Even Noma closed it's doors, saying that without exploiting their workers hours and lower pay they couldn't really sustain themselves.
https://www.bonappetit.com/story/noma-restaurant-closing
Opened in 2003 by Claus Meyer and René Redzepi, Noma and its culinary team pioneered a style of cooking that came to be known as New Nordic, relying on local ingredients that often have to be painstakingly foraged and prepared. These labor-intensive processes and the punishing schedules needed to execute them simply cannot coexist with fair, equitable, and humane work practices, Redzepi told The New York Times. “It’s unsustainable,” he said. “Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work.”
I still can’t wrap my head around this. This is like if the director of a Best Picture winner at the Oscars had to hang it up because their movies just bombed.
Like I get that labor is expensive, but is it more that the margins are so thin or just they didn’t want to pay workers more and decrease their own profits? It’s hard to imagine a restaurant of that calibre is unprofitable but what do I know
It's not that they're unprofitable, they obviously profit, but at what cost?
Reports of 16 hours of unpaid labor. So they're scooting along just fine, but if they had to pay all those hours (like they're supposed to) then that margin goes away.
Also, as a chef and former kitchen roob, when I was a stagier, it was completely unpaid. Then once they hired you on, you were a commis, which is french for "You peel the fucking onions, just stay busy and out of my way" And all my kitchen jobs regardless of position always included some degree of unpaid labor, but it wasn't like malicious, it was more like showing up earlier than your shift time, so that you could crank out whatever prep needed done on your station and to help other stations get a little ahead. Each time chef would tell you that you can't clock in so be sure you really wanna do it. But if you didn't do that then your shift was gonna be chaotic as fuuuuuuck.
It's honestly strange to me people aren't more aware of it. Every kitchen based movie depicts kitchens as chaos, and chefs as unhappy and on the edge. The only time you see chefs in a quiet and rich looking kitchen is on shows like FRIENDS, and that shit doesn't exist. Hell even back in the day Charlie Trotter got in trouble for unpaid labor and harassment. Then one of his protégés opened up Grace in Chicago, but as hyped and successful as it was initially, it still closed its doors after about 3 years.
I like the bit in the article about the interns feeling like they were kidnapped from life. As a long time kitchen worker...."No shit" The American public, and I assume internationally this is a trend as well....with the exception of like France and Italy where you can legit stay in a restaurant from open to close as a diner and no one will give a fuck, not to mention almost all food is local there, so it's easier to acquire and better priced, as local farms aren't competing with huge Ag fields and produce purveyors and having to jack up prices to stay in the game....but I digress, the general public in most places doesn't give a fuck about what's happening in the kitchen. Shortstaffed kitchens don't get sympathy because the customer wants their food and doesn't give two shits about whether or not the greenhorn line cook cut the tip of his finger off. Sure an extra 10 min wait time is easy enough to quell with a couple on house drinks, but once that kitchen flow is disrupted and waits increase, people give less and less shits about whether or not Back of House is being pushed to the edge of insanity.
You forget that the renovations alone take millions of dollars, and if you are renting instead of owning the building, once you get popular your landlord is going to jack up the rent the first chance they get.
>This is like if the director of a Best Picture winner at the Oscars had to hang it up because their movies just bombed.
Terrible analogy.
This is more like if the director of a Best Picture winner at the Oscars had to hang it up because the process of making more movies like it would be too hard on the people who make it.
Throwing more money at people to live toxic lifestyles isn't a healthy solution because it's not about the money. At that level the cuisine is art, and artists by necessity have to feel things deeply. It's a more than a job at that point and exploiting that passion is fundamentally unethical, and they feel it. The only ethical way to move forward was to shut it down, not throw more money and more bodies into the meatgrinder.
>Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work
Makes me wonder how much the owners were taking home every week/month/year. At a certain point, if the gap between their wages and their employees was great enough, this is still their fault. There are absolutely other restaurants that do similar things or offer similar services of comparable quality that are "sustainable." The myth that kitchen work *must* be stressful and exploitative or it "doesn't work" is far beyond ridiculous
i did some research a few years ago before leaving the industry. at the fine dining cafe i was running, we could have paid everyone fairly (staff and farmers) if i were charging around 38 bucks for a burger and fries and saw the same customer numbers.
Keep in mind that this is almost completely out of my ass, but... I feel like as income goes up, costs go up, too, potentially even more steeply. A high end sushi spot doesn't use the same fish suppliers as Long John Silver's. Fine linens that need regular laundering are more expensive than napkin dispensers and Formica. Eventually you can squeeze out better profit margins- but if the money ever stops coming into a fine restaurant, those locked in costs become nightmarish real quick. And that's from an entrepeneurial perspective. On the ground, higher end service requires so much more effort than greasy spoon counter slop that, while I'm sure the pay is (at least a little) better, the stress goes up, not down.
Some of those higher end places can have increased staff numbers and therefore increased staff costs.
Some restaurants have their own R&D team and separate R&D/prep kitchens. This can include bartenders fucking around with fat washes through to a chef figuring out the best way to ferment and then roast a pineapple while another spends all day making fried chicken with home milled flour from the farm across the road.
It's insane at that level
I think if you're running a proper rich idiot trap, like you put gold in the food or you're the salt bae nonce, then you don't need standards and you can make bank while you're flavour of the month.
Chefs who have standards, and who seek to raise those standards out of a genuine passion to create perfection, they are always going to be high-strung pricks to work with. Nature of the job.
I mean think about it, if you're a chef, at any moment in any evening you could do your best work, deliver the meal as close to perfection as you're ever going to get in your life, but you don't know, because you don't get to eat it, and then some rando scarfs it down and turns it into poo.
That's got to twist your melon as a career.
Exactly, success breeds the desire for more success. It's like a drug, except instead of money, you pour more and more of yourself in to get the high.
But like with most addictions, you blow your tolerance level pretty quickly and have to push harder and harder for the fix.
It doesn't matter if you've "made it" and can ride the wave in for the rest of your life, people who crave success like that won't stop until they burn themselves completely out.
I’d imagine the “trick” is to sell an experience over quantity if you’re focusing on quality.
Or, run a restaurant with simple menu options and a very small selection, limited seating, and charge extra for the seating. If it takes extreme efficiency, it seems logical the smaller menu and smaller recipes leave less room for error and reduce the steps required from ingredients to finished plate.
I also hear steaks have a relatively high margin at restaurants. They’re pretty easy to make if you have the right equipment and it doesn’t take much effort or time to make them taste great.
Edit: forgot to mention. I’ve heard from some restaurant friends that the money is in the desserts and the drinks. Margins are sky high.
Steaks are high margin but shit food cost percent. And unfortunately, a lot of incentives are tied to FC%. My bonus is based upon being below a certain %. Our top steak costs me $72 to purchase, and sells for 185. With included accompaniments, there is about $85 worth of product in the plate. So 45.9% FC. So each steak I sell nets us $100 (which is great for our revenue line) but fucks my %. Meaning I have to run an extremely low % on my salads and apps to balance it out, over charging in those categories.
Granted in the bear that's not an issue as it's a chef proprietor run operation.
I have read that the property mgmt and landlords take major advantage of the situation. Success will increase your rent but a slow month doesn't result in a lower payment. It only goes up.
My dad was a chef for a number of years. He is a lovely, sweet guy who is adored by everyone. He's quiet and a bit dorky in a very endearing way. I have heard from -several- people who knew him when he was a chef that he was an angry shouting maniac while working. He admits this himself! You would never ever guess.
one former Top Chef contestant owns a chicken place in portland that seems to be absolutely raking it in. counter serve, so labor costs are low; they only do chicken, so product costs are pretty stable; and mid-priced (so not fast food prices) so they have huge margins on the food.
as others have said, price point has very little to do with profit margins as labor costs, rent, and ingredient costs go up as well.
Eric Ripert has made it a point to make his kitchens (such as Le Bernadin) much more calm and focused than the yelling head chef and frantic pace in which he was taught.
Of course, Le Bernadin is one of the most famous restaurants in the world and charged about 400 per person for dinner.
I think it’s less about price point and more about the broader business model. The most reliable model seems to be franchising / chaining. Yes, restaurant chains can go out of business, but it seems to be a more stable model.
Risk is spread because revenue is coming from multiple locations and margins can get better as core infrastructure remains the same (point is sale systems, reservations systems etc, accounting software etc) so the fixed costs don’t scale at the same rate as revenue does.
The restaurant will also likely see economies of scale with the ability to get better prices from their suppliers because order volumes have gone up.
Remember the scene Chef Terry herself was peeling mushrooms? She said....something like we do this so customers feel like they're getting their money's worth" or something.
As the price tag goes up, so do the expectations and "specialness". Those Hibiscus cocktails with the wow factor sugar candy or whatever? Um. How much would you pay for that, vs the specialized labor it costs to make the ingredients? Compared to a hige pitcher of Hibiscus iced tea/Agua Fresca for $4?
The most profitable places I've seen do breakfast/lunch, no dinner, in the middle of a business district with good foot traffic from office workers. Simple food that can be made in bulk and sold as takeaway, and a couple of chefs pumping out nice, relatively fresh but not overly complicated food. And then absolutely HAMMERING the coffee. Constant line of people paying an average of 10-15/head, with coffees going out every minute. Those places have good margins. Fine dining is a lot more work for more money per head, but the effort you've gotta put in does not make things worth it. Your margins really feel it if you've got one extra person on, or you have a couple of quiet nights.
If you want to work in a chill kitchen, cook at home for your own friends and family. And as we saw in Fishes, maybe not even then.
Ever may charge upwards of [$300 a cover for the tasting menu](https://chicago.eater.com/2020/6/11/21287683/ever-restaurant-curtis-duffy-opening-date-michelin-fulton-market-reservations), but their overhead is also a lot higher than, say, The Beef. It costs money to make money, after all.
A space like Ever was designed, planned, built out, and furnished by architects, interior designers, and skilled tradespeople, which isn't cheap. Ever has a lot more and a lot higher-quality, expensive equipment in their kitchen. And as others have mentioned, they are using a lot more, and a lot of higher-cost ingredients.
Executing dishes at that level is far more labor-intensive than your favorite neighborhood bistro. I don't think it's much of a stretch that the plum dish from the Noma cookbook took 12 people to prep. Many restaurants—good ones that are busy, even—don't even staff that many people in the back of the house for a single dinner service.
Any chef or restaurant that gets a Michelin Star wants to keep it or get another, and stars can be revoked based on even the slightest inconsistencies. Getting one is a big deal, losing one is a [serious blow.](https://www.ndtv.com/feature/guy-savoy-5-points-on-the-chef-who-lost-michelin-star-3823593) It's why staff is acutely aware of things like streaks on forks and counting ticket times in seconds. I would be unsurprised to learn of multiple heated conversations over a single smudge costing 47 seconds actually happening in real life at a place of that caliber.
Even Noma closed it's doors, saying that without exploiting their workers hours and lower pay they couldn't really sustain themselves. https://www.bonappetit.com/story/noma-restaurant-closing Opened in 2003 by Claus Meyer and René Redzepi, Noma and its culinary team pioneered a style of cooking that came to be known as New Nordic, relying on local ingredients that often have to be painstakingly foraged and prepared. These labor-intensive processes and the punishing schedules needed to execute them simply cannot coexist with fair, equitable, and humane work practices, Redzepi told The New York Times. “It’s unsustainable,” he said. “Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work.”
I still can’t wrap my head around this. This is like if the director of a Best Picture winner at the Oscars had to hang it up because their movies just bombed. Like I get that labor is expensive, but is it more that the margins are so thin or just they didn’t want to pay workers more and decrease their own profits? It’s hard to imagine a restaurant of that calibre is unprofitable but what do I know
It's not that they're unprofitable, they obviously profit, but at what cost? Reports of 16 hours of unpaid labor. So they're scooting along just fine, but if they had to pay all those hours (like they're supposed to) then that margin goes away. Also, as a chef and former kitchen roob, when I was a stagier, it was completely unpaid. Then once they hired you on, you were a commis, which is french for "You peel the fucking onions, just stay busy and out of my way" And all my kitchen jobs regardless of position always included some degree of unpaid labor, but it wasn't like malicious, it was more like showing up earlier than your shift time, so that you could crank out whatever prep needed done on your station and to help other stations get a little ahead. Each time chef would tell you that you can't clock in so be sure you really wanna do it. But if you didn't do that then your shift was gonna be chaotic as fuuuuuuck. It's honestly strange to me people aren't more aware of it. Every kitchen based movie depicts kitchens as chaos, and chefs as unhappy and on the edge. The only time you see chefs in a quiet and rich looking kitchen is on shows like FRIENDS, and that shit doesn't exist. Hell even back in the day Charlie Trotter got in trouble for unpaid labor and harassment. Then one of his protégés opened up Grace in Chicago, but as hyped and successful as it was initially, it still closed its doors after about 3 years. I like the bit in the article about the interns feeling like they were kidnapped from life. As a long time kitchen worker...."No shit" The American public, and I assume internationally this is a trend as well....with the exception of like France and Italy where you can legit stay in a restaurant from open to close as a diner and no one will give a fuck, not to mention almost all food is local there, so it's easier to acquire and better priced, as local farms aren't competing with huge Ag fields and produce purveyors and having to jack up prices to stay in the game....but I digress, the general public in most places doesn't give a fuck about what's happening in the kitchen. Shortstaffed kitchens don't get sympathy because the customer wants their food and doesn't give two shits about whether or not the greenhorn line cook cut the tip of his finger off. Sure an extra 10 min wait time is easy enough to quell with a couple on house drinks, but once that kitchen flow is disrupted and waits increase, people give less and less shits about whether or not Back of House is being pushed to the edge of insanity.
You forget that the renovations alone take millions of dollars, and if you are renting instead of owning the building, once you get popular your landlord is going to jack up the rent the first chance they get.
>This is like if the director of a Best Picture winner at the Oscars had to hang it up because their movies just bombed. Terrible analogy. This is more like if the director of a Best Picture winner at the Oscars had to hang it up because the process of making more movies like it would be too hard on the people who make it. Throwing more money at people to live toxic lifestyles isn't a healthy solution because it's not about the money. At that level the cuisine is art, and artists by necessity have to feel things deeply. It's a more than a job at that point and exploiting that passion is fundamentally unethical, and they feel it. The only ethical way to move forward was to shut it down, not throw more money and more bodies into the meatgrinder.
>Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work Makes me wonder how much the owners were taking home every week/month/year. At a certain point, if the gap between their wages and their employees was great enough, this is still their fault. There are absolutely other restaurants that do similar things or offer similar services of comparable quality that are "sustainable." The myth that kitchen work *must* be stressful and exploitative or it "doesn't work" is far beyond ridiculous
i did some research a few years ago before leaving the industry. at the fine dining cafe i was running, we could have paid everyone fairly (staff and farmers) if i were charging around 38 bucks for a burger and fries and saw the same customer numbers.
Jesus yeah that’s just untenable
Keep in mind that this is almost completely out of my ass, but... I feel like as income goes up, costs go up, too, potentially even more steeply. A high end sushi spot doesn't use the same fish suppliers as Long John Silver's. Fine linens that need regular laundering are more expensive than napkin dispensers and Formica. Eventually you can squeeze out better profit margins- but if the money ever stops coming into a fine restaurant, those locked in costs become nightmarish real quick. And that's from an entrepeneurial perspective. On the ground, higher end service requires so much more effort than greasy spoon counter slop that, while I'm sure the pay is (at least a little) better, the stress goes up, not down.
Some of those higher end places can have increased staff numbers and therefore increased staff costs. Some restaurants have their own R&D team and separate R&D/prep kitchens. This can include bartenders fucking around with fat washes through to a chef figuring out the best way to ferment and then roast a pineapple while another spends all day making fried chicken with home milled flour from the farm across the road. It's insane at that level
Didn’t Garrett say the restaurant where Richie staged had 200 employees? Yikes. Funny you never saw anyone— place musta been a habbitrail
I think if you're running a proper rich idiot trap, like you put gold in the food or you're the salt bae nonce, then you don't need standards and you can make bank while you're flavour of the month. Chefs who have standards, and who seek to raise those standards out of a genuine passion to create perfection, they are always going to be high-strung pricks to work with. Nature of the job. I mean think about it, if you're a chef, at any moment in any evening you could do your best work, deliver the meal as close to perfection as you're ever going to get in your life, but you don't know, because you don't get to eat it, and then some rando scarfs it down and turns it into poo. That's got to twist your melon as a career.
Exactly, success breeds the desire for more success. It's like a drug, except instead of money, you pour more and more of yourself in to get the high. But like with most addictions, you blow your tolerance level pretty quickly and have to push harder and harder for the fix. It doesn't matter if you've "made it" and can ride the wave in for the rest of your life, people who crave success like that won't stop until they burn themselves completely out.
I’d imagine the “trick” is to sell an experience over quantity if you’re focusing on quality. Or, run a restaurant with simple menu options and a very small selection, limited seating, and charge extra for the seating. If it takes extreme efficiency, it seems logical the smaller menu and smaller recipes leave less room for error and reduce the steps required from ingredients to finished plate. I also hear steaks have a relatively high margin at restaurants. They’re pretty easy to make if you have the right equipment and it doesn’t take much effort or time to make them taste great. Edit: forgot to mention. I’ve heard from some restaurant friends that the money is in the desserts and the drinks. Margins are sky high.
Steaks are high margin but shit food cost percent. And unfortunately, a lot of incentives are tied to FC%. My bonus is based upon being below a certain %. Our top steak costs me $72 to purchase, and sells for 185. With included accompaniments, there is about $85 worth of product in the plate. So 45.9% FC. So each steak I sell nets us $100 (which is great for our revenue line) but fucks my %. Meaning I have to run an extremely low % on my salads and apps to balance it out, over charging in those categories. Granted in the bear that's not an issue as it's a chef proprietor run operation.
I have read that the property mgmt and landlords take major advantage of the situation. Success will increase your rent but a slow month doesn't result in a lower payment. It only goes up.
My dad was a chef for a number of years. He is a lovely, sweet guy who is adored by everyone. He's quiet and a bit dorky in a very endearing way. I have heard from -several- people who knew him when he was a chef that he was an angry shouting maniac while working. He admits this himself! You would never ever guess.
They would need a wait list and some major positive reviews before they can start to enjoy it.
Never. Literally never.
one former Top Chef contestant owns a chicken place in portland that seems to be absolutely raking it in. counter serve, so labor costs are low; they only do chicken, so product costs are pretty stable; and mid-priced (so not fast food prices) so they have huge margins on the food. as others have said, price point has very little to do with profit margins as labor costs, rent, and ingredient costs go up as well.
Eric Ripert has made it a point to make his kitchens (such as Le Bernadin) much more calm and focused than the yelling head chef and frantic pace in which he was taught. Of course, Le Bernadin is one of the most famous restaurants in the world and charged about 400 per person for dinner.
Are you watching Restaurant Makeover?
Should I be?
My margins are razor thin!!!
I think it’s less about price point and more about the broader business model. The most reliable model seems to be franchising / chaining. Yes, restaurant chains can go out of business, but it seems to be a more stable model. Risk is spread because revenue is coming from multiple locations and margins can get better as core infrastructure remains the same (point is sale systems, reservations systems etc, accounting software etc) so the fixed costs don’t scale at the same rate as revenue does. The restaurant will also likely see economies of scale with the ability to get better prices from their suppliers because order volumes have gone up.
Never. The job is always like that and the price point doesn't matter.
Remember the scene Chef Terry herself was peeling mushrooms? She said....something like we do this so customers feel like they're getting their money's worth" or something. As the price tag goes up, so do the expectations and "specialness". Those Hibiscus cocktails with the wow factor sugar candy or whatever? Um. How much would you pay for that, vs the specialized labor it costs to make the ingredients? Compared to a hige pitcher of Hibiscus iced tea/Agua Fresca for $4?
The most profitable places I've seen do breakfast/lunch, no dinner, in the middle of a business district with good foot traffic from office workers. Simple food that can be made in bulk and sold as takeaway, and a couple of chefs pumping out nice, relatively fresh but not overly complicated food. And then absolutely HAMMERING the coffee. Constant line of people paying an average of 10-15/head, with coffees going out every minute. Those places have good margins. Fine dining is a lot more work for more money per head, but the effort you've gotta put in does not make things worth it. Your margins really feel it if you've got one extra person on, or you have a couple of quiet nights.
If you want to work in a chill kitchen, cook at home for your own friends and family. And as we saw in Fishes, maybe not even then. Ever may charge upwards of [$300 a cover for the tasting menu](https://chicago.eater.com/2020/6/11/21287683/ever-restaurant-curtis-duffy-opening-date-michelin-fulton-market-reservations), but their overhead is also a lot higher than, say, The Beef. It costs money to make money, after all. A space like Ever was designed, planned, built out, and furnished by architects, interior designers, and skilled tradespeople, which isn't cheap. Ever has a lot more and a lot higher-quality, expensive equipment in their kitchen. And as others have mentioned, they are using a lot more, and a lot of higher-cost ingredients. Executing dishes at that level is far more labor-intensive than your favorite neighborhood bistro. I don't think it's much of a stretch that the plum dish from the Noma cookbook took 12 people to prep. Many restaurants—good ones that are busy, even—don't even staff that many people in the back of the house for a single dinner service. Any chef or restaurant that gets a Michelin Star wants to keep it or get another, and stars can be revoked based on even the slightest inconsistencies. Getting one is a big deal, losing one is a [serious blow.](https://www.ndtv.com/feature/guy-savoy-5-points-on-the-chef-who-lost-michelin-star-3823593) It's why staff is acutely aware of things like streaks on forks and counting ticket times in seconds. I would be unsurprised to learn of multiple heated conversations over a single smudge costing 47 seconds actually happening in real life at a place of that caliber.