective in closing the pay gap between the front and back of house — a primary rationale for going tip-free. In 2018, average hourly pay for USHG prep cooks was $14.45 with HI and $15.06 without, a difference of 61 cents, according to the internal memo. The average hourly pay for line cooks was $15.88 with HI, 29 cents higher than the non-HI average of $15.59, but a rate that was still $10.25 less than the average hourly pay for servers under HI. (USHG declined multiple requests for comment.) According to the employee, management wasn’t willing to raise prices enough to meaningfully increase back-of-house wages, or to maintain front-of-house salaries: “They didn’t want to raise the prices so high that people have sticker shock.”

These results, in combination with the financial pressures caused by the pandemic, may have contributed to Meyer’s decision to bring back tipping in July. “I think the timing and rationale is totally understandable,” Miller said of Meyer’s return to tipping. Miller notes that the reversal may be an example of “‘COVID exposing a fragile system’ in the same way that restaurants that were just barely surviving pre-pandemic are likely to choose this moment to move on.”

“Danny Meyer has abdicated his right to be a leader in this industry,” Cohen says of the move, arguing that if there was any time for Meyer to hold firm, it is this very moment. “What happens when his customers don’t feel so generous three months from now?” she asks. “I did no tipping before Danny Meyer, and I’ll keep doing it long after he’s given up. I think women and BIPOCs are used to white guys not being there for us when the chips are down.”

It remains to be seen how the pandemic will intersect with wages for servers, at a time when so many are out of work. This July, Marketplace reported that restaurant traffic has declined by 60 percent in some parts of the country, but according to the BBC, those who are ordering out seem to be tipping generously, with tips up by nearly 15 percent for Grubhub and Seamless drivers, and up 99 percent for Instacart shoppers since the pandemic began.

Though a sense of altruism may be responsible for this increase in gratuity, larger tips can also widen the earnings disparity between the few servers who remain and kitchen staff, so that a handful of tipped employees are making as much or more than they did previously, “whereas their cooks and managers are being asked to be more dexterous and take on more responsibility than ever before,” Miller says.

Even as sticker shock and worker turnover shredded the no-tipping cohort in New York, a sizable percentage of Bay Area restaurateurs who began experimenting with tip-free in the mid-2010s managed to make it work. The difference may owe, in part, to regulatory flexibility and a greater number of policy alternatives available in California. Most notable, it seems, is the ability to append a mandatory service charge to checks at the end of the meal, a practice that is currently illegal in New York City.

“I am fully convinced that even at our very popular, busy restaurant, if we raised the prices by 20 percent starting tomorrow, we’d do significantly less business,” Hoffman said last July. Comal’s mandatory service charge allowed Hoffman and co-owner John Paluska to increase revenue while avoiding the sort of business loss attributable to sticker shock. “People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip,” Hoffman observed, which accords with studies that show consumers’ preferences for prices that are partitioned, rather than bundled.

Corey Lee, the chef behind the San Francisco restaurants Benu, Monsieur Benjamin, and In Situ, agrees that a service charge is a necessary bridge for diners in the U.S. “The idea of a ‘tip’ is so ingrained in American dining culture that most diners aren’t ready for service-inclusive pricing,” Lee said in July 2019. “Therefore, we break it out for them as a separate charge so they can see what’s happening.” Lee, who has imposed this charge at both the three-Michelin-starred Benu and the more casual Monsieur Benjamin, says that it avoids sticker shock while stabilizing wages for all staff and raising earnings for those individuals on the “lower end of the pay scale.”

But for some restaurateurs, the service charge is not a silver bullet. When Fred and Elizabeth Sassen decided to eliminate tipping at their Oakland restaurant, Homestead, in March 2015, they eschewed an automatic charge, believing that a tacked-on fee might confuse and frustrate guests and staff alike. Instead, they opted for service-inclusive pricing and, to incentivize employee performance, implemented a compensation model that factors in skill, experience, and hours to arrive at a base salary; from there, total salaries are set based on individual effort. Though the process was not without its difficulties — “what we realized quickly was that we would eventually have to cycle through the whole [front-of-house] staff” who expected the higher wages of a tipping model — Fred Sassen said that the new system has been, overall, more equitable in terms of compensation and advancement opportunities. “I’ve had a dishwasher that’s been with me for four years, he makes more than some of my servers,” he said, an industry rarity.

Jennifer Bennett, part-owner of San Francisco bistro Zazie, said that replacing gratuity with service-inclusive pricing in June 2015 allowed her to implement a pay-for-performance system that not only equalized wages, but improved service. It is a system, Bennett said last summer, that “is very different” than the static hourly no-tipping models used by many other proprietors, which divorce work quality from earnings and thus fail to effectively incentivize employees. In her model, on top of the minimum wage, servers make 12 percent of their individual sales, while kitchen staff earn 12 percent of shift sales. Because the entire restaurant is engaged in a sell-more, earn-more mentality, servers are quick to refill mimosas, while the kitchen profits too. Before, Bennett noticed that cooks would be furious if an eight-top walked in the door right before closing. “But now, what do they see? Another $15 in my pocket.”

Bennett, who split ownership of Zazie with three longtime employees in January, believes that the benefits go beyond economics. “Everyone thinks they are judging their waiter,” she said, “but really, from the moment you walk in the door, your waiters are judging you also.” With gratuity, Bennett noticed that some staff would make tipping stereotypes based on race and gender; servers fought over “good” tables and avoided “bad” ones “like the plague.”

Despite the tip-free movement’s waning trajectory, Bennett is confident that tipping will inevitably fall out of favor in the United States. “The inequality between the front and the back of the house has got to change,” she said. “We can’t keep having these people working in hot miserable conditions for 10 hours a day, making a third of the money of the cute bartender.”

Now is the “perfect” moment for reformation, new Zazie co-owner Megan Cornelius said in July. “These workers have been deemed essential and are putting themselves at risk. To walk out with a living wage that is secure and accurately coincides with how much they sell in a night, and isn’t reliant on the whim of guests who have been [sheltering in place] for months, is actually extremely important, now, more than ever.”

“My heart breaks every time another restaurant gets rid of its no-tipping policies,” Cohen said in pre-pandemic March of the setbacks faced by her New York peers. One of New York’s most notable tip-free successes — she opened her second restaurant, Lekka Burger, last November, after nearly five years of gratuity-free at Dirt Candy — Cohen has a specific aim beyond solidarity for its own sake: creating a critical mass of tip-free restaurants.

Eliminating tipping can be considered a collective action problem: a situation where short-term self-interest conflicts with the achievement of longer-term collective benefits. If a few restaurants charge $27 for lasagna under a gratuity free-model, a nearby restaurant that charges $22 and collects tips can gain by acquiring price-sensitive customers and servers who are attracted to tipping, even if all restaurants would be better off with a fairer and more sustainable payment structure. “If you’re a no-tipping restaurant, you just look so much more expensive than the restaurant next door to you,” Cohen explained.

Some restaurateurs believe that the government could generate sustainable buy-in by offering a tax break or some kind of subsidy to tip-free establishments. “For more restaurants to be tipless, I think it would take some economic incentive,” Lee said when we spoke last year.

Bennett, for instance, said that she would “love to see” a tip-free tax break, or even a tax incentive that simply rewards restaurateurs for paying staff higher wages. It is the kind of relief that, in the wake of COVID-19, Congress has already enacted for the airline industry, and could be added to a broader aid package for restaurants. To a similar end, Danny Meyer and One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman recently penned a Time op-ed that, among other proposals, advocated paying a full minimum wage to all workers plus a cut to restaurant payroll taxes — a form of tax relief that could, perhaps, be increased for tip-free establishments.

State labor laws can cut several ways, including by reducing an employer’s incentives to rely on tipping. Forty-three states maintain different minimum wages for tipped and non-tipped employees. In states like New York with a “tipped minimum wage,” employers can pay tipped workers a lower minimum than their non-tipped colleagues (called a sub-minimum wage), as long as the employer can prove that tips make up the difference between what the employer pays and the non-tipped minimum. Seven states, including California, currently impose one minimum wage for all workers, regardless of whether or not they’re tipped, which also means that restaurant owners do not have the option of off-loading labor costs onto customers.

But other policies may work to “save tipping” by reducing some of the system’s socio-economic discordances, albeit while leaving in place tipping’s problematic and often punitive dynamics. A 2018 amendment to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act legalized unlocked tip pooling — allowing gratuities to be split between front- and back-of-house workers — in most states, as long as the entire staff is paid the full minimum wage. This means restaurateurs can equalize earnings between the front and back of house without eliminating tipping or building the entire cost of labor into menu prices. (Unlocked pooling remains illegal under New York state law even after the national statutory change.)

The idea is popular: In the Time op-ed, Jayaraman and Meyer voiced support for “a full minimum wage with shareable tips on top.” After the FLSA change, chef-owners at several prominent, moderately priced Bay Area restaurants announced that they would adopt unlocked pooling, a group that included Tanya Holland of Oakland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen. Even some of no-tipping’s earliest adopters have considered reintroducing gratuity and pooling it. “We’re looking at all of it,” former Chez Panisse general manager Jennifer Sherman told me last year during ongoing discussions to modify or replace the restaurant’s 30-year-old service charge. More recently, current GM Varun Mehra, who succeeded Sherman, said that the compensation question remains undecided as the restaurant and more affordable upstairs cafe remain closed for dining during the pandemic.

Despite tip pooling’s appeal as a relatively straightforward solution to industry-wide wage disparities, it leaves unresolved the dynamic that remains central to tipping: placing worker compensation directly in the hands of diners, a power that can be at the root of harassment, discrimination, and inequitable treatment of employees. “Shared tips are still the fruit of a poisonous tree,” says Cohen.

Lacking a more persuasive financial case, the no-tipping movement seemed unlikely to win over more supporters in the Great Before. But now, as the pandemic’s social and economic crises unfold and larger swaths of the public pay greater attention to racial and financial equity, the case for tipping may be challenged anew.

“You could argue that restaurants have a cover and ready explanation for raising menu prices,” hypothesizes Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University and an expert on tipping. “Under the circumstances, we’ve got extra cost. We’ve had to implement whatever safety protocols and we have less seating capacity. And so, the cost of business has gone up, we have to charge more. And I would think that customers would understand that.” That type of empathy and comprehension could alter what has previously comprised a longstanding undervaluation of the costs involved in eating at restaurants, and align them more closely with compensatory practices in other parts of the world.

“We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food,” said Karen Bornarth, head of workforce development at the East Harlem bakery and business incubator Hot Bread Kitchen, when we spoke last July. “And I think that those of us who love to eat out and enjoy our food need to wake up to that, and realize that maybe we have to pay a little bit more for that dinner out so that we can create a more equitable system that works better for everyone, business included.”

That there will be fewer places to leave gratuity may circuitously aid the cause for tip-free. In the New York Times, Besha Rodell wrote that the pandemic could “end the age of midpriced dining,” as the trends in Melbourne — away from “casual gastronomy found in its cafes, pubs and wine bars” and toward higher-end concepts with to-go options — could be a “bellwether for other cities around the world.” As more U.S. proprietors stick with menus designed for pickup and delivery, there may be an even stronger lurch toward limited-service, which, as the name suggests, calls into question the need for any related charges or gratuity. As Eater reported in mid-August, 150 restaurants have closed in New York alone since the onset of COVID-19.

It’s a shift that’s already happening. Both Chez Panisse and Comal have swapped separate service charges for service-inclusive pricing as the pandemic has forced them into takeout- and delivery-only. “All three of our menus are just the prices plus tax and that’s it,” Hoffman says. “There’s not the traditional tipping environment anymore... There is no restaurant server, bringing you food, bringing your bill, and then receiving the tip at the end of it, that whole dynamic is gone.” Besides, customers report greater irritation when asked to tip at counter-service restaurants, according to research conducted pre-pandemic but published in May 2020.

In the midst of widespread suffering, Hoffman isn’t quite ready for optimism about a renewed push for no-tipping. But he continues to believe in its potential. “This is incrementalism. It’s gonna be slow evolution and change, based on the [restaurants] that survive,” he says. “It’s going to be the savvy ones that make it, and let’s hope they have their heads on straight with respect to the biggest issue in restaurants, which is the relationship between pay and work.”

Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Bay Area-based writer.

Not as long as factory farming is still a part of the food supply chain, anyway

In the middle of July, Impossible: The Cookbook, a compendium of recipes designed to showcase the plant-based meat engineered by Impossible Foods, was launched with grimly impeccable timing: Four months into the COVID-19 pandemic, meat shortages and revelations about the terrible conditions in meat processing facilities, where the virus had infected more than 25,000 workers nationwide, had cast an unforgiving light on the country’s industrial meat industry.

Impossible insists there is a better, highly versatile alternative to meat consumption, embodied in recipes like Kwame Onwuachi’s Ethiopian spiced meat with hummus and toasted cashews, where crumbled Impossible Burger takes the place of more traditional ground lamb. It is one of 40 recipes from a slew of well-respected chefs that demonstrate that the only limitation to what you can do with Impossible’s faux flesh is your own imagination.

The word “vegan” is conspicuously absent from the cookbook’s introduction, which instead proclaims that the book is “for people who love meat.” This is the kind of crafty messaging that has defined Impossible since July 2016, when the company launched its signature “bleeding” ersatz beef patty: This may be vegan meat, but it is designed to appeal to actual meat eaters. It’s clearly working: By early May of this year, sales of its products had shot up 264 percent since March.

The Impossible Foods story has been told many, many times since the company launched in 2011. It’s become a juggernaut with almost $1.5 billion in funding, a grocery store footprint that is 30 times larger than it was six months ago, and like any good tech unicorn, a proper direct-to-consumer website. Given Impossible’s projected growth, expanding product line (Impossible sausage was introduced in June), and compelling pitch (“We’re making meat,” the cookbook reads, “mouthwatering, craveable, nutritious meat — from plants” that “requires 87 percent less water and 96 percent less land to produce” than a conventional burger), it is tempting to think that plant-based meat is the way of the future. Impossible: The Cookbook suggests that it is not merely a possibility, but an inevitability, the only direction in which progress points. Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown implied as much in an interview last year. “We are dead serious,” he said, “about our mission to eliminate the need for animals in the food chain by 2035.”

With a subtitle proclaiming “How to Save Our Planet, One Delicious Meal at a Time,” the cookbook — and, by extension, Impossible Foods — is promising no less than a brighter tomorrow that will be built upon patties wrought of soy and potato protein, disgorged on an endless assembly line monitored by contented, fairly compensated workers as happy cows roam on distant fields, free to live out their natural lives.

The strongest case for the vegan supply chain can be made by considering not what it is, but what it isn’t. The vegan supply chain isn’t factory farms, industrial livestock operations that house thousands of animals under one roof, often in miserable conditions that are not only inhumane but also terrible for the environment. Among other things, these farms generate about 70 percent of the country’s ammonia emissions and 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, contribute to deforestation, and create lagoons of animal waste that pollute the environment and sicken people in surrounding communities. The vegan supply chain also isn’t slaughterhouses or meat processing plants, where low-paid, often immigrant workers toil shoulder-to-shoulder in physically grueling conditions ripe for spreading COVID-19. And, although this should be obvious, the vegan supply chain is not one built upon abject animal suffering and exploitation.

Compared to that, the vegan supply chain looks pretty good, and Impossible Foods is hardly the only voice arguing that going vegan can save the planet. In 2018, the journal Science published the results of a comprehensive analysis of the environmental impact of 40,000 farms in 119 countries. It found that while meat and dairy supplied just 18 percent of food calories and 37 percent of protein, they used 83 percent of farmland — and produced 60 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. The upshot, as the study’s lead researcher told the Guardian, was that a “vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use, and water use.” And last year, a report by the United Nations body on climate science concluded that reducing meat consumption in favor of plant-based diets could have a significant positive impact on our ability to fight climate change.

But while there is very little doubt that eating less meat and dairy is better for humanity’s chances of long-term survival in our current home, the vegan supply chain on its own is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems. Like any agricultural supply chain, it is not automatically virtuous, much less neutral in its environmental impact. To examine some of the issues surrounding the vegan supply chain is to understand why a truly sustainable and ethical food supply chain is defined by more than simply what it is not. It is also to acknowledge that reforming the way we grow our food requires a truly systemic approach.

Even if we do accept that fake meat is the way of the more enlightened future, we still have to ask where, how, and by whom each of its ingredients is being grown and then processed, how the factory where it’s being mass-produced is being powered and how much greenhouse gas emissions it produces, and how much greenhouse gas is in turn produced by the different operations that supply the fake meat’s various ingredients, and packaging, and on and on forever more. Every step of the industrial supply chain — vegan or not — is fraught with these considerations, as well as more vexing questions than encouraging answers.

Take, for example, the soybean, a crop whose byproducts are ubiquitous ingredients in processed foods, both vegan and otherwise. The vast majority of the world’s soy — over 70 percent — is grown for livestock feed, which is why the growing demand for meat, particularly in China, has helped to double global soy production in the past two decades. It is soy grown for livestock feed, not vegan foods, that is a driver of deforestation in South America and its concomitant displacement of Indigenous communities and small farmers.

While only a tiny percentage of soy grown worldwide is for human consumption, the presence of soy in many vegan processed foods means that it is still necessary to ask where that soy comes from, and to question the practices used to grow it. Impossible Foods itself has been criticized for its use of soy, specifically the genetically modified soy in its burger. A host of controversies surrounds GMO soy, but Impossible Foods has defended its GMO ingredients by pointing out that its use of genetically modified soy is more environmentally sustainable than harvesting non-GMO soy, and, moreover, is safe for human consumption.

Along with soy, palm oil and cashews are ingredients that regularly appear in many vegan foods. Increasing demand for both presents a conundrum for anyone concerned about sustainable eating. Palm oil shows up in about 50 percent of consumer goods, including processed vegan foods like margarine, cookies, and ice cream. Palm oil plantations have been linked to numerous environmental and human rights issues, such as biodiversity loss and deforestation, and human rights abuses in Thailand and Indonesia.

The cashew, a foundational ingredient in many vegan dairy products, has been linked to human rights violations in Vietnam, the world’s leading cashew exporter. While some of the more egregious practices, such as the use of forced labor at processing facilities, have been curbed, the difficulties of tracking the cashew supply chain (cashews are often grown in one country, processed in another) mean that it’s possible for worker abuses, such as poverty-line wages and the use of child labor, to go undetected. And the cashew isn’t the only nut with issues: Almond production, for example, requires huge amounts of water, a problem exacerbated by the surging market for almond milk products.

In other words, no matter the crop being grown, there is the persistent issue of how farm laborers and the land they work are mistreated: Whether it is agricultural slavery on Florida tomato farms or illegal deforestation driven by Mexico’s growing avocado trade — which has also attracted the involvement and attendant violence of organized crime — the produce industry is rife with its own exploitative and abusive practices. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the greenhouse gas emissions produced by plant-based agriculture, whether from artificial fertilizers or practices such as tilling the fields or the transport of produce around the globe.

To look at an Impossible Burger, or any industrial food, is to see a myriad of potentially troublesome links in the supply chain. Which is not to say that it’s impossible, so to speak, to have an ethical and sustainable supply chain. But the demands of capitalism — specifically that for food produced cheaply and at great volume in order to yield a profit — frequently undermine that goal. It’s a challenge that is further compounded by the imperative to feed a growing global population, and the varying standards for what it actually means to be ethical and sustainable at every level of the supply chain, vegan or not. Although switching to plant-based meat offers numerous environmental benefits, the companies that make it must find a way to reconcile the need to scale and make money with the practice of how to do so responsibly.

Even if the Impossible promise turns out to be true, that we can indeed have a perfectly virtuous vegan supply chain engineered by a hegemonic tech company, there is still one inconvenient fact: For any number of reasons — whether cultural or economic — the majority of people on the planet prefer to eat meat and will not give it up willingly, and that will remain the case perhaps even after plant-based meat is a truly perfect simulacrum of the real thing.

There are emerging alternatives. While they aren’t vegan, they do have the potential to accomplish the same goals as plant-based meat, perhaps some even more successfully. The need to create more sustainable alternatives to meat, combined with the preference of many people to continue eating it, has created a potentially lucrative opening for the cell-based, or cultured meat industry, whose inherent promise is meat without all of its accompanying demons. The industry began to get attention in 2013, when a Maastricht University professor named Mark Post successfully made a burger from cow stem cells he had grown into strips of muscle fiber. Since then, a number of cultured meat startups have popped up around the world, growing everything from meatballs to gelatin to seafood. Some observers are bullish about the industry’s potential: Last year, the consulting firm Kearney released a report predicting that by 2040, 60 percent of the world’s meat will be lab-grown or plant-based.

Cultured meat offers many potential advantages over both conventional and vegan meat, sustainability-wise: Whereas similar ingredients are used to produce both conventional and vegan meat (i.e. soy, potatoes, wheat, and water), cultured meat needs only a diet consisting predominantly of amino acids and glucose — ingredients grown in labs, rather than in resource-intensive fields.

The challenge, though, is producing it at scale, and doing so affordably; according to the Kearney report, the cost of cultured meat was $80 per 100 grams in 2018, versus conventional beef’s 80 cents per 100 grams (a number that reflects the way the industrial meat industry benefits from cheap grain, cheap labor, and direct and indirect government subsidies). While industry experts forecast that cost will be cut to less than $4 per 100 grams in the next 12 years, there are still plenty of hurdles to overcome, such as regulatory approvals and consumer acceptance.

Cultured meat may indeed be one way toward a more environmentally sustainable future, but that future remains relatively distant and highly speculative. For now, perhaps the least terrible option for recalcitrant meat eaters who care about the environment and have the privilege of choice is to support the small, independent farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices. Nearly 100 percent of most livestock raised for consumption lives on factory farms. There’s little doubt that small farms can be a more sustainable alternative — one that should be combined with an even more sustainable alternative, which is just to eat less meat. Decreased consumption leads to decreased demand and, in turn, to decreased production. But given that global meat production is projected to be 16 percent higher in 2025 than it was a decade prior, this seems as unrealistic as the likelihood of McDonald’s rolling out cell-cultured Big Macs in time for Christmas.

Rather than looking at the sustainable food supply chain of the future as an all-or-nothing scenario — one that either involves animal products or doesn’t — it’s perhaps more practical to take a holistic view, one that acknowledges the dizzying complexities of food production, as well as the varying definitions and measures of “sustainability.” Put another way, there is no single correct approach to fixing our problems, something illustrated by a 2017 study about the potential of organic agriculture to create a more sustainable food system. A 100 percent conversion to organic agriculture wouldn’t do it, the study found — among other problems, organic farming would require more farmland than its conventional counterpart. A more sustainable scenario, the study concluded, would combine organic agriculture with reductions in food waste and the amount of food used for livestock, along with a corresponding reduction in the production and consumption of meat.

Even supposing there is no magic bullet, there does seem to be one obvious thing we could do to build a more sustainable supply chain: stop factory farming. Because while livestock farming can be sustainable and even ethical, particularly if it’s done on a smaller scale and using practices that favor the environment and human and animal welfare, there is nothing sustainable about the industrial livestock industry. And if climate change, environmental degradation, and worker and animal abuses haven’t given us reasons enough to find a better way forward, then the COVID-19 pandemic has provided yet another compelling reason by highlighting the ways that factory farms, with their overcrowded, unsanitary conditions ripe for spreading disease and promoting antibiotic resistance, may put us at risk for future pandemics.

The call to end factory farming is gaining momentum: Last December, Sen. Cory Booker introduced legislation that would place a moratorium on large industrial animal operations and phase out the biggest ones by 2040. Crucially, the proposed bill also calls for strengthening protections for the family farmers and ranchers who cannot compete with these large-scale operations and are often forced into exploitative contracts with the corporations that control the meat industry.

This kind of support for small, independent farmers is at the heart of what the ethical and sustainable supply chain of the future entails: It is not so much about vegan eating as it is about creating systems that enable farming that is humane for the environment, people, and animals. Plant-based meat can be part of that, and should be — provided that the companies that manufacture it are actively invested in creating a system whose concept of ethics and sustainability goes beyond being simply the lesser of two evils.

Restaurants have been a driving force in gentrification for decades. Here’s how not to be.

Shortly after the news broke that Sqirl, one of LA’s most popular restaurants, had been serving jam from buckets that developed mold, it became clear that food handling was just one of Sqirl’s issues. Jessica Koslow was accused of taking credit for her employees’ contributions and, then, the spotlight turned to comments she had made about Sqirl’s Virgil Village neighborhood years ago. Alongside moldy jam, there was another issue that could no longer be ignored: Koslow was unapologetic about her restaurant’s role in the area’s gentrification.

Sqirl opened in 2011 in Virgil Village, a pocket of Los Angeles populated by Salvadoran churches, Ecuadorian restaurants, and auto garages. Rent for the 800-square-foot space, by Koslow’s admission, was incredibly cheap. “My cheat is this shitty corner on Virgil and Marathon,” she said in 2016. “My cheat is like, I pay $2 per square foot.” Soon after opening, the restaurant’s grain bowls and $15 jars of seasonal jam drew lines of customers. The notion that Sqirl was the first desirable business in a neighborhood populated mostly by Central Americans became a part of the restaurant’s origin story: On another occasion, Koslow described the location as being “on a street no one knew about, in a neighborhood no one cared about.”

“There’s an image that the restaurant is looking to cultivate,” former Sqirl sous chef Gabe Rios recently told the LAnd magazine. “And over time, the image became very clearly not where the community was, but where it was going.” But against the backdrop of this summer’s Black Lives Matter movement and calls to support BIPOC-owned businesses, an outwardly progressive restaurant could no longer support gentrification without scrutiny.

Gentrification is the process by which more affluent people and businesses move into a neighborhood, effectively changing the character of that neighborhood by creating a rent gap between existing land values and potential ones. (A 1976 study by the Urban Land Institute described gentrifiers as those “establishing a new investment climate” in an area.) The change can take place over decades, and while the technical definition of gentrification doesn’t include race, gentrification in the United States by and large impacts Black and Latinx communities who are displaced by wealthier white people. The pattern repeats itself in neighborhoods in nearly every city: Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights in New York, Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, the Old Fourth Ward in Atlanta, West Philadelphia, and so on.

The forces that drive gentrification are based in policy, many of them racist. When it was founded in 1934, the Federal Housing Administration would deny mortgage insurance in Black neighborhoods, a process that became known as redlining. Those measures essentially prevented Black people from owning their homes, making it easy for them to be pushed out, and although the 1968 Fair Housing Act made redlining by the FHA illegal, its basic upshot — a systematic denial of services to selected groups of people — still happens in the public and private sectors.

Elsewhere, zoning regulations that once enforced segregation have been changed to bring new people to a neighborhood. But often, they follow similar redlining measures and disproportionately up-zone, or add population density, to minority neighborhoods, inviting in more outsiders while decreasing the amount of rent-stabilized or low-income housing as demand goes up. Other current policies that support gentrification come in the form of tax abatements that lure in new income-eligible homebuyers (who again, can pass an often racist mortgage and lending process), new development, and new businesses at the expense of those longer standing.

While gentrification was happening in cities throughout the 20th century, the cycle we’re currently in started in the 1990s, when members of the white creative class were compelled to move back to cities by low rents and the promise of cultural capital, spurring a reversal of white flight described by theorists like Richard Florida as “urban revitalization.” As these new residents moved in, businesses that catered to them soon followed; the initial third-wave coffee shop or destination restaurant or fake dive bar then signaled to other outsiders that the neighborhood had appealing amenities. More outsiders moved in, and more restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques, and fancy bars followed, the cycle repeating itself over and over again in urban neighborhoods across America. “‘Foodie’ culture often serves as gentrification’s leading edge,” according to a CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute brief, “by signifying that a community is ripe for investment.”

But, while restaurants have been beneficiaries of this process, in recent years, some have taken an even bigger role in neighborhood shifts. As developers in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta recognized the cultural appeal of restaurants, they began courting chefs to open restaurants as flagship tenants, often expressly to attract new residents from outside the community. Developers and policymakers may describe these investments as revitalization, but when “revitalization” replaces the people who live in a place with wealthier white residents, prohibiting them from enjoying any of the new investment in the neighborhood, it’s gentrification. “Gentrification happens from the top, down,” Devita Davison, founder of FoodLab Detroit, says. “Revitalization, to me, is change in the community from the bottom, up. And what that means is that change is controlled by the people who live there. Gentrification is a tool used by the people who want to live there. They’re different things.”

Restaurateurs haven’t paid enough attention to gentrification, and restaurants that otherwise espouse liberal philosophies, like fair wages and ethical sourcing, are often less cognizant of how they may contribute to displacement. In the restaurant business, with its slim margins, operators likely want a mix of customers; destination diners mean a potentially infinite customer base. Owners might assume that neighbors will appreciate having a nice restaurant nearby, but its physical existence doesn’t equal accessibility to the people that live there. Compounding the problem, restaurants that move into a community without making any attempt to be for the community are nonetheless deemed “approachable neighborhood restaurants” by their peers and media — also, largely, outsiders to the neighborhood in question. Sqirl, for example, was praised for its accessible menu of moderately priced, unfussy breakfast foods, not whether it had been embraced by its immediate neighbors.

If these past months have been good for anything, it’s taking stock of the ways we can all do better. Restaurants will continue to seek out locations in neighborhoods with low rents, and while they can’t on their own reverse the policies that stack affordable rents in gentrifying communities of color, they can make strides to be actually accessible to the wider community and not harbingers of displacement. This work is essential. “Gentrification,” says Davison, “is a social justice issue.”

Accessibility should be a goal of neighborhood restaurants. Many restaurateurs recognize the value of affordable pricing — having an entree or two under $10, or $2 happy hour beers — but they overlook the other ways a restaurant should define “accessible.” Ultimately, restaurants should aim to become third places for the wider neighborhood. “With the call for change within our communities and government institutions, we also need change to come from within the restaurant industry,” Amethyst Ganaway wrote on Eater in June 2020, during the first weeks of the Black Lives Matter protest movement. “New third places should be created, tearing down old racist and classist ideologies and putting systems in place that represent true inclusivity and compassion.”

To become this kind of third place, restaurateurs need to be aware of the face they present to the community. A new business with an entirely white staff isn’t going to appear welcoming to a community of Black and Latinx residents who may already be concerned about displacement. Restaurants should strive to hire locally for both back of house and front of house. “A gentrifying restaurant that’s all white — or looks all white from its front of house staff — in a community of color can do things very differently,” says Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. “[Instead, they can] rely on that community of color as clients rather than bring in a community of consumers from outside of the neighborhood.”

Jayaraman believes that investing in the community will only help a restaurant in the long run. Start “thinking about your workers as consumers, thinking about their families as consumers, thinking about their community as consumers,” she says. With this kind of thinking, there are “bottom-line benefits,” like a built-in customer base and, if those hired from the community are paid as well as they should be, less turnover.

Restaurateurs need to understand who lives in a community in order to serve it, and this takes work. Kamau Franklin, founder of the Atlanta-based Community Movement Builders collective, encourages restaurateurs to dialogue with neighborhood associations and community groups about what the restaurant’s role should be. Restaurateurs and restaurant organizations should be “looking at what those neighborhoods continually look like, talking to the leadership of folks in those neighborhoods, and trying to figure out what those folks are saying they need.”

At a bare minimum, a restaurant should respect a community’s culture. In her 2019 essay “Dear Gentrifiers,” Ryan Shepard describes the time she dined at a new restaurant in a historically Black D.C. neighborhood with a cocktail menu that seemed to reference the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 2018, a white woman opened a restaurant in Crown Heights, a gentrifying neighborhood of Brooklyn, and in a press release characterized the building as “a long-vacant corner bodega (with a rumored backroom illegal gun shop to boot)” and boasted about “a bullet hole-ridden wall” (it was more likely cosmetic damage). That kind of insensitivity, as Shepard writes, shows how restaurant owners “are all too happy to co-opt Black urban spaces or culture (and often, cheaper property values) to make a profit, all while disrespecting, disregarding, and displacing the very people whose communities they’re in.”

Mindful community involvement from groups of restaurant owners, hopefully, can lead to deeper policy change. The CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute urges food advocates and community activists to take part in neighborhood planning meetings so that they can oppose zoning changes that may disadvantage existing businesses. With more awareness of the forces that threaten neighborhoods, they can lobby for the kinds of policy that keep communities intact.

Greater recognition of restaurants’ capacity to fuel gentrification is starting to happen. In recent weeks, Koslow’s role in the changing demographics of Virgil Village was scrutinized, most astutely by the LAnd article co-written by Samanta Helou Hernandez, the founder of This Side of Hoover, an Instagram account that documents gentrification in Virgil Village. The account, which has more than 8,500 followers, acknowledges the existing community and its resilience as new residents and construction move in post-Sqirl. And as Black Lives Matter generated calls to pour money into Black communities, other websites and Instagram accounts that similarly amplified POC-owned neighborhood businesses gained new support. That increased awareness translated into a meaningful response: The spotlights and lists in June boosted sales at Black-owned businesses, including restaurants in gentrifying neighborhoods, such as Peaches Hot House in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood.

This support needs to outlast the summer. And just as food media once galvanized the Sqirls of the world, it can lift up the longstanding restaurants in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, and more thoughtfully question the restaurateurs who declare their businesses to be neighborhood restaurants. “[Journalists should be] asking, ‘Do you think about what your role is in terms of community?’ and not accepting a standard answer like, ‘We’re going to help turn this community around,’” Franklin says. “I think there is this plethora of set answers that folks in business like to give, which is, ‘We’re a part of the community fabric and dynamic.’ Too many times they get away with it because people don’t ask the follow-up questions.”

In thinking about a future with truly accessible restaurants, ones that aren’t signposts of gentrification, there are lessons to take from those leading the charge right now. Restaurants in cities from NYC to Los Angeles to Providence have transformed their spaces into third places for protesters. White restaurant owners, like Greg Baxtrom of Maison Yaki in NYC, are turning over their restaurant spaces to support Black businesses. Chefs like Josef Centeno in Los Angeles are using their skills to feed hospital employees and out-of-work restaurant workers and not asking for money in return. These are restaurants that have reverted to their first purpose: feeding the community.

Of course, some were doing this work long before the pandemic and protests. “I think community work is something that is just so overlooked,” Zenat Begum, owner of the five-year-old Playground Coffee Shop in Bed-Stuy, told Eater. “It wasn’t until COVID that we were able to get a platform to really start talking about a lot of the stuff that we have done in the last five years.”

Before the pandemic, Playground offered programming like yoga classes and readings; when the pandemic began, it set up community fridges. In nearby Bushwick, Francesca Chaney opened her vegan cafe Sol Sips with sliding-scale brunches and a message that vegan food was for Black people, too. These restaurants were opened by people with meaningful roots in their neighborhoods, not outsiders. But if outsiders must open in gentrifying neighborhoods, these are the examples they should look to.

For these restaurants, and the models that have emerged during the pandemic, profit is secondary. As long as restaurants are operating under capitalism, they will struggle to be completely compatible with the support of Black and Latinx communities in gentrifying neighborhoods: When profitability is at the forefront, anything else becomes disposable, Davison says.

Restaurants can’t fix gentrification, but no one is asking them to; few are calling for restaurants to stop opening in gentrifying neighborhoods. Changes to policies that favor wealthy homeowners over lower-income residents and new developments over investment in community are the only ways to meaningfully curb gentrification. What restaurant owners can and should do to support that is incorporate the community into their visions.

“These people are customers, too,” Franklin says, referring to the people who live in neighborhoods long before they become targets for investment. When considering opening a new restaurant, restaurateurs shouldn’t be driven by “what they think is going to be the best for them in five years or 10 years based on their projection for what’s happening to the community. Instead, it takes looking at people like they’re human beings, like they matter, like they should have a role and a say.” Which, really, should have been the way restaurants operated all along.

Building an equitable restaurant — where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and work without discrimination — will require undoing the way most restaurants are run

The only ethical restaurant I have ever heard of is on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I have never watched the show, but my partner has excitedly explained this particular vision of utopia to me at least three times. The restaurant is named Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and exists in New Orleans in the 24th century, on an Earth that has abolished prejudice, money, and hunger. Though you could press a button and conjure any ingredient, the aforementioned Sisko still finds a desire to provide hospitality, so every night he cooks gumbo and jambalaya and presumably gives it away for free, just because he wants to.

We have not figured out how to replicate matter, nor have we abolished money, so even in our most progressive and sustainable restaurants, the food has to come from somewhere and must be paid for by someone. But we all know the restaurant world has more immediate problems than the lack of a Star Trek society. Building an equitable restaurant, a place where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and can work in an anti-discriminatory environment, is going to take a near-undoing of the way most restaurants are run.

Currently, most restaurants, whether they are high-end or hole-in-the-wall, family-owned or corporate-run, operate in much the same way. There is an owner, or owners, who either own the property the restaurant is on or lease it from a landlord. Sometimes the chef is also the owner, or sometimes they are hired by the owner. In the kitchen, there is a hierarchy. It may not always look like the traditional French brigade system, with its focus on militaristic efficiency, but the chef manages, and makes more money than, the line cooks. In the back of the house, dishwashers, bussers, and cooks are often paid the minimum wage, while in the front of the house, in most U.S. states, servers and bartenders are paid lower wages with the expectation that customers will make up the difference in tips. Many states permit employees to be fired at will. And the lower down the line you are, the less likely it is you’ll be making decisions about how your workplace functions.

It’s not glib to say that eradicating capitalism is the surest way to build equitable restaurants. Living in a country that provided universal health care, federally mandated paid child leave and sick leave, and a living minimum wage, as well as incentivized sustainable farming, encouraged unions, and got rid of at-will employment, would go a long way toward creating environments within restaurants (and all businesses) where workers had power over their own livelihood.

But that is a tall order for restaurants to take on alone, so barring revolution (though fingers crossed), upending everything we assume about how restaurants are run is the necessary step toward an actually ethical restaurant industry. Other options already exist — nonprofits, workers collectives, unions, volunteer-run restaurants — that create models for a fairer and more just workplace. But what does it even mean to be an equitable restaurant? And can simply changing the ownership structure provide that?

Kirk Vartan, co-owner of A Slice of New York pizzerias in the Bay Area, understands that phrases like “collectively owned” or “workers cooperative” can inspire panic and confusion. It’s like, what, everyone has to vote every time you place a produce order? Is it going to lead to the drama of the Park Slope Food Coop deciding whether or not to carry Israeli products? “People think that it’s hippies, and everyone’s going to smoke weed, and sit around in a circle and just love and peace, and whatever,” he tells Eater. “And the reality is, this is a very real business model.”

Vartan actually took inspiration from, of all places, the corporate world. While working for NBC, he was given stock options. “It’s not a lot of stock. It’s like this little itty-bitty micro-bit of the company. But it changes your attitude when you actually own part of it,” he says. After leaving to start a New York-style pizza shop in San Jose, he was determined to create a similar business structure. He says his employee-owned model was at first discouraged by a corporate attorney, who said it wouldn’t work for a restaurant. But Vartan continued to bring it up with employees, and eventually worked with Project Equity, an organization that advocates for and consults with companies to pivot to employee-owned models, to become a worker cooperative.

A Slice of New York allows employees to become co-owners after they’ve spent at least a year at the company; as of now, about 45 percent of the employees are co-owners. Operationally, the model doesn’t change much. There are shift managers who make the immediate calls about who does what day-to-day, and Vartan remains the general manager. The restaurant’s governance is what’s really affected: Every co-owner has an equal share of the business and a vote on a board. Board members all have an equal say in decisions about benefits, safety procedures, menu changes, and issues dealing with the general financial wellbeing of the company. “In a traditional ownership model, whatever is not spent on people goes to an individual,” Vartan says. Instead, in a cooperative, members decide how to spend, save, or split profits, “so there’s no incentive to try and not take care of the people immediately.”

Vartan credits the co-op model with helping A Slice of New York both stay in business and keep employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The worker-owners voted to mandate masks and social distancing policies weeks before the state did, and to do away with slices, even though they were a huge part of the business, because they’d be harder to serve safely. “We did that not because we were trying to maximize our profit. We did that because we were trying to maximize the safety of our team,” says Vartan. “People are seeing and making decisions, not just [thinking] ‘I want this.’ It’s, ‘How are we taking care of each other? How are we taking care of the business?’ And that mindset is why this is the right model going forward.”

There is no one way to be a co-op. Owners can decide how long employees must be at the company before they’re eligible to become a co-owner, how much it costs to buy in, how much of the profits to split, and how much to save for a rainy day. But the ability for those questions to be a conversation, and not a top-down mandate, is enticing. The model “increases the likelihood that the business will stay locally owned and operated, gives workers a greater equity and turns what might otherwise be a low-paying blue-collar job into a more rewarding career,” writes Melissa Lang in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cara Dudzic, co-owner of the cooperational Charmington’s cafe in Baltimore, says the restaurant’s worker-owned setup means employees often stay for years in an industry where the standard is months, and they have the opportunity to buy into health care benefits, something most restaurant jobs don’t offer. “What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

No matter how kindly run and community-focused a restaurant’s structure is, wages are often the sticking point. After all, it’s a job; getting paid is the goal. And as much as co-op or nonprofit structures help with the overall work culture, they do not solve the problem so many restaurants face: It costs money to pay people a living wage. The industry typically relies on tipped wages for servers, which allows restaurant owners to pass the burden of ensuring servers make a living wage onto customers. Everyone admits it’s a bad (and racist) system. But doing away with tipping has proven to be a hard sell for customers and workers alike. Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants famously ended tipping, initially faced customer sticker shock, and staff leaving because they could make more with tips than on an hourly wage. The group reinstated tipping this June.

Vartan says employees at A Slice of New York start at $16.50 an hour, $4.50 above California’s minimum wage (and almost a dollar over San Francisco’s), because, since no one owner is trying to make a profit above anyone else, wages can be lifted across the board. And employees there can still accept tips. But becoming a member of a cooperative does require buying into a long-term plan, in an industry that has by design courted short-term commitment; giving up a portion of one’s wages to be part of a worker-owned collective, or forgoing $300 a night in tips so everyone can make $15 an hour, is not as enticing if you’re not planning on being there long. Even for longer-term employees, given the relentless nature of the work, it’s hard to give up the “every man for himself” mentality, especially during an unprecedented recession.

Charmington’s began with 11 partners in 2010, and is now down to just three. “Some people hired as regular staff did want buy-in, and did by accepting a few hours of compensation as shares rather than wages every pay period,” Dudzic says. But other staff didn’t want to forgo wages, didn’t plan on staying in food service that long, or just didn’t have the time or energy for the “fairly stressful early meetings and email chains” that being a co-owner of a restaurant entail. “The main thing that gets in the way of providing everything we want is income,” she says, noting that the opening of a food hall a few blocks away in 2016 has continued to cut into their lunch business. Sales being what they are, Charmington’s base wage is the Maryland minimum wage of $11 an hour. The reality is, even though Charmington’s is paying as much as it can while ensuring it can stay afloat, workers could probably make more elsewhere.

Wage equity is part of a larger conversation among the industry as a whole about creating a better future for restaurants: Regardless of what the rest of the business model looks like, it’s something that, should the owners desire, can be solved almost immediately. “American society or business schools say it’s profits over everything, but we’re always saying that it’s community over profits,” says Yajaira Saavedra, co-owner of La Morada in the Bronx. To that end, every employee of the restaurant — regardless of their role — receives the same wage. For a long time, that wage was $17 an hour, but this summer, it was boosted to $20 with a grant from the city.

La Morada, it should be noted, is not a co-op — it’s owned by a family of undocumented people, and has made a name for itself as not just a restaurant, but a community center and haven for immigrants and other undocumented people. Saavedra says that prioritizing fair wages and treatment has led to high retention rates among workers and a loyal following in the community, which is more important to Saavedra than taking home a bigger cut of the profits. “Even if we [close], we want to make sure that the community is stable, and we have fought for the better,” she says. “And we left it in a better standing than when we were there.”

In his book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber, an owner of Blue Hill Farm and the longtime chef at its two associated restaurants, quotes naturalist John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Which is to say, when it comes to restaurants, it’s hard to change one thing unless you’re changing everything.

“The organic movement was about an organism, why everything is connected,” Barber says in an interview. “It got dumbed down into, do you use pesticides or not? But really, the origins of the organic movement were about the community which produced your food, the community that got the food to you, and the community that was cooking the food and enjoying it together.” It isn’t organic unless the humans involved aren’t being exploited. It doesn’t matter if your steak was grass-fed if the person who butchered it can’t afford rent.

The ethics of Blue Hill come at a price — a socially distanced picnic at the fine dining Blue Hill at Stone Barns currently costs $195 a person. In any restaurant, Barber explains, “it’s rent, food costs, employee/insurance costs,” and while there may be wiggle room, a lot of those costs are set. “When I talk about buying ingredients that are treating the environment right, rightfully so, a lot of chefs are like, ‘Well, I would love to do that, but I literally don’t have room in the budget to be doing that like Blue Hill does.’” (Weeks after we spoke, Barber announced that he plans to step away from chef duties, and pivot both Stone Barns and the NYC location of Blue Hill to a chef-in-residence program that he hopes will help combat “racial and gender inequities” in the industry, something he and Blue Hill have been criticized for perpetuating, most recently by chef Preeti Mistry).

Of course, not every meal can realistically be $195 per person. The cost of providing every employee with a living wage and benefits — not to mention paying rent and insurance, and serving a good product affordable enough for most people — is nearly impossible with the way restaurants, co-op or not, must run. Vartan says about 45 percent of A Slice of New York’s costs are labor costs, which he describes as one of a restaurant’s three knobs; the other two are quality of food and pricing. “We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing,” he says. Yet, he’s gotten complaints that his pizza is more expensive than a pie you could get at Pizza Hut. No matter how much better his product, or better-treated his employees, some customers aren’t willing to, or flat out can’t, afford it.

The problem of “good” food being prohibitively expensive can’t be completely solved by restaurateurs turning those knobs. Depressed wages and inflation are problems for everyone, not just restaurant workers. And if it isn’t going to be addressed by an increased minimum wage, it has to come from customers rethinking their own priorities where able. Which many of them are doing.

The COVID moment has perhaps opened some diners’ eyes to just how precarious things have been for food-service workers. In the short term, consumers are stepping up and filling gaps by donating to GoFundMes, buying gift cards, or just tipping well. Elsewhere, mutual aid efforts aimed to address the widespread hunger caused by the pandemic and the recession have inspired many to think critically about what role restaurants should play in that aid. During the pandemic, La Morada has served 1,000 free hot meals a day, and used its longstanding relationships with local farmers to help solve the problems of food waste and hunger. “Small farmers, organizations we have those relationships with ... now trust us to actually do the mutual aid work and have volunteered either their time or their produce,” Saavedra says.

For many diners, the value of eating out is now not just about the immediate experience, but everything, including the people, that make it what it is. It’s always been that way to a certain extent — the way that $195 Blue Hill meal is worth it not just because the food tastes good, but the knowledge that it was grown thoughtfully, cooked by experts, and served to you in a perfect pastoral setting. Now, “value” can include not just customer experience, but the knowledge that employee well-being is part of the plan.

What the pandemic has strengthened, and what anyone who has ever felt the comfort of having a local knows, is the idea of a restaurant as a community. The risk of losing the coffee shop where you read the paper every Saturday, or your favorite date spot, or the bar where the bartenders always give you a shot for the road, has galvanized people within the restaurant industry to think through what a better future looks like, and those outside of it to care as much about the people working at the restaurant as the restaurant itself. “Once you are attuned and aware of it, it becomes part of the fabric of the culture,” says Barber. “It doesn’t go back.”

It is with that momentum that models like workers collectives, mutual aid, and legislation advocacy can thrive. As food-service businesses have been struggling through the pandemic, “worker co-op models are being pitched to municipalities, on the basis of maintaining wealth and equity for oppressed communities,” says Jeff Noven, executive director of the nonprofit grocery store Berkeley Student Food Collective. The student food collective is a cooperative success story, but its unique place within the university community means many of its methods are not replicable. Most obviously it operates without the burden of labor costs: Noven is the only full-time employee, with his and four part-time employees’ salaries subsidized by grants. Most of the labor comes from 150 volunteers, who elect the board from within that membership. That can’t be the path forward for the vast majority of restaurants.

There’s also the issue that many groups doing the work might not be eligible for government aid or alternative business models. For La Morada, applying to be a co-op or a nonprofit requires citizenship paperwork they don’t have, and while according to Harvard Law School, federal law doesn’t “expressly prohibit undocumented immigrants from working for a business that they own,” the laws are also pretty unsettled. Saavedra says they also had issues converting to a soup kitchen, as they couldn’t apply for 501(c)(3) status. But that hasn’t stopped La Morada from its commitment to mutual aid. “We still have all the same values,” says Saavedra. “You don’t necessarily need [to be] a co-op or a not-for-profit tax. You carry ethical work.”

Instead, there are other ways for businesses to adopt parts of the co-op model, or other equitable models, that work for them, and those actions are already in progress. The unionization push throughout restaurants and grocery stores continues to advocate for better working conditions, especially as many were deemed “essential workers” as lockdowns began in March. Restaurants continue to do away with tipping, and to incorporate mutual aid into their business models. But everything restaurants can do on their own is a few drops in a bucket compared to what government support in the form of things like universal health care, or real aid for small businesses, could achieve. Vartan is working with local legislators to incentivize businesses to organize as workers collectives, and noted the 2018 Main Street Employees Ownership Act as a step toward federal support. And restaurant workers continue to push and protest for things like a fair minimum wage, federally mandated sick leave, and support for independent restaurants struggling during the pandemic.

Prioritizing community over capitalism has always been an option. But now, more people than ever have a desire to seek out food made in equitable spaces, to learn about the inner workings of their favorite restaurants and see how they can best support them, or just leave a 30 percent tip because they know times are tough. That won’t go away once we have a vaccine.

Sustained change will take a greater understanding of what “equity” means, and what it will require from both restaurants and customers. As bad as the pandemic has been, it has put us in a great position to do that sort of reevaluation, and reimagine a restaurant as a place where success doesn’t mean profit, but rather that the whole community, farm-to-table, is cared for. And to maybe even fight for a day when it won’t be the responsibility of restaurants to solve these problems at all.

23 chefs, activists, restaurant owners, documentarians, and workers look into their crystal balls to envision: What would a utopian restaurant industry look like in five years?

The realities of the COVID-19 pandemic — which has devastated the restaurant industry and irreparably altered the lives of everyone who works in it — has forced a painful, impossibly forward-looking conversation to the front of people’s minds: How will the restaurant industry rebuild?

It’s not a premature or needlessly pessimistic question; the restaurant industry has been held together by a frayed thread since long before the pandemic. Recent months have revealed how precarious the livelihoods are of a largely uninsured and often undocumented workforce; the extent to which independent restaurant owners face paying unforgiving rents; and how deeply diners have been encouraged to devalue the labor that goes into growing, transporting, cooking, and serving their food. The culture of restaurants, too — long known to harbor a cartoonishly masculine, often hostile environment — came under a fresh round of scrutiny, years after the beginning of #MeToo, as a summer of social justice protests rooted in the Black Lives Matter movement inspired more and more restaurant employees to publicly expose racist, sexist, and abusive work environments.

The term “reckoning” has been bandied about in response to the intertwined awakenings, but this is just the beginning. In fact, to some, it’s an opportunity. The restaurant industry’s precarious position — one where survival is not guaranteed — places it in a position to actively imagine the terms of its own rebirth.

Eater asked 23 leaders to predict what a revitalized restaurant industry would (and should) look like five years from now, in (a presumably post-COVID vaccine) 2025. The images can feel utopian: Scenes of community-based food systems from the grower on down, of dining rooms and kitchens where every employee has access to health care and a living wage, of flexible business models that encourage creativity but place the needs of the immediate community first. But as these voices reveal, there’s an army of chefs, activists, restaurant owners, documentarians, and workers armed with big ideas and even bigger expectations. And they’re already making it happen.

The untapped promise of America’s restaurants means they are worth saving. Here’s how.

First, burn it all down…

“The tastiest, healthiest food, made from responsibly produced ingredients, that’s affordable to all, made by a well-paid, well-trained staff that are not overworked, will remain a pie in the sky unless we undergo nothing short of a revolution. As long as the Farm Bill incentivizes food that makes us ill; as long as our governmental policies perpetuate abuse and oppression of Black people, the Indigenous, immigrants, women, and the poor; as long as our government continues to allow corporations to destroy the environment, vast systemic improvements to the restaurant industry will not happen, and the sustainable food movement will only significantly benefit the rich.” — Bun Lai, chef/owner of Miya’s in New Haven, Connecticut, the first sustainable sushi restaurant in the world

“Dismantling of the brigade system. Dismantling of a singular concept driven by the face of a chef. Representation in a restaurant of the people that work there, not just a brand of a chef or a restaurant group... More needs to be done on transparency in pay at restaurants. Not just tipping, which needs to go away. It’s racist, it’s classist. It’s really about passing the buck, and that’s what this industry is about: never really taking responsibility 100 percent.” — Eric Rivera, chef/owner of Addo in Seattle

…to create a new, fair, inclusive system…

“Restaurants are creating a surplus of disadvantages for people that live at or below a certain poverty line. The issue of solving restaurants is the issue of solving hunger ... [and] the vast majority of the people who have those issues work in restaurants. Most chefs don’t eat the quality of the food in which they sell because of the hours in which they have to work to make ends meet to be successful. Servers who work in these restaurants often aren’t treated properly or make enough money to take care of themselves.” — Houston chef Jonny Rhodes, who will close his fine-dining restaurant Indigo in 2021 to focus on his grocery store and farm

“We need to totally redesign the way we think about service and compensation. I would love it if there was a world where all of the porters and dishwashers had health insurance. If we could just get the diner accustomed to what that actually looks like, in terms of menu prices. Dining out ethically means you’re going to be paying a lot more than you ever thought you would. There are hidden costs to that hamburger. That unpaid, invisible labor. I want to see a world where working at a restaurant is given respect and you get health insurance and you make a living wage. It would be great if they could be paid what they actually contribute to society, which is so much.”— Sohla El-Waylly, assistant food editor at Bon Appétit

“This industry was really built off slavery, essentially. That’s why it was a profitable business. Because they didn’t have to pay for labor. They didn’t have to pay servers. They didn’t have to pay their cooks. They just had to pay for their food. So I think taking a hard look at this industry, and what it’s really going to take to change is the whole industry waking up to that narrative. That’s not going to be easy. I’m not saying that I have the answers, but that’s what I would like to see and I hope we can figure out a way to get there together.” — Washington, D.C.-based chef Kwame Onwuachi

“I think workers will be paid and treated as the professionals that they are and that will result in a better bottom line for employers, less turnover, and a better dining experience for customers. It will be a world in which everybody gets a full, fair livable minimum wage. Nobody’s living off of tips as a part of their base wage, and that dramatically reduces sexual harassment in the industry and racial inequality. It will mean that the industry would have moved away from the legacy of slavery and toward a future of stability and equity for everybody.” — Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley

“In this most generous future, the pay wouldn’t matter because maybe your income isn’t as tied to your performance of labor. It wouldn’t be as dire or as important, being paid well or not paid well. I think from that standpoint, it would be interesting to consider restaurants as a place for performance, a more engaged performance of labor, a more engaged performance of diner — folks who are fully present. But I don’t think those things necessarily preclude conflict or tension, because those things are inherent in people, despite whatever system is in place ... but I do think that the framework, in my most generous interpretation of the future, would be more compassionate. And the folks who inhabit that framework would be faced with different challenges. It wouldn’t be utopian, but it would be egalitarian and rewarding in some way.” — Tunde Wey, chef, documentarian, and author of the essay “Don’t Bail Out the Restaurant Industry”

“In the long-term future, I think we will have to think about socializing the cost of health care. That is, we cannot run this business on the backs of people who are the most vulnerable politically, vulnerable socially, and vulnerable as people to healthcare risks, including COVID-19.” — Krishnendu Ray, associate professor of food studies at NYU and author of The Ethnic Restaurateur. Read more from our conversation with Krishnendu here.

… and a business model that’s both ethical and sustainable...

“Restaurants are mini capitalism petri dishes… everything about capitalism is sort of amplified in a restaurant, because everything is an extreme. And it really hurts me, because I think a fundamental thing about cooks and chefs is that we want to be generous. Yet the business doesn’t allow for that.” — Samin Nosrat, chef, writer, and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat star

“I’m really hoping that there’s going to be different ways of structuring a business — from the ownership, compensation models, whether it’s cooperative or profit sharing, tipping or no tipping — various different ways of solving the problem of equitably paying people. A lot of the issues that workers face are due to low wages or lower amounts of leverage. People exploring innovative ways to structure their businesses is going to be the next way that people are going to get out of this.” — John deBary, bar expert, writer, and co-founder/president of the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation

“I’d like to see more cooperative and collective ownership. I think there’s a lot to be gained from that, particularly in a country where there’s been so many conversations about cultural appropriation. I think it’s time for us to put our money where our mouth is and give back to cultures and values that have built us as individuals and really disperse the benefits.” — Emiliana Puyana, program manager at the nonprofit San Francisco food-business incubator La Cocina

“The things that I find really exciting, too, are the ways in which the food industry has stepped up through programs like SF New Deal, Frontline Foods — to find other ways of existing outside of a retail identity. Not necessarily charity, but community-oriented work, is going to be a bigger emphasis. Because it’s so meaningful, because it really does help people, if you can find a way to square your operation and make it work with that model built in, I think that is really great.” — Soleil Ho, San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic

“If we’re really going to think about what transformation and opportunity look like, what does it look like within the context of having spaces that restaurateurs and chefs could afford? Does that model look like ownership? Does the model look like cooperative ownership? What does it look like to be able to be successful?” — Devita Davison, executive director of FoodLab Detroit

… which would help change the culture…

“I’m interested in seeing what food will look like if we allow all cultures to participate. Every culture that’s allowed to be elevated on a higher level in this industry, to showcase their techniques and cuisine, people pull from it. If you allowed African Americans to rise to that level, then let’s [ask people to consider]: How will European or French cuisine taste using a blend of West African spices and West African techniques, or Southern techniques? We’re missing a whole flavor profile of food by keeping chefs or a culture of people at a lower level where they’re not able to bring information and knowledge to this industry.” — Keith Corbin, chef of Alta Adams in Los Angeles

“Most of the industry’s still operating under an obsolete system that still glorifies long hours, misogyny, and the bullying of the queer community. I think it’s essential to get rid of these toxic behaviors and start working toward a more inclusive environment that takes care of mental and physical health.” — Paxx Caraballo Moll, chef of Jungle BaoBao in San Juan, Puerto Rico

“Being a little bit more holistic in thinking about how tedious and physical and also mentally draining it is to be in kitchen culture, restaurant culture, sometimes even for seven days straight for some people. I’m looking forward to seeing a care-based approach on how we support people that are working in this industry from the ground up.”— Francesca Chaney, owner of Brooklyn’s Sol Sips. Read more from our conversation with Francesca here.

“There is very little contact between the Thomas Kellers of the world and the Steve Ellises of the world. There’s a lot of things we can learn from each other that unfortunately doesn’t exist because there hasn’t been the platform or the incentive, up till this point, to have those conversations. Chipotle should be talking to the Cambodian noodle restaurant, and they should be helping each other out. Fine-dining restaurants should be in conversation with people like us.” — Lucas Sin, NYC-based founder and chef of Junzi Kitchen

“Instead of these big mega-restaurants, I see lots of small places, lots of small gathering places where there is a lot of exchange of ideas. Food just becomes part of that. It’s not just food. It’s not about coming and eating and leaving. It’s about talking. It’s about politics. It’s about everything else.” — Vishwesh Bhatt, chef of Snackbar in Oxford, Mississippi

“Right now we’re not really charging the correct cost of a meal. We as a business have to do our job to create that awareness. I think that’s the change that needs to be seen so people don’t question and will be more willing to pay for the true cost of a meal.” — Azalina Eusope, a fifth-generation street food vendor and chef-owner of Azalina’s in San Francisco

“I just really hope that even in six months’ time, that we have this amount of energy. If I could give anybody any advice, it would be: Keep going. Anytime you think that you’re not enough, keep going, because you’re going to be enough for you. And ultimately, as people of color, as Black folks, we have all the tools that we need to survive on our own; we’ve always been that way due to the structures of capitalism and the impact of these socialized systems.” — Zenat Begum, owner of Brooklyn’s Playground Coffee Shop

… fix the supply chain...

“The understanding of Indigenous food systems is the understanding of how regional food systems work, and I really believe that that is where we need to be moving toward in the future. We need community-based food systems, we need a lot more local community-based farming systems that can produce a lot of food for very particular regions.” — Sean Sherman, founder/CEO of the Sioux Chef and the Indigenous Food Lab. Read more from our conversation with Sean here.

“There’s still a lot of exploitation that happens at the farm level. I would say that’s probably the single biggest challenge and weakness that this entire industry has. The people who are doing by far the most labor-intensive portion of the entire supply chain are at origin, and they’re getting the smallest piece of the pie in terms of compensation and how the dollar is divided up. The level of exploitation and the level of poverty that exists for the farmers and producers is a tragedy.” — Keba Konte, founder of Red Bay Coffee in Oakland, California. Read more from our conversation with Keba here.

… and finally, save the world.

“Implement carbon farming. Globally, 1 percent of GDP [investing in carbon farming] would have society on track to solve climate change and lower global temperatures. That’s all it takes, sending 1 percent instead of 0.00 percent.” — Anthony Myint, co-founder of Mission Chinese Food and Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit organization that funds renewable farming efforts.

Interviews by Monica Burton, Brenna Houck, Nick Mancall-Bitel, Rebecca Flint Marx, Meghan McCarron, Jaya Saxena, Elazar Sontag, Lesley Suter, and Jenny G. Zhang

This upma recipe from New York chef Chintan Pandya is just like the one his mother used to make

When Chintan Pandya thinks of breakfast, he thinks of upma. But he’s not alone in that: A traditional Indian breakfast speciality, upma is a savory porridge that’s found across homes in the western and southern parts of India and increasingly all across the country, and not just as a morning food. But Pandya, a New York-based chef born in Mumbai, has a hard time separating upma from his morning memories of enjoying warming bowls of it prepared for him by his mother.

The go-to ingredient here is coarsely-ground wheat, which more often than not is semolina. (As the star of the show, the very first step is dry-roasting semolina in a pan.) From there, you’ll find traditional additions like ginger, red onion, chile, and urad lentils, which all provide layers of crunch and texture to the porridge. Then of course there’s herbs and spices, often including curry leaves, mustard seeds, and cilantro.

But the beauty of upma, Pandya says, is how much you can customize it — with more nuts, seeds, and wide variety of vegetables. Some cooks add cashews or peanuts, while some (like Pandya) add yogurt for extra creaminess; peas and carrots are a popular addition once the onion is cooked down, and for others upma is incomplete without a touch of sugar. Once it’s cooked, many are in agreement that upma should be finished with a squeeze of lime, but lemon has been known to be used in its place. All variations aside, the ultimate goal is a comforting porridge that’s delicious and nutritious.

Known for his dedication to simple homestyle cooking at his restaurant Adda, Pandya has changed very little about his mother’s upma since he started making it for his own daughter. His recipe, which you can find below, is an ideal place to start on your quest for perfecting your own bowl. After that, go crazy with colors and textures, spice and sweetness.

Upma

Serves 4

Ingredients:
1 cup semolina
2 teaspoons ghee (this dish can be vegan if you swap ghee for oil)
¹⁄₂ teaspoon mustard seeds
5 to 6 curry leaves
1 teaspoon urad lentils
2 green chilis, chopped
¹⁄₂ teaspoon ginger, chopped
¹⁄₃ cup yogurt (optional)
1 red onion, chopped
1 cup tomatoes, chopped
1 teaspoon cilantro, chopped
Half a lime
Hot water
Salt

Step 1: Heat a small pan and dry-roast the semolina. Set aside.

Step 2: Using a medium pot heat the ghee. Add mustard seeds. Once seeds begin to crackle, add in urad lentils and curry leaves. Then, add in green chili and ginger. Add chopped onion and cook until translucent. Once onions are cooked, add tomatoes.

Step 3: Add salt to taste and mix well, then add the roasted semolina and mix again. Sauté and add in hot water. Cook well over medium heat

Step 4: Once cooked, add the yogurt and mix well. Once desired consistency is achieved, add the cilantro and juice from half a lime. Enjoy immediately.