No Employee Drinks
For Top Chef star Hugh Acheson, whose Georgia restaurants include Empire State South and Five & Ten, documentation employees sign isn’t enough. “A lot of them are just there to appease the insurance company. And then they go straight in the drawer. Restaurants are alive and need to be watched over constantly.”
The chef stresses the need to make a distinction between employees’ professional and personal lives. “I find that the restaurants that are the most out-of-control, the most exploitative, are where everyone drinks together after hours.” Acheson continues: “I’m not the guy dancing on the bar at an Aspen after party. And your employees shouldn’t be dancing on the bar at their workplace, either.”
Sang Yoon of California spots such as Father’s Office and Lukshon has the same policy. “The problems we are seeing now aren’t a lack of established rules,” he says. “It’s people at the top not following their own rules; it’s no different than senators and studio heads.” With the late hours and alcohol, restaurants are an incubator for bad behavior. Yoon’s rule for avoiding these issues is to prohibit shift or after-work drinks. “Shift drinks turn into a two-hour thing, and nothing good comes of it. I strongly advocate a separation of church and state. You just cannot hop from one side of the bar to the other.”
Get in People’s Heads
One of the few women in the male-dominated barbecue industry is Amy Mills of 17th Street Barbecue, which has a couple of locations in Southern Illinois. Mills makes every employee sign a document drafted by her lawyer: “Sexual Harassment and a Hostile Work Environment.” “A lot of people in the barbecue industry are from a different generation, where bad behavior was acceptable. We are breaking that mold,” Mills says. She regularly posts stories that relate to industry problems on the restaurants’ social media and in the hallways. More important, she now makes a point of talking about them in pre-shift meetings. “You talk and talk and get in people’s heads.”
Sherry Vallaneuva, who runs six restaurants, including the Lark, Lucky Penny, and Les Marchands in Santa Barbara, Calif., has instituted a harassment training program that her managers take every year. Vallaneuva used to work at Twist Worldwide, researching trends for companies such as Target; now she’s responsible for almost 300 employees. “Those trainings are expensive, and they cut into the already thin margins you have as a restaurant operator. But this is not sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We’re the hospitality equivalent of a PG 13 movie.” Because there’s such a dramatic labor shortage in restaurants, Vallaneuva sees some places putting up with more bad behavior than they should. Once she gets a report, she moves fast to eliminate a problem employee. “I’m a believer in that “one bad apple” cliché. I’d rather do the job myself then keep that violating the rules. I’m fine to go in and work the line.”
Change the Message
Bobby Stuckey, owner and wine director of Colorado’s renowned Frasca Food and Wine and Tavernetta, believes that even just changing the messaging can help fight the problem of abuse in restaurants. He’s intent on getting rid of the glamorized, hard-partying chef credo. (That’s been celebrated since before Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential came out in 2000. Late in February, Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll (HarperCollins, 2018) by Andrew Friedman—no relation to Ken—will be released. It will highlight the origin of American cooking culture in the 1970s and ‘80s.)
On a more concrete level, Stuckey credits a human resources manager he hired as a non-biased person to oversee problems. The company now executes confidential surveys among the staff—not a common restaurant practice. It’s not cheap; Stuckey says the manager makes close to a six figure salary. “But it’s so much better and more healthy now that our staff knows they have a voice.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.