dear fellow restaurant people, we’re also kind of the problem

I have a hard time imagining what life for civilians looks like. To be able to walk into a restaurant and find yourself entranced by the aroma of some delectable culinary expression passing by them on a platter as they walk in the door of the restaurant, by the sight of the bustling staff and a sea of diners and drinkers, by the cacophony of sound produced by ice rocking back and forth in a Boston shaker and gaggles of tourists and bachelorette parties yelling over each other as the in-house sound system croons away a playlist that the poor servers and bartenders have heard on repeat for potentially years. I can’t remember the last time that I sat down at a restaurant with the bliss to tune out the ceaseless, droning thoughts that are endemic to a career hospitality professional which constantly keep us watching to see what sliver of insight we can ascertain from the inner machinations of a restaurant operation; as if we ourselves aren’t paid to masquerade said machinations as a flawless, well-oiled machine at our respective places of employment.

But the twenty-eight year old who worked at a Target or something while maintaining straight A’s in high school, didn’t work in college, graduated with a degree in marketing, and took a job straight away at a firm of some sort has never had to consider what happens behind the scenes at a Chuy’s in the same way that I couldn’t begin to grasp what a job in their field looks like. The biggest difference between myself and this strawman that I’m postulating about for the sake of this self-indulgent blog post however, is that the hospitality industry is one of the few industries that exists that serves as a great equalizer for all walks of life and, with relatively little exception, just about every single person you know. This is so to say that just about everybody has some form of experience dining at a restaurant and yet there are so many people who have either no experience viewing what we do from the operational standpoint or have experience that’s so far removed from the constantly changing beast that is the hospitality industry that their perspective is no longer applicable.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t stop for a second here before diving into the meat and potatoes of why I’m writing this to say that in the nearly thirteen years that I’ve been slinging plates and cocktails for a living in some capacity, I’ve met the most beautiful collection of people that anyone could ever be so lucky to have the fortune of knowing. I don’t have any conception of what my circle of friends and acquaintances would look like if a high school friend’s neighbor hadn’t flagged us down one day to ask if we could fill in at the kitchen she was managing for $40 out of the cash register that night when I was fifteen; frankly, I don’t particularly care to. I love what I do for a living and it’s because I love people. I love taking care of people and I love being able to be a part of something special for anyone who walks in the doors of the restaurant that I work with. Some of my fondest memories from an otherwise traumatic and better-to-forget childhood were going out to eat with my family. I don’t think that a lot of people, patron nor employee, really have any comprehension of the intrinsic value of those experiences.

For many servers, cooks, bartenders, bussers, hosts, and managers, the industry is just a paycheck and anyone who so much as mildly inconveniences them can fuck off. For many guests, these experiences (that albeit have an exceptionally large margin for quality) that countless underpaid workers put literal blood, sweat, and tears into are taken for granted because of the fact that, as a collective industry, we’ve trained people to be entitled to whatever their conceptualization of what they deserve is by groveling for them and sticking our noses in the proverbial mud every time they get the slightest bit miffed about any sort of quality, service, or atmosphere related issue that they can conceive. It’s easy to forget that we restaurant servants and our patrons work so much better together and this memory loss isn’t helped by the industry’s tendency to abuse and underpay their staff; this doesn’t exactly motivate a lot of people to show up and “do the right thing” day in and day out. To say this isn’t a multi-faceted issue is to be reductive to the point of forfeiting any illusion of interest in making the hospitality experience a more equitable one for everyone involved, but I personally have neither the desire to pontificate about every single issue that plagues we restaurant-folk nor the magnetism to hold your attention long enough to do so.

That said, I would implore that you don’t make any assumptions based on what I just said about what this whole thing is about. I know it seems like I’m setting myself up to the complain about how hard our jobs are and how much more appreciation we deserve, but to be completely honest, I think that there are already too many self-reverent, egotistical people populating spaces in hospitality so I ardently refuse to contribute to their woe-is-me bullshit. Listen, we all chose to be here one way or another, but for an industry that hosts so many workers, there are so few of us that have accepted that at some point in time, this became our de facto career. That discrepancy tends to create factions amongst us in terms of what kind of attitude we carry in our respective places of work towards the care we choose to apply to our day-to-day vocational responsibilities. Tragically, sometimes that can manifest itself into the form of people with egos that outweigh their talents which isn’t exactly conducive to creating an environment that fosters growth and inclusivity to the target demographic of people who are beginning their budding careers in the service industry (read as young people).

It’s easy to forget where we all came from. See, these days, I get to enjoy a cozy lead server position at a nationally acclaimed, high end restaurant that not only specializes in my favorite type of cuisine and spirits, but also has something that, until I started there, I was not convinced existed: true, unfettered camaraderie and passion that exists in every member of the staff. I speak of a rare space in which myself and every other member of the team is happy, respected, compensated, and aware of the fact that we are all contributing to something truly awesome in nature. To the uninitiated, the gravity of that concept may be lost in translation, but if any of my industry kinfolk can believe that there lies truth in my sentiment about this beloved restaurant without the innate skepticism that plagues the vast majority of us, I imagine that it’s because you’ve seen something like this before in whatever uncommon capacity it exists in the wild. 

It’s a good life, but as much as I know that I had to bust my ass to earn my spot here, I’m not unique in the fact that I deserve this. Hell, everyone does. Every single person who punches in at a bar or restaurant-be it the sixteen year old host working their first job or the thirty year seasoned industry veteran deserves to be in a healthy working environment where they can make enough money to be successful in their personal lives and be proud of what they’re doing. So why is it that so many of us who do, in fact, know that a better life in this industry is real and achievable are so unwilling to accept that others deserve the same thing we have experienced? Like any other waiter who’s pushing thirty or still playing in the end zone past it, I didn’t cut my teeth in the type of environment that I now celebrate being a part of. I bled for jobs as a food runner, expo, busser, server, cook, dishwasher, manager, host, and bartender that made me a third to half of what I currently make and provided significantly less fulfillment. But the fact of the matter is that I honestly didn’t know any better. You convince yourself when you’re putting your nose to the grindstone that you’re doing the best that you possibly could because for that not to be true puts forward a hard suggestion that you’re treading water.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones who spent more time learning than treading and was able to lean on my mentors in the business to experience growth in times that could have otherwise given way to stagnancy. The opportunities I was fortunate enough to have gave me skills and experience that now actively benefit me, but it was a hard thirteen years that cost me a lot as well: mental health, a marriage, friends, family, and then some. There was a lot of sacrifice that I was expected to make to move up and make something of myself that, frankly, I don’t feel as though I’m expected to make in my current role. So when I see some twenty year old get hired to host or clean tables at the restaurant that now provides me the comfort and stability that have shaped my new sense of normalcy, I’m overjoyed to see someone who won’t have to struggle, hurt, and experience loss to get there like I did. Just because I had to doesn’t mean they should, right?

But you hear grumblings. When I was in management at a previous job, having to figure out staffing after COVID shutdowns in 2020 forced us to really reshape our perspective on what a qualified applicant was. In a company that I was once an eighteen year old busser brushing shoulders at work with rockstar servers with ten to twenty or more years of experience, I was now a manager hiring servers with two years of questionably relevant experience. But this wasn’t necessarily an issue with my previous employers, but rather an industry-wide pivot brought on by a global pandemic that reshaped the entire world’s attitude towards work. See, the civilians that I was waxing hypothetical about earlier may not realize the true extent to which many restaurants abused their staff and when months of shutdowns and slower business came about, even restaurant folks who had found their way to a better spot started falling off the service industry chess board in favor of opportunities that could afford them a better quality of life that is basically unheard of in our line of work. The seasoned veteran servers and bartenders were mostly not applying for our craigslist ads anymore because they were either hanging on for dear life to whatever job they were secure in at the time or had gotten out of the industry entirely. So what do you do as a restaurateur? You adapt. 

In this case, we had to work a good bit harder to make people into the servers, cooks, bartenders, bussers, and dishwashers that we wanted to work with. If I may be terse and perhaps a bit uncharitable, the problem is that an industry consisting primarily of people who don’t have any personal investment into their own job who walk home with cash every day tends to be an industry with lots of short-sighted, jaded, impatient folks who either don’t care to or don’t know how to be the person that they wish they would’ve had when they were a sixteen year old host working their first restaurant job. Who are we to act like we’re somehow superior to these kids for not knowing everything like we weren’t at one point fresh, green, and relatively clueless? 

My newfound gem of positivity and nurturing in the restaurant industry does highlight the impatience with new faces that I experienced in previous jobs in stark contrast, but every now and then someone will say something to the effect of “has this person never worked in a restaurant before?” to which I’m pedantically inclined to reply “obviously anyone who has been hired here has worked in a restaurant before.”-instead I just settle for telling people to keep an open mind and be patient. Alternatively, let’s suppose this new food runner who just said the wrong name of the dish they just dropped off to your table has, in fact, never worked in a restaurant before. Does it benefit anyone to talk shit about them behind their back? It certainly isn’t helping them get better at their job and I guarantee that the catharsis one might get from releasing that sort of toxicity in the air isn’t doing anything but exacerbating negativity for the offending party as well.

Look, at the end of the day, I don’t feel like I need to sit here and preach like I haven’t at some point or another been guilty of the very words and attitudes that I’m now lambasting. That said, we don’t have a very long life expectancy in this industry. We’re built to either quit after a few years of intense burnout or cope with the taxing nature of the industry with imbibement and indulgence until we destroy our bodies to the point of inability to carry a tray. I promise that you’re only worsening your own mental health by choosing negativity and condescension day after day. Granted, that’s the easier choice to make, but choosing mindfulness, patience, and grace instead will extend our stamina both mentally and physically. And if you’re a restaurant patron who works outside of the industry and for some reason made it this far into this post, the same advice applies to you as well; this shit isn’t easy, so just be nice when you can manage it and we’ll all be better for it.

We can all do a little better, but we never will if we don’t accept that we should.

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zen and the art of utter institutional failure

Here’s one quick thing I’ll say that’s tangentially related to the broader topic at hand to clarify in case there was any confusion whatsoever before we get going with this thing: I’m not going to debate with a single person about the morality or justification for abortion. I have a hard-line stance that anyone who needs or wants an abortion should be able to easily get one for free, no questions asked. If you don’t agree with that, I don’t care. If you have something to say to me about that, don’t. Once again, if you possess an opinion that would serve to undermine the right to bodily autonomy for people who have uteruses, then I do not care about your opinion and, furthermore, I do not care about you. In fact, I would venture to say that very few, if anyone cares about you. You are a roadblock to progress and your opinion is drenched in the blood of the thousands of vulnerable people with unwanted pregnancies that you have assisted in condemning to death and despair. Unkindly, go read a book and leave me the fuck out of your backwards attemp to subvert the eyes of your life’s audience from the facets of your person that cause you insecurity by attempting to strip away the humanity of others. Full send.

Now back our regularly scheduled musings.

…

Hell, I can’t believe that I’m saying this (and those of you who are close to me might also reel a bit from the shock), but I was actually somewhat wrong last time. Just a few days ago, Biden signed the first gun safety legislation since the 90’s into law which, albeit didn’t do everything that we could have wanted to do to protect our children from gun violence, was a really refreshing step in the right (read as left) direction for us. I was nearly bamboozled into having some of my faith in the legislative process restored.

How silly of me.

I’m sure that I don’t need to remind anyone about the state of the union at the moment. I know that we collectively feel the foundation of whatever faith we had in our institutions crumbling beneath our feet and nobody is unjustified in feeling hopeless. If you made the trek through my last post about a month ago, you would know that I’m not only prone to such hopelessness myself, but also that I’m on the borderline of being an advocate for hopelessness as a means of survival. Not to be a broken record, but I feel even more justified in my routine post-massive-societal-loss defeatism than I did a month ago.

They finally fucking did it. On Friday, June 24th, 2022, five vile, soulless husks decided that they were doing their best to represent the interests and wellbeing of three hundred twenty nine million people by effectively denying the right to uterus-possessing-persons to have autonomy over their own bodies that is supported by some sixty odd percent of our country’s population. Three of said ravenous, rapacious, misogynist dipshits were appointed to their undemocratic lifetime appointments by reality TV star and conman, Donald J Trump, during his four year stint as America’s daddy. 

Cue hand-wringing from virtue-signal-happy democrats who are just dying to say “I told you so” for not voting for Hillary Clinton. As if the party that’s had the popular support of the majority of the country for eighty years hasn’t at some point surely had the power to codify Roe into law, but actively chosen not to in a play to continue dangling the lives and well being of human beings that they claim to support and care about in front of our faces to convince us to throw our votes away on them election after election. But if we’re being honest, this issue that will never personally affect any of our top-level elected officials was always just smoke and mirrors to distract the broader American populace from the endless spending on oil and bloodshed that lines said top-level politicians’ pockets (also known as one of the sole remaining pillars of the United States of America with bipartisan support from all members of the legislative and executive branch).

If I may ask, how long can we sleep at night while continuously blaming “Republican obstructionism” and Trump for the failures of the Democratic Party as the only viable voting option to the left of David Duke? If the entirety of the Democratic Party’s legacy can be undone in four years by one of dumbest human beings that has ever emerged into the public spotlight, then that speaks tragic volumes of energy and momentum that’s been wasted on our collective efforts to keep them in power for as long as they’ve had this infuriating stranglehold on us.  I reiterate that the Democratic Party has held popular support in this country for eighty fucking years and yet, they allow themselves to get steamrolled by Republican efforts to gerrymander and con their way into positions of power because they need the proverbial boogeyman (look up where that term came from by the way) to hold our votes ransom so we don’t do something “foolish” like vote for the Green Party or some other entity that doesn’t support their imperialist fiscal interests. If Democrats actually cared to mobilize voters, they could do so easily by showing any sort of tepid support for progressive policies that would empower the working class in even the slightest. But instead they threaten you with violence and the stripping away of your basic humanity so that Nancy Pelosi can fire off a banger email telling you that you need to donate money to her re-election campaign for an area of the country where a democrat will never lose the house seat.

Are you not tired of this shit yet? I mean, how many times are we going to just let them drag our noses through the mud before we at least *entertain* the notion that there needs to be some sort of viable alternative to just voting for democrats over and over again while they continuously disappoint us at every conceivable opportunity?

I’m posing some mighty tall questions and criticisms for someone who doesn’t really have any answers, huh? Like I haven’t voted in every single election that I’ve been of age to vote for in my life and sighed while I tapped the box next to a (D). Who am I kidding? I voted for my late friend, Mimi Soltysik for president in 2016 after myself and a couple of friends of mine went around the state of Texas and gathered signatures to see to it that votes for our friend, the Socialist Party candidate for president, would be counted. Did he win? Obviously not, but it felt nice to try and exercise an alternative. Many would say that we were few of many that split the vote and made way for Trump to be president, but I’ve written dissertations about why that couldn’t be further from the truth and I’m not inclined to delve into that again at this juncture (though I’m sure that I may be inclined to do so come election season 2024). That said, my protest vote, in hindsight, didn’t accomplish much because it wasn’t a part of a broader organizational effort to push forward an agenda. The Socialist Party too realized this in 2020 and instead of putting forth their own candidate, co-signed the much more popular and successful Green Party’s candidate. I’ve long felt as though the Green’s would be a really good place to start if we want to start investing in a party that actually has more than corporate interests in the driver’s seat on this road-trip/descent into the capitalist hellscape that we’re all on together. It may sound far fetched, but let’s be honest: doesn’t reforming the democratic party sound even more of a fantasy?

That said, I’m screaming into the void more than I’m actually here to offer solutions because, if I’m being honest with you, dear audience, I’m in no way qualified to offer solutions here. It’s hard times. Give your friends with uteruses a hug. Or give them the money that you were considering donating to democrats. Maybe both. I don’t know. You should probably still vote, but maybe approach with more skepticism than you have previously and with more intention to broaden your activism beyond the voting booth. It feels like a little too late to settle for “a good start”, but what else have we got?

thoughts, prayers, action

I was at a McDonald’s on December 14th, 2012. I recall standing there with my at-the-time girlfriend who I would later marry, have children with, and divorce getting a snack before going into our respective shifts at the restaurant that employed both of us at the time. There was a television in the back that would usually crank out CNN’s twenty-four hour news cycle on repeat throughout the day and, at the time, I was a freshly-minted adult-a mere eighteen years of age-and therefore, had neither the life experience nor the desire to be informed or interested in anything that I would generally find meeting my eye on that screen.

But that day was different because it was on that day that the United States would be sent into collective shock and grief when a man not much older than I was at the time walked into Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut and took twenty-six lives including those of twenty elementary school-aged children. The murder of a child has always been and will always be impossibly difficult to stomach, but such a senseless, reasonless murder on this scale was one of the most disgusting, blood-curdling acts to slip into my stream of perception at this point in my life. I had grown up in the shadow of the tragic Columbine shooting, but there was an immediately perceptible, yet somehow very difficult to explain line of demarcation between that and what happened in Newtown that day.

I’m sure many people my age can relate to the notion of coming into a form of consciousness in the post-9/11 world in which the world seemed so constantly engulfed in chaos that it would take something truly jarring-something so unthinkable-to truly rattle us. I was no different than many of my peers in that respect. My family was vaguely conservative, but rarely was there ever a truly coherent opinion presented to me that gave cause to any sort of exploration into my own political identity. Instead, my ideological development came from a common, but nonetheless very dangerous place: the internet. In today’s climate of non-stop, in your face online political activism (or at the very least virtue-signaling and posturing), you can assume that if you start to veer into the dark side of politics (read as conservatism if you’re in the US), someone, somewhere will be there to jump out and scare the wrong out of you from their corner of the internet. But a mere decade ago, this was extraordinarily less of the case and you were always just a YouTube rabbit hole or two away from finding some unabashed libertarianism or worse. I personally realized how easy it was to fall into this trap at that age and, were it not for the help of some extraordinary women in my life, I likely would have succumbed to such a nugget of ideological nonsense as that in a much more difficult-to-repair way.

But not everyone is as fortunate as I was in that respect. In the past decade, we’ve seen thousands of mass shootings in the US and little (if any) legislative action to mitigate the horrific violence that we’ve all started becoming desensitized to. The predominant motivating ideology for the perpetrators of these heinous acts is white nationalism/white supremacy. This is not an opinion of mine, but rather a cold, uncomfortable, and indisputable fact. There is nothing particularly easy or pleasant about confronting this vile underbelly of society that has become all too comfortable in recent years to show its ugly face repeatedly, but if we hope to stop these people from continuing to violently seize power from us by means of dominating the attention economy, it is our duty to do so.

Now surely, some of those who will read this diatribe of mine will read that last sentence and say “there’s nothing hard or uncomfortable about confronting racism/racists and it’s cowardly to frame it as such”. I would’ve once been one of those people, but that’s only because I would have at that point in my own political development not confronted how deeply the darkness of racism and white supremacy had infected every facet of the United States both in domestic and foreign policy. See, how are we to condemn the prejudiced attack of the man who took the lives of ten black people in a grocery store in Buffalo if we do not condemn our country’s ally Israel in its creation of an apartheid state with dominion over the Palestinian people? How do we condemn the man who killed nine black people at a church in Charleston if we do not condemn our own government’s plunder and pillage of the global south? And even if we remove race from the equation, how the fuck am I, a parent, supposed to condem the murder of nineteen elementary school aged children children two hours away from me in Uvalde, Texas and in the same breath be complicit in the bombing and shelling of schools and hospitals by our government’s hand in the middle east?

The short answer is that I cannot hold such cognitive dissonance so I instead choose rage over all of it. Living with such a rage is difficult. The unfettered cynicism that consumes me when it comes to every political/politicized issue that arises has not only had a hugely negative impact on my person but on countless personal relationships. My faith in the institutions that we are supposed to be able to rely on to serve justice to those who would prioritize their own capital gain and/or power over human life has long since faded and I’m left feeling powerless, hopeless, and defeated when yet another senseless loss of life enters my periphery such as the aforementioned massacre in Uvalde.

However, this one struck a different chord for me. It is only in these very moments in which I type these words that it occurs to me how much the predominant emotion that I’ve experienced through every global tragedy for years has been anger; how much my knee-jerk reaction has always been to let rage inspire action instead of sitting back and allowing myself to feel. With Uvalde, I felt my immediate response differently.

Today, I’m sad. Very sad. Like, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve cried since I first read the news last night kind of sad. Today, I realized that the last time I felt sadness hit me like a brick due to some form of current event was nearly ten years ago in the lobby of a McDonalds when an eighteen-year-old Alexander learned that twenty kids my younger siblings’ ages had just been massacred in Connecticut. Today, I realized that nearly a decade later, nineteen children barely older than my children had just been massacred in Texas and that not a god damn thing has been done about it by the powers that be who are supposed to make the decisions necessary to protect us. None of the letters to my representatives, none of the petitions, none of the organizing, none of the rallying and protesting, none of the volunteer work, none of the donations, none of the voting that I’ve done in my career as an adult have done a single fucking thing to keep something like this from happening. The saddest part about this is knowing it will happen again and knowing that I possess no power to stop it.

Now what? Now my daughters start school this fall and I just have to send them off to class every day hoping that they come back? Is that the world I live in now? Has it always been? I guess there’s no fair way to answer that last one, but I now feel confident in saying that even if the world was not always this way that it, at least, always will be. How am I to get frustrated with people for expressing “thoughts and prayers” when shit like this happens when their thoughts and prayers are effectually identical to the countless actions that myself and so many others have taken to try and repair the broken institutions that have so unabashedly failed us so many times?

The system is broken and that’s not new news, but it hurts when one of its many cracks and faultlines shows itself in such a way as this. This dissertation doesn’t turn around and become happy, poignant, and full of solutions either. I’ve been trying to encourage everyone to do the “right” thing and act to stop such tragedy over and over again until I’ve gone blue in the face for a decade and accomplished nothing. I’ve written countless polemics rallying against hopelessness in an era of never-ending darkness and atrocities for as long as I remember.

But today? Today, I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m scared, and I have no solutions. Today, I have about as much to offer as that kid ten years ago wiping tears from underneath his eyes in between bites of a quarter pounder with cheese. Today, I guess it’s just thoughts and prayers.