A $61.7 million settlement will compensate gig workers whose tips were used to subsidize their hourly wages
Amazon has agreed to pay more than $61.7 million to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that the e-commerce giant skimmed off customer tips to subsidize delivery drivers’ hourly wages.
“The FTC is sanctioning Amazon.com for expanding its business empire by cheating its workers,” FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra wrote in a statement. “In total, Amazon stole nearly one-third of drivers’ tips to pad its own bottom line.”
Under the Amazon Flex program, which launched in 2015, independent contractors use their own cars to deliver Amazon packages and Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods groceries. The FTC alleges that Amazon lured in recruits for the Flex program by promising they would receive a base hourly wage between $18 and $25, as well as 100 percent of tips left by customers in the app.
But between late 2016 and August 2019, Amazon allegedly lowered its hourly rate and started using tips to make up the difference without informing drivers. Even after drivers started to complain and the media began reporting on the tip pocketing, according to the FTC, the company took steps to “obscure” what was going on, telling drivers that they were still receiving 100 percent of tips, even while Amazon employees privately referred to the situation as an “Amazon reputation tinderbox” and “a huge PR risk to Amazon.” The company allegedly only stopped this new pricing model when the FTC informed Amazon that it was investigating Flex pay practices.
In response to the settlement, an Amazon spokesperson told the Verge that “while we disagree that the historical way we reported pay to drivers was unclear, we added additional clarity in 2019 and are pleased to put this matter behind us.”
The $61.7 million represents the total amount that Amazon allegedly withheld from Amazon Flex drivers, and will be used to compensate those workers. Drivers who think they may have been impacted should sign up for FTC email updates, a spokesperson for the agency told Recode.
Under terms of the settlement, which was announced on the same day that Jeff Bezos revealed he would be stepping down as Amazon CEO for a new role, Amazon has to be transparent about drivers’ pay rates and tips and must obtain express informed consent before making any changes to how tips are used as compensation, going forward.
The gig economy is rife with such tip-pocketing schemes. (Almost like these companies’ business models can only work by exploiting labor?) Delivery startups DoorDash and Instacart reversed similar pay structures after customers threatened to stop using the apps.
But with this latest rebuke of Amazon Flex’s practices, the FTC may finally be moving to deter this behavior across the board. Per Recode:
FTC Acting Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat, and Commissioner Noah Phillips, a Republican, called on Congress to give the FTC the power to create gig-economy rules that more clearly explain what type of behavior is unlawful. The pair also are requesting that Congress give the FTC power to issue large civil penalties to first-time offending businesses as a further deterrent to engaging in schemes like Amazon’s, which FTC commissioners called “outrageous.”
“The Commission has historically taken a lax approach to worker abuse,” commissioner Chopra wrote in a statement. “I hope that today’s action turns the page on this era of inaction.”
The pandemic has made it hard to accept sloppiness, but maybe one day we can consume something this messy with our friends again
Growing up, my bachelor dad could reliably make about three meals, and two of them came out of a can. One was Dinty Moore beef stew, a fine slop to be eaten off a chair while sitting on the couch, watching cartoons. The other was Manwich. For some reason Manwich was slightly rarer in our household, probably because it required the procurement of buns. As such, the sloppy joe has always been a treat in my mind, even though making them is as easy as putting meat sauce between bread. This is all to say I would like to eat more of them. Occasionally even at a restaurant.
The sloppy joe allegedly originated as a “loose meat” sandwich in Iowa, and turned into one of those recipes favored during the Great Depression and WWII because ketchup and tomato sauce could stretch limited ground beef into many meals or to feed many mouths. Now, it’s probably best known through Hunt’s Manwich — “fun piled on a bun,” as its ads called it. It’s marketed as mostly to parents, the sort of “everyone likes it” dinner that even the pickiest child will eat. It’s like if instead of eating leftover bolognese out of a tupperware (god’s perfect meal), you put it on bread. It’s barely a recipe, it’s so obvious.
Plenty of childhood favorites have gotten the chef treatment over the years — the lobster mac and cheese craze, the fanning devotion to chicken tenders. But the mainstreaming of boutique burgers, alternative meats, and the chopped cheese does not seem to have resulted in a widespread resurgence of the sloppy joe. Yes, Superiority Burger has its Sloppy Dave, and White Castle has a sloppy joe slider. But where is the sloppy joe at BareBurger or Shake Shack? If Fuku has a vada pav, where is its keema pav?
I assume it’s because of the sloppy joe’s namesake quality. While burgers may fall apart by the middle, after the bun has sort of slipped forward and suddenly you have 75% of the filling left with only 25% of the bread, the fundamental premise is that the patty holds together. But the sloppy joe, despite telling you right there it’s sloppy, is also sort of deceptive. Unlike a platter of Ethiopian wat and injera, or a plate of BBQ ribs, which you know you’re going to need a wet nap for, the bun sort of tricks you into thinking the sloppy joe won’t leave you with sauce on your fingers. So when the filling inevitably falls out, and you need to sop it up with the bun or scootch it onto a spoon, it feels like a failure.
Maybe then it’s that, to enjoy the sloppy joe, we first need to accept mess, not reluctantly but radically. Part of the joy of eating is letting yourself indulge in all of your senses, including touch. To laugh when filling falls out of your sandwich, to stop trying to create the perfect “bite” with perfect ratios of each individual ingredient. The pandemic has made it hard to accept sloppiness. We’re all hyper aware of our bodily fluids, the ways particles of ourselves drift toward each other. It will take a while for many to be able to eat together without thinking of microparticles and splatter. But when everyone is vaccinated and eating indoors is no longer an exercise in selfishness, imagine the glory of being able to suck sloppy joe off your fingers without worry. We should all embrace the messy when we can. So please, burger places, put a sloppy joe on your menu so we can celebrate.
Quesabirria tacos from El Garage in the Bay Area | Patricia Chang
This week on Eater’s Digest, Bill Esparza explains why Tijuana’s birria and quesabirria tacos have been such a hit in the U.S.
Birria, a Mexican stew with pre-Hispanic roots, is suddenly the hit dish of street food scenes in cities across America. But how did it evolve from its origins to Tijuana taco stands in the ‘50s, LA food trucks in 2015, and to now San Francisco, Austin, New York, and beyond? Why is it spreading now? And is birriaramen a delightful homage or a travesty?
This week on the Eater’s Digest podcast, Los Angeles-based food writer Bill Esparza takes us through the history of the birria de res taco, how it’s changed for various audiences, and how a younger generation of social media-savvy Mexican Americans fueled its success.
Then Eater D.C. editor Gabriel Hiatt joins us to explain the proposed loosened open container laws in D.C., and we discuss Michelin, Subway’s “tuna,” and more.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Tyson, JBS, and Smithfield will all be evaluated on their handling of the COVID-19 crisis
A House subcommittee has launched an investigation into how major meat processors and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) responded to coronavirus outbreaks and deaths in meatpacking facilities, a source of rapid transmission of the virus during the early months of the pandemic.
Rep. James Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina and chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, announced the probe on February 1 and sent letters to OSHA — the Department of Labor agency meant to ensure safe and healthy working conditions — as well as Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, and JBS USA, three of the country’s largest meatpacking companies.
There have been a combined total of at least 41 major outbreaks in connection with JBS, Tyson, and Smithfield, the New York Times reported using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The subcommittee’s press release announcing the investigation cites reports that more than 56,000 meatpacking workers have tested positive for COVID-19, and more than 270 have died, per the Food & Environment Reporting Network’s tracker. Employees who are racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by outbreaks at these kinds of plants, the CDC found.
“Public reports indicate that meatpacking companies … have refused to take basic precautions to protect their workers, many of whom earn extremely low wages and lack adequate paid leave, and have shown a callous disregard for workers’ health,” Clyburn wrote in his letters to the three companies. “These actions appear to have resulted in thousands of meatpacking workers getting infected with the virus and hundreds dying. Outbreaks at meatpacking plants have also spread to surrounding communities, killing many more Americans.”
The probe is also taking aim at OSHA, accusing the agency under the Trump administration of failing to “adequately carry out its responsibility for enforcing worker safety laws at meatpacking plants across the country, resulting in preventable infections and deaths,” Clyburn wrote in his letter. In response to coronavirus-related violations at meatpacking companies, OSHA issued just eight citations and less than $80,000 in penalties — amounting to what former OSHA leaders called “less than a slap on the wrist,” Food Dive reported.
“OSHA failed to issue enforceable rules, respond in a timely manner to complaints, and issue meaningful fines when a company’s unsafe practices led to the deaths of employees,” Clyburn wrote. “As a result, I am concerned that under the Trump Administration, OSHA did not fulfill its mission to protect vulnerable meatpacking workers during the pandemic.”
How I learned to stop worrying and love ice cream for dinner
A common joke is that the chore of pandemic cooking has reduced us to eating piles of slop. But for a weird, specific, tertiary reason, I actually was. In May, I burned my esophagus. My doctor prescribed a soft food diet, for which there is nocleardefinition. Finding a truly soft food is difficult. Polenta can be rough. Beans have scratchy skins. Greens are fibrous. Rice is unyielding, bread is dry, yogurt stings, vinegar burns. Ground meat feels gristly, herbs have pointy stems, and entirely too many types of ice cream come with bits.
I’d been getting through spring lockdown by baking crusty sourdough bread (like I have been since 2018, okay!), grilling spice-rubbed pork chops, and ordering takeout nacho kits with extra margaritas. The injury was sudden and scary; in its wake, having to spend months avoiding food with texture was horrible. But a real, urgent, all-too-tangible reason to restrict my diet revealed how many unhelpful rules I had for food. In the end, slop set me free.
My doctor’s advice was to be as conservative as possible: no to tofu, yes to soft tofu; no to rice, yes to congee; no to bread, yes to bread soaking up the broth of a soup. Looking back through my camera roll, it’s striking how quickly, and how persistently, I tried to weasel around these orders. I’ll have tofu, but firm tofu, and I’ll bake it. I’ll make pancakes with only half whole grain from a local flour mill. I’ll order the nachos but, like, really soak the chips in the queso. I’ll grill squash (??). Every single one of these photos makes the center of my chest clench as I remember how I felt eating these things. It wasn’t good.
Eventually, I had to give in to the mush. It felt dorky to be perpetually mashing potatoes or making gravy or tossing pasta in cream sauce. Sauteed spinach (the only truly soft green) and quick-cooked oatmeal were on constant rotation; an udon soup with peeled carrots and soft tofu got me through a lot of weekday nights. I slipped the skins off peaches, scooped melon with a spoon, and made gargantuan vats of applesauce. The best of those recipes are old-fashioned, and many of my meals were weird (I started eating sauteed spinach and a pile of tuna salad for lunch). Consuming one texture was tedious.
But I was injured and in pain, and as I ate the softest foods and the pain eased, I wondered why I’d been fighting it so hard. That rebellious, painful urge to eat something I wasn’t “supposed to” in response to food restrictions was familiar. Before my injury, I obsessed over whether I ate healthy enough. I’m fat, and only recently open to being okay with that; I started dieting when I was 10, and long after I stopped formally dieting when faced with its dubious evidence of success, I ate by ever-shifting, elaborate sets of self-imposed rules. Those rules grew a new set of rules when I took on a job that involved eating absolutely everything, including two dinners in a row. Fear of food thrums through the media dedicated to it — see every time a food writer calls a recipe naughty or jokes about having to cut off carbs around the holiday — as does fear of being seen struggling with that fear, maybe because these jobs rely on our fragile bodies and senses. From restaurants, I ate what was interesting (whatever my definition of interesting was), and at home, I ate what was healthy (whatever my definition of healthy was).
Giving up alcohol and coffee was easier than sticking to my soft diet, in fact, because I kept trying to force every meal into a “healthy” form. A dietitian I was working with suggested, reasonably, that I loosen those self-imposed rules and focus on eating whatever I actually wanted to eat that wouldn’t do harm, even if that was a pint of ice cream. I had never eaten a pint of ice cream as a meal in my life; I was convinced this was some kind of food rubicon I would cross, and that afterwards, all my meals would become pints of ice cream. But one Saturday, on my way back from the beach, starving and stuck in traffic, I dove into a convenience store and bought the only ice cream I could find, Haagen-Dazs in pints. While crawling down PCH (Malibu is… fun?), I ate my fill of dulce de leche ice cream with a plastic spoon as it grew cool and viscous at the edges and felt like I’d won a prize. Literally nothing bad happened. Instead, two good things happened: I was no longer painfully hungry, and I’d had ice cream.
So in addition to my parade of soups and pureed soups and chicken salad from the chicken carcass that had become soup, I ate a significant amount of Straus fudge swirl ice cream for dinner at home, and then I ate it again for a snack the next day, and I became my grocery store’s best Straus ice cream customer, because Straus is a great and underrated fancy ice cream brand. I ate a pint of Jeni’s for lunch before heading to a backyard hang, and another pint of Haagen-Dazs on my way back from a camping trip. I started riding my bike to the (closer) beach and stopping for ice cream at local shops. It was a big deal when I could even get flavors with bits.
If you fear or fetishize a food, the advice is to eat it so often it becomes normal and unremarkable to eat. Eating ice cream as my go-to soft food helped me finally understand an approach I’d read about and talked about and maybe even believed I’d undertaken but obviously never had: eating to take care of myself. Not eating to feel something, or not feel something, or learn something, or report something, or achieve perfect health, or perform perfect taste, but eating to satisfy hunger and to heal, with absolutely no other restrictions in place. On all my meals, the pressure eased. I could make the same chicken soup for weeks in a row, even if that was not something a “food person” (whoever that is) would do; I could go a whole day without eating fruit if I was out of melon and peaches; I could eat microwaved mac and cheese if I could not stand to peel another vegetable. Eating what your body can eat, and wants to eat, is sometimes called intuitive eating, which makes it sound easy, or mindful eating, which makes it sound annoying. It’s hard, and it’s not annoying, though it does involve surprisingly powerful flashes of anger and frustration and grief.
As I got better and the list of things I could eat expanded, the level of stress I felt around food didn’t rise back to where it had been, and I had a clearer sense of what I actually wanted, whether that was a pile of bitter greens or a Nutella sandwich. But “better” is a tricky proposition; a friend with a long-term condition recently described it as Zeno’s arrow, always halving the distance but never arriving. I still have some pain, and my meals tend a little soft. And parts of my mind want to set a date for when we’ll cut off the ice cream.
I’m angry, and I’m sad, that I used to powerfully fear a simple food, and that part of me still does, and that the only actual effect of that fear is to make me want to eat a painful amount of ice cream before it is taken away. At the worst of my injury, friends would say enviously, Oh, at least you get to eat all this ice cream. But guess what: We all do, whenever we want.
A tablescape at IGNIV Bad Ragaz, which has two Michelin stars. | IGNIV
The country has more two-star restaurants than ever
On the heels of its dining guide reveal for Hong Kong and Macau, French tire company Michelin revealed the new Michelin stars for Switzerland and deems the list “a refreshing selection illustrating the strength of the Swiss fine dining scene despite the ongoing crisis.”
The newest guide to the European country features more two-star restaurants than ever before, with four new two-star restaurants bringing the category’s total to 24. They include Mediterranean-inspired CÃ d’Oro in St. Moritz; vegetable-forward Magdalena in Schwyz; Restaurant Sens, located in the Hotel Vitznauerhof in Vitznau; and Zurich’s Widder Restaurant.
There are 16 new restaurants with one star in the Michelin guide, bringing the one-star total to 95. Zurich gets four of these, including Japanese restaurant Sushi Shin, the mostly vegetarian Neue Taverne, IGNIV Zürich by Andreas Caminada (the third of the chef’s IGNIV restaurants to get two stars), and La Rôtisserie, located in the Storchen Hotel. Lugano, in the Italian-speaking Ticino region in the south of the country, also makes a strong showing with three new one-star restaurants: I Due Sud, META, and Principe Leopoldo.
Switzerland’s list of three-star restaurants, Michelin’s highest rating, remains steady in 2021 with Cheval Blanc by Peter Knogl in Basel, Le Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Ville in Crissier, and Schloss Schauenstein in Fürstenau all retaining their status. And this year, Michelin awarded 19 restaurants its sustainable Green Star.
As in past years, the Michelin guide to Switzerland also includes the lesser priced (and lower ranked Bib Gourmand) selections. There are 15 new Bib Gourmands this year, but for the first time in Switzerland, that list includes a vegan option with the addition of KLE in Zurich. That cuisine category seems to be getting its due in the Michelin guides more and more: In January, Michelin awarded a star to a vegan restaurant in France for the first time. Check out the full list of Switzerland’s Michelin stars on the Michelin site.
The Georgian chef’s two Savannah restaurants — the Grey Diner Bar and Grey Market — will be found in the forthcoming downtown hotel the Thompson this year
You can add pork floss, a century egg, or a deep-fried youtiao cruller, but I prefer it how it was first served to me: soothing, bland, and ideal for sick days
Something magical happens to rice if left to boil for too long in an excess of water: The grains break down, absorbing the liquid and softening, creating a one-pot wonder of thick, stodgy starch that’s as fragrant as it is warming.
This is, of course, congee: the porridge — also referred to as jook, zhou (my name for it, having a Northern Chinese mother), or myriad other names — that likely originated in China but is eaten in many Asian countries.
Congee has a history as a famine food — rice stretched to last with the addition of extra water — and, more commonly nowadays, the ideal sick dish. Low-effort and gentle on the stomach, it’s embraced as a go-to for belly aches, colds, or days of general discomfort. That’s how I’ve always known it; my grandmother, who lived with us for years while I was growing up, would make congee on the regular, but particularly during the winter or when any of us felt ill. It’s just rice and water (usually one cup of rice to four or five cups of water, depending on one’s preference for watery or thick) simmered for at least 25 minutes (depending on one’s level of impatience). Sometimes she would add tapioca or sago pearls and sugar to taste, turning the dish into a dessert of sorts. Congee could last for half a week; we poured in a little water each time and boiled it anew, further breaking down the rice until by the third day or so it was even more glutinous, a glorious transfiguration of texture.
There are many other ways to eat congee, varying depending on the cuisine, geographic region, or just one’s own tastes. You can make it with stock, top it with pork floss, add a century egg or a deep-fried youtiao cruller. There are more recent takes on the age-old dish, too, as congee has reached new heights of trendiness in recent years, appearing on the menus of hip restaurants in both China and the U.S. A few years ago in Beijing, I met up with a cousin at a restaurant specializing in congee. The place was popular with the district’s plethora of university students; I saw tables full of people younger and cooler than me gossiping and laughing over large vessels of congee served with seafood, meat, preserved vegetables, sauces, and so much more. Here was the humble, homey bowl — and it was in vogue.
But I prefer the plain, two-ingredient, at-home version whenever I have a craving for congee, which I confess is almost never. I only make it when I’m truly sick or, sometimes simply sick for home, although whether that longing is for my mother or grandmother or just the feeling of being cared for as a child, I don’t know. When my tastebuds are dulled, there’s a soothing blandness to congee, primarily satisfying in its gloopy texture on the tongue — as if I’m eating baby food again — and its solid comfort. Like swallowing hot mouthfuls of nothing that light a candle in the stomach, filling it with a gentle warmth that lingers.
Resolutions fizzle and project cooking can be a drag — but there’s nothing wrong with a good old fashioned challenge to get you out of a kitchen rut
There’s a certain personality type out there that gravitates toward goal-setting and self improvement, and I admit that I have it. They (by which I mean, me) make New Year’s resolutions. They track how many books they finish in a year on Goodreads. They set productivity goals for quarantine that go beyond doggedly drinking their way through their liquor cabinet. I’ve somehow resisted the siren song of the bullet journal, but many others like me have not.
Not everyone naturally ascribes to these Type A tendencies — and honestly, that’s a good thing — but if there’s one place we should all consider being a bit more goal-oriented, I’d argue it’s cooking. Feeding ourselves is a thing we all have to do at least a few times a day, and especially in a year when so many of us have cooked ourselves into a rut, a little motivational challenge might just be your way out.
I, personally, have been taking this approach for the last seven or eight years, and it’s led to a range of adventures in the kitchen. There was the year I made a vow to cook at least one recipe out of every one of my 70-some cookbooks. Or the time I tried to recreate every meal I remember having for dinner during my childhood, from city chicken to spaghetti with frozen meatballs to Swiss steak. I was baking my own bread months before the pandemic made it trendy, thanks to my decision to christen 2020 the Year of Bread. Often, I get fixated around the idea of making one recipe of a certain type each week, which means I’ve made at least 52 versions of meatballs, Japanese dishes, and Soups of the World (this year, the vibe is #tacos2021, with plans to make homemade tortillas also in the mix).
Each of these challenges came with its own little rewards along the way — aside from a no-brainer plan for dinner at least one night a week. The year of Frederick Family Foods meant that I got to have a lot of probing, nostalgic conversations with family members about the time we spent around the dinner table, and I now have a record of all those family recipes for posterity (though I won’t be holding onto the one for grilled cubed steak with ketchup too tightly). Forcing yourself to use each cookbook you’ve accumulated at least once means that you’re in a more informed position to Kondo that bookshelf by year’s end. (Joke’s on me; several years later, I’m back up to 80-some cookbooks.) And I now know how to roll an omelet for tamagoyaki, make a cute(ish) bento, and pickle vegetables in the Japanese tradition, further expanding my cooking repertoire.
Plus, since I tend to unnecessarily share these kitchen chronicles on social media, my friends like to get in on the action by sending over their own recipes and ideas. One year I ended up making my friend Rachel’s family recipe for Greek New Year’s bread (poorly, it turns out), and the previous year, discovered the tortilla soup recipe my coworker Amy swears by. And in non-COVID times, my friends can literally share in the festivities, as I often will find a way to incorporate the year’s cooking challenge into my annual holiday potluck (giant meatballs and big pots of gumbo have proven crowd-pleasers).
I find that having the structure of a cooking goal takes away some of the mental load of meal planning — at least I know when I sit down to write the grocery list, I’m making, say, at least one taco each week (and since, you know, Type A, I already have a spreadsheet of brainstormed taco-related ideas to draw from). It also forces me to get creative — once you’ve worked your way through turkey meatballs, Swedish meatballs, etc., it’s time to start brainstorming ideas like French onion soup meatballs or Chicken Cordon Bleu Balls (name courtesy of my husband; yes, he is 12).
Of course, cooking goals don’t have to be as dramatic as making 52 versions of something over the course of one year. If you enjoy cooking even a little bit, there’s probably some sort of challenge you’ve always wanted to tackle in the kitchen. Maybe it’s making pasta from scratch. Or finally dusting off that tagine you got as a wedding present. Maybe it’s cooking with rabbit. Perhaps it’s adding more meatless meals to the rotation.
Whatever you choose, odds are that having a goal this year will make the inevitable time you spend in the kitchen a little more satisfying, a little more adventurous, and a little less of a chore. And if it means you finally get Mom to write down that lasagna recipe she’s been dangling over your head for years in the process, all the better.
Brands like DoorDash and Uber Eats promise volume and convenience. But some restaurateurs are sticking with in-house delivery or small local companies instead.
One of the first things Sylvan Mishima Brackett did after the mayor of San Francisco issued a lockdown order in March was walk a few blocks to a local Best Buy to buy a phone. The chef and owner of Rintaro, a San Francisco Japanese restaurant, planned to set up a bento hotline for people to call and order thoughtfully packaged and impeccably designed to-go meals.
Everything about Rintaro, a six-year-old izakaya in the Mission District of San Francisco, is thoughtful. Food is grilled over a traditional charcoal grill; udon is handmade; Wasabi root is grown locally. Sylvan’s father, who apprenticed as a temple carpenter in Kyoto, built the space, including booths made from 100-year-old redwood wine casks and mud walls made from iron-rich red soil from Sylvan’s childhood home in Northern California’s gold country. It feels refined, relaxed, upscale, and approachable all at the same time. To translate this aesthetic to go, takeout food is creatively wrapped in compostable packaging and adorned with colorful custom labels. In May, Eater SF referred to the bento as some of the “prettiest takeout in San Francisco.”
Rintaro’s bento boxes were especially popular during the earliest days of lockdown. “In the beginning of COVID, there were not that many restaurants like us doing takeout, so we were super busy. The person on the phone was just inundated with calls,” Brackett says. Guests started to get frustrated that they couldn’t get through. One person called 60 times to place an order, only to be greeted by one busy signal after another. Even then, Brackett says he never considered signing up with a big third-party delivery service, even though the headquarters of two of the country’s largest providers, Uber Eats and DoorDash, are within walking distance of his restaurant. Still, his experience underscores how much time, thought, effort, and money is required to purposely avoid the apps.
“They’re an extractive industry that puts in a middleman which takes more or less what the profit would be, or more than the profit would be,” he says. An exceptionally successful restaurant might run a 20 percent profit, he explains. “If a third party is taking anywhere between 15 to 30 percent of the order, then that’s more than the profit of the people who are actually doing the work.”
Restaurateurs’ complaints about third-party delivery services have taken on a different urgency as we near a year of pandemic health and safety restrictions. These companies have always charged for their services; COVID didn’t change that. But as delivery became a lifeline for restaurants in distress due to dining room closures, delivery companies posted record growth. In April, May, and June 2020, DoorDash actually made money for the first time, over $20 million. Meanwhile, Uber’s CEO has promised investors the company will finally make a profit by the end of this year, largely thanks to its delivery business.
Delivery companies promise restaurants easy ordering and incremental sales. They say their huge footprint — DoorDash has 18 million customers — will bring more business. They offer sign-up promotions that reduce or eliminate commissions. The prospect of signing on, getting a tablet in the mail, plugging it in, and accepting orders is tough to resist. While DoorDash doesn’t officially share how many independent restaurants use its service, a December filing referenced 180,000 local restaurants on its platform, representing a significant portion of DoorDash’s 390,000 merchants. Delivery apps have grown quickly, reworking how we order and receive restaurant food, and how we judge convenience — the apps tout an average delivery time around 30 minutes. Larger companies justify high commissions by explaining they provide a service that would cost the restaurant time and money to operate themselves.
Brackett tried a few setups looking for the right fit. He briefly used Tock’s to-go offering, which charges 3 percent for each order, a number that Tock’s CEO has said was the absolute minimum the company could charge while keeping its own lights on. Even at that low rate, Brackett says it was costing Rintaro thousands of dollars in fees and credit card processing charges. “When you’re making negative 4 or 5 percent profit, losing another 2 or 3 percent isn’t great,” he says.
Now, Brackett only accepts delivery orders over the phone and slots them into one of three evening timeslots. Three servers have stayed on “super part time” to work as delivery drivers. The restaurant uses one driver per day to deliver between three and eight orders each night within a three- to four-mile radius, serving more or less half of the city thanks to the restaurant’s central location. Delivery costs the guest $10. For carryout, diners can place online orders through the restaurant’s website, which is tied directly to its point-of-sale system. The restaurant pays a credit card processing fee on each order, something it would pay no matter how it served customers, but online orders cost an extra 1.2 percent on top of the typical fee. It’s called a “card not present” transaction, and the higher rate has to do with the higher risk of fraud associated with processing a transaction without swiping a card. In December, this cost Rintaro about $3,000. The restaurant processes between 30 and 60 to-go orders per night.
When outdoor dining was allowed in San Francisco, Brackett says the restaurant was able to break even, or even turn a small profit, with its 26 outdoor seats. San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho recently added Rintaro’s bento to the paper’s Top 25 list, and after that, “We were quite busy,” Brackett says. “We broke even.” That’s a good week — during a bad week, the restaurant loses between $5,000 and $8,000 offering only takeout and delivery.
Since January 1, delivery companies are prohibited from listing California restaurants without explicit permission. Brackett says he used to field sales calls from delivery apps wanting to add Rintaro to their platforms, but hasn’t heard from them in a while. “I think they gave up,” he says. Looking ahead, Brackett expects to continue with bento takeout and delivery for several months or until indoor dining is reopened at full capacity and business returns. “We don’t have the bandwidth in the kitchen to do both,” he says.
A restaurant owner doesn’t have to build their own intricate delivery system or even be particularly tech-savvy to avoid the big apps. Nicolle Dirks owns the Portland, Oregon, restaurant Epif with her husband, chef Pepe Arancibia. It’s a five-year-old, full-service vegan restaurant that serves food inspired by the Andes region of South America. The pair reopened the restaurant in early May, offering takeout for the first time — but only to guests who ordered ahead online. At the time, she said, the prospect of speaking to anyone face to face was daunting. “I actively wouldn’t even accept a walk-up order. I’d point through the window to the sign that had our website and that said order online only,” Dirks said.
Two months later, she noticed a flyer from a local bicycle delivery service. “My husband used to be a bike courier in Boston. And I’m just like, yes, those are my people, that’s who we want to do business with.”
The service is called CCC PDX. “We started in 2017 because we wanted to provide a nice service for nice people to have food delivered quickly and affordably by bike! We’ve seen the way apps do it and we think it SUXXX!” the website reads.
“The couriers, the people who are doing the work should be paid a fair amount and make money doing this job,” says CCC co-owner Ponce Christie. “This was the whole reason I got into it, too, because I wanted to ride bikes and make money riding a bike. And now at this point, I want to make that a possibility for someone else.”
Since March, order volume delivered by CCC has grown nearly 1,000 percent, and the company works with about 100 Portland restaurants. At the beginning of the pandemic, CCC had seven active couriers. Now it has 40, including several former restaurant workers who lost their jobs due to COVID. Restaurants pay a 10 percent delivery charge, and the diner pays $3 to $5, depending on the restaurant and their location. CCC takes 5 percent of the order fee and $1 from the delivery fee; everything else goes to the courier, including the full tip. The company uses software developed by another bicycle messenger company that can be tied directly to many restaurants’ online ordering platforms.
“I think our goals are different,” says CCC’s Christie of larger delivery companies. “Their goal is to capture enough market share that they can put us and everyone else out of business and then raise prices to actually be profitable. Our goal is to not do that — it’s to, like, just exist. And ride bikes.”
As for why it works so well in her Portland community, Dirks says, “Smaller single-location businesses are perhaps a little bit more aware of keeping the local money in this local economy.”
The vast majority of Epif’s orders still come from its own website, placed by local and loyal guests. Thanks to what Dirks calls “multiple fortunate situations,” the restaurant breaks even. “The big one is that my husband and myself as the owners are also the ones who are doing all the work.” It also doesn’t hurt, she says, that the empanadas that they’ve always served travel particularly well.
In October, as the weather cooled, Dirks was looking for more ways to increase business. A friend suggested trying DoorDash, and Dirks reluctantly agreed. “She was like, ‘Nicolle, I know you are so averse to working with any big companies. But you can get so many new customers through these third-party apps.’”
Orders are sporadic — sometimes four or five come in one night, sometimes just one per week. Compared to orders placed for pickup and those delivered by CCC, Dirks knows next to nothing about the customers who place DoorDash orders. Once, a customer ordered through DoorDash but picked up the order themselves. “I wanted to say something when the customer picked up to be like, ‘Hey, if you ordered directly from our website, that would help us out so much more,’” Dirks says. “But I felt like I’m not in a place to tell [that to] people.”
Dirks has also learned that working with a large third-party delivery partner doesn’t mean any less work on her part. She’s taken to writing the time on every bag she packs before sending it out with a DoorDash driver. “So hopefully the customer understands that I had my food ready for you at the right time — it’s your driver that didn’t show up for another 20 minutes or half an hour.” This is also why she likes working with the local service. “I’m directly contacting Ponce via email or by phone and he’s in direct contact via open radio with his couriers,” she says. “So, any problems get solved immediately.”
In March, DoorDash temporarily waived pickup fees for restaurants. According to a company spokesperson it’s no longer offering that promotion, though pickup is offered at a reduced rate for merchants. Over the course of the pandemic, delivery companies have made other product changes, too. Restaurants on the large national platforms can accept orders directly on their own websites without paying commission fees, using a service like DoorDash to deliver the food. Of course, this requires a customer to order directly from a restaurant, not by quickly opening a mobile app. Our app-based ordering habits are tough to break: The majority of DoorDash’s business in 2020 came from repeat users, not diners who were new to DoorDash. And these companies have deep advertising and marketing pockets; DoorDash just announced its first Super Bowl ad, featuring actor and rapper Daveed Diggs and a few Sesame Street muppets. Uber Eats has run an ad campaign for months featuring Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and beloved Queer Eye host Jonathan Van Ness.
Portland, like other U.S. cities, has instituted a temporary 10 percent cap on commissions delivery services can charge restaurants, and Epif’s Dirks says she’s had no trouble with DoorDash respecting the regulation on her bill. But if the city mandate ends and commissions rise, she says she’ll close her account and work only with CCC.
At Rintaro, Brackett’s choice to stay off the apps comes down to his view on their fundamental business model. “It rubs me the wrong way in all sorts of ways. It’s white-collar versus blue-collar, it’s venture capital money versus people who are doing really hard physical work and taking the money from that.” Plus, he says, “It’s been really nice for some of the post-COVID regulars to get delivery from servers that they know.”
Kristen Hawleywrites about restaurant operations, technology, and the future of the business from San Francisco.
Banh xeo from pop-up-turned-brick-and-mortar Bánh Vietnamese Shop House | Rachel Vanni/Eater
From the Editor: Everything you missed in food news last week
This post originally appeared on January 30, 2020 in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week.Read the archivesandsubscribe now.
I find myself on Instagram more than ever these days. Not because I’m scrolling through friends’ kid photos or getting FOMO glimpsing everyone’s takeout or illicit trips or vaccine snaps. Instead I’m obsessively looking at restaurant tag pages, researching their outdoor dining setups and taking notes on a personal spreadsheet.
I’ve continued outdoor dining through the winter, and while I rely heavily on Eater recommendations and get tips from friends, it’s kind of hard to assess a restaurant’s alfresco environment without photos. Is it a sidewalk of yurts and greenhouses or one of those three-sided sheds? Did they just build the inside outside? Are tables spaced? What’s the heater scenario? Are they serving on proper plates and with real glassware, or is this a takeout-box scenario?
These details are incredibly important and practically impossible to glean without an in-person visit, and I often have to scroll through Instagram’s location page, which is populated mostly by diners’ photos, to find what I’m looking for.
Relatedly, this week Becky Duffett covered just how important the platform has become as a marketing tool for brick-and-mortar restaurants doing takeout and as a lifeline for newly created pop-up businesses that market their menus and communicate with customers over Insta. And I loved Tejal Rao’s piece about how she now has calendar alerts “for more than 50 menu drops on Instagram, and notifications set for new posts on about 100 accounts.”
What used to feel to me like a haven for performative consumption and envy-inducing posts has evolved into a place where I can research and discover and interact with creative food folks selling frozen dumplings, foccacia squares, and coveted cookie boxes. And what used to seem like a perhaps silly but necessary promotional outlet for traditional restaurants is now one of the best tools in the arsenal for connecting with customers stuck at home.
On Eater
Giovanny Gutierrez/Chat Chow TV
Carbone’s opulent pandemic offering
— As Californians emerged from a stay-at-home order, outdoor dining returned in LA, San Diego, SF, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, New York’s indoor dining will return on Valentine’s Day.
— The owners of high-end and once-exclusive restaurant Carbone just opened their fourth location in the former Upland space in Miami. And the opening chefs behind white-hot D.C. restaurant Bad Saint just opened Pogiboy, a Filipino food stall stand inspired by Jollibee and Bob’s Big Boy.
— Here’s one I haven’t seen before. In Michigan, the advocates behind One Fair Wage are teaming up with the state to offer relief to restaurants on the condition that they commit to giving away free meals (one for every $10 granted in funding) and eliminating the tipped wage in their restaurant within five years.
— Great British Bake Off will launch a celebrity edition with James McAvoy and others, and I am HERE for it.
Wonho Frank LeeSuckling pig from Los Sabrosos al Horno in LA
Chicago chef Phillip Foss on the damage third-party delivery apps are doing to the restaurant industry and what operators like him have to do to fight back.
— By the numbers: How much a Detroit food hall spent pivoting, and pivoting again, during the pandemic.
— I 1000 percent do not understand the appeal of beer flavored with Hot Cheetos or brownies or pickles, but I’m happy it helped this Dallas brewery stay alive through the pandemic.
The impact on a restaurant that has to close for two weeks during a COVID scare. [Astrolabe]
Love this woman repurposing and selling vintage snowsuits so more people will dine outside. [The Cut]
It seemed cool when the owners of Howlin’ Ray’s hot chicken discovered a historic neon sign on the outside of their building during a renovation. But then (of course) they learned of its racist connections. [Vice]
The box mix, diner favorites, and other fruit-filled options that will improve your breakfast game
Finding a good pancake recipe is weirdly harder than it should be: Breakfast’s ultimate simple starchy pleasure can come in all manners of different flours, require different dairy products, and in recent years, have gone the way of full protein in many people’s approach. But Eater editors, as per usual, have their time-tested go-to versions, which you too can flip out over, below:
Blueberry yogurt multigrain pancakes: I was generally of the belief that you didn’t need a recipe for pancakes. Just mix up some stuff in a bowl, pour it on a hot griddle, and see if it, well, pancaked. I don’t know what led me to this Smitten Kitchen recipe in the first place, but I still make them when the morning calls for a little something extra. Yogurt in place of buttermilk, a mix of grains like rye and whole wheat, and a helluva lot of lemon zest give these incredible flavor and texture — they really put the cake in pancake, if you know what I mean. Plus, there’s something very satisfying about squooshing individual berries into the half-cooked pancakes before flipping. — Lesley Suter, travel editor
Chez Ma Tante’s pancakes: I was always a basic box pancake kind of guy before I tried making [Brooklyn restaurant] Chez Ma Tante’s recipe. I’m usually not a great recipe follower, but if I can achieve success, so can you. The recipe has a ton of butter in it: There is clarified butter in the batter, you add butter in the pan for frying, and you top it with butter. It’s really a great way to start your morning. — Stephen Pelletteri, executive producer
Banana pancakes with coconut and jaggery: Jaggery continues to be an under-appreciated sweetener in the U.S., so I’m taking this opportunity to highlight its glorious fudgyness in a pancake recipe that’s a weekend staple in my house. This recipe from the British cookbook writer Meera Sodha (it’s featured in her 2015 book Made in India) is closer to a stuffed crepe than a traditional pancake, and its soft and thin exterior is the ideal conduit for the rich filling made with desiccated coconut, sliced bananas, warming ground cardamom, and of course a generous amount of jaggery to bind it all together. Sodha recommends having it with crème fraîche or some shrikhand, the sweet Indian dish made with strained yogurt, but really this caramel-y pancake can be rolled up and consumed entirely on its own. — Tanay Warekarar, Eater NY reporter
Orange yogurt pancakes: I’ve always loved pancakes, but the recipes I used were interchangeable until I found this winner in Edible Twin Cities from Minneapolis-based blogger Stephanie Meyer. The batter is starkly different than runny buttermilk. But the viscous mixture results in towering cakes with a tangy, tender center. The edges get almost a crispy lacework from all the butter and fat. It’s both sophisticated and so simple to make. These are cakes for the pancake elite. — Joy Summers, Eater Twin Cities editor
Perfect buttermilk pancakes: I make Alison Roman’s Perfect Buttermilk Pancakes every Saturday for my kids: They are very good and easy for the kids to make with me (not very many ingredients) and have turned me into a person who now always has buttermilk in the fridge. I used to avoid recipes with buttermilk, because who has buttermilk? Now I do. I always have buttermilk. — Amanda Kludt, editor in chief
The Pioneer Woman’s lemon pancakes: I feel fine admitting that the first time I made these pancakes was to pay homage to Harry and Meghan’s lemon wedding cake while my sister and I watched their royal wedding from many miles away. These pancakes — at their best when cooked on a cast iron — are light as heck every time with just the right amount of acid. It’s a must-do recipe if you’re a citrus-y sweets fiend like myself, and Harry and Meghan. Don’t skip the lemon zest topping: When the zest links up with the butter and syrup it’s almost as good as getting a bite from a breakfast plate where you get a little sausage, a little egg, and a little syrup — just blissful. — Patty Diez, project manager
Phoenician buttermilk pancakes with pecan honey butter: Pancakes are a blessing and a curse. I love them but eating them almost always results in a complete sugar crash by mid afternoon wherein everyone around me is punished by my sudden, terrible mood. Because of this, I only make them on rare occasions (days when there’s nothing important to ruin) and go all out with the fluffiest buttermilk diner-style pancakes I can manage, using a recipe from The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook. While nothing can beat the satisfaction of consuming them at an actual diner, these pancakes are almost as good coming off your own stove. Instead of the pecan butter, I just go with regular butter and maple syrup. The batter also holds up great with the addition of blueberries or chocolate chips. — Madeleine Davies, Eater.com daily editor
King Arthur’s gluten-free pancake mix: Look, I’m a documented believer in box mixes and if you still aren’t, the King Arthur gluten-free pancake mix will convince you. I actually got these accidentally, not even noticing the gluten-free label, but they routinely create pancakes that are cheerily fluffy yet delicate and crisp, with a warm, toasty flavor that plays so well with add-ins like sliced bananas or raisins. I think I’ll make some this weekend. — Hillary Dixler Canavan, restaurant editor
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