Corey Mintz: “Kitchen workers feel empowered to voice their objections and to not take jobs.”
A conversation on kitchen culture and how restaurants are adapting during the global health crisis with the critically-acclaimed author and food reporter.
Original photo by: Jaime Hogge | photo edited by: Yarden Haddi
The restaurant is a special place where we satiate our cravings for the foods we love. It’s where we celebrate those milestone occasions with family and friends. It’s where we experience joy. But, in this issue, food reporter Corey Mintz takes us behind the facade of warmly glowing restaurant lights and beautifully laid out dining tables, and gives us insight into the very different experience that exists within the kitchen walls and offices of upper management. The author of the upcoming book, The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them and What Comes After, outlines the more unsavoury aspects of kitchen culture and how workers are being exploited on a daily basis. And, while Corey sees some signs of change and a greater sense of empowerment from kitchen staff, he says that a lot more needs to be done to ensure better working conditions for these individuals working on the front lines. Corey also weighs in on how social media platforms like Facebook Marketplace have been utilized in the culinary scene as well as other trends being accelerated amid COVID-19, the influence of third-party food delivery apps on restaurants’ operations, and the importance of breaking bread with your family. Perspectivves reached Corey virtually at his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
“If you grew up eating with your family, the conversations and dialogue help shape who you are.”
Ziv: At the Haddi household, sitting down for meals with the family every weeknight is a sacred thing. I wonder what your thoughts are about this communal experience?
Corey: From my perspective, the family dinner is of huge value. I’m currently in a period where I am re-evaluating it because we have a daughter who is under two years old. she is transitioning from being fed to being able to eat a meal and a lot of the transition period has happened under the cloud of COVID-19 where it wasn’t possible to be with other people at all. Just this week we were able to have people over in the backyard. They have kids and we ate together at the same time. And, you know, just from the perspective of cognitive development, I see that every time my daughter is with someone else at the table, like another child, she jumps up a lot. She figures out more of what to do, how to do it, has more motor control, and is more interested in a different variety of foods. It plays a huge role in our development. If you grew up eating with your family, the conversations and dialogue help shape who you are. My goal is that I am creating that kind of household for my daughter. I don’t like the idea that it’s going to be that sort of 80s style household that I grew up in where my father worked until 8 pm and maybe he fed us dinner when he got home or maybe we already ate dinner. But that wasn’t part of our lives and that bums me out.
Ziv: was there any special moment or a connection within your family, during your childhood, that made you gravitate towards the culinary world?
Corey: There wasn’t. The majority of chefs or restaurateurs that I speak with or interview have a childhood origin story no matter what country, town, or neighbourhood they’re from. They tend to have a story about some family member who specialized in cooking something, or how they learned to make something in the kitchen with their mother or father. Food just did not play a central role in my household. I have more memories of comic books and the NBC Thursday Night Lineup than I do of meals we ate with my family. Dad did his best, he was a single father. He had like five dishes that he had on rotation. And my grandmother was a terrible cook. She’d make a boiled chicken. That was the dish. So I don’t have those wonderful warm stories.
Yarden: What sparked your interest in food then? How did you get your start in the culinary scene?
Corey: I started cooking later. After high school, I moved in with my girlfriend who had scoliosis. After undergoing a spinal operation, she was in bed for six months and I had to look after her. Part of that meant making meals which is why I learned to cook. My mother gave me a cookbook, The New Basics, and I started making recipes out of there. I developed newfound confidence that blossomed with following a recipe and having it come out as something that was better than I had ever imagined because I had never cooked before. It really instilled that sense of confidence in me that a lot of kids get through organized sports or the arts. It was the first time I went, “wow I could be good at something.” So I went to culinary school and focused on food from there. I cooked for a number of years in a variety of different jobs, mostly restaurants, and when I hit the end of that road—because I knew I didn’t want to go any further—I decided to take a stab at what I always wanted to do, which was writing. Thirteen years later, here I am talking to you and accepting this award [laughs].
Yarden: It appears as though plenty of people are cooking a lot more during this pandemic, myself included. I’m even cooking for my brother. As horrible as COVID-19 has been, what are your thoughts about how it forced us to spend more time in the kitchen?
Corey: We always have to acknowledge the terrible parts of COVID-19 right before we talk about the benefit that has come out of it. That's understandable. But if a good thing came out of a bad situation let’s not be shy about that. Look at the smile on your face when you talk about cooking for your brother. That’s a wonderful thing. I gather you didn’t cook much before?
Yarden: No, not really.
Corey: Yeah, I mean what else was going to get you to make that shift, and having done so do you feel more confident in the kitchen? Do you want to cook more?
Yarden: I do. I don’t know if I am that great, but I do actually enjoy cooking.
Corey: Who cares about being great. I mean, it makes you feel good, it shares your affection with other people, it puts food on the table, and you spend less money than you do going out to eat or furthering the addiction on third-party food delivery apps. It’s a good benefit and I don’t know that there’s any way to quantify it. I think a lot of people will come out of this pandemic with newfound cooking skills and confidence in meal-planning, shopping, budgeting, cooking, as well as preservation. And there’ll be another cohort of people living through this pandemic who will swear to never cook again because they hate it. I don’t know how many there are on each team, but I’ve talked to both camps and there are passionate feelings on both sides. I think it’s wonderful if people had time to be able to build that muscle.
“For years, restaurant managers have been saying that the only way for them to pay workers what they deserve is to raise prices.”
Ziv: In December of 2020, you wrote a piece for The Globe and Mail about problematic kitchen culture in the restaurant industry. You start the article by saying that, “the way we treat the people who produce food is atrocious.” What do you mean by that?
Corey: That’s the axe that I am grinding. I just got a text from this restaurateur I know and who I have interviewed a couple of times. The first couple of lines read: “do you know any cooks?” I am a freelance food writer living in Winnipeg. How do I know any cooks looking for work in Toronto? This is the situation that every restaurateur, at least in North America, is in. There’s a huge labour shortage and from my perspective people—who for years worked really hard for minimum wage or less and did it because they love the work—finally had a break from the cycle of needing to go to work every day just to pay their bills and have become exhausted from it. They’ve had a mental break and a huge portion of workers are not going back. Some people are going into work in other fields, some are going to school, and some are just transitioning to other temporary jobs. I just listened to a podcast the other day about a cook who just took the exam to be a mail courier and loves it because it’s unionized and the hours are regular. So there’s been a reckoning just due to the imbalance of how labour is handled in restaurants.
For years, restaurant managers have been saying that the only way for them to pay workers what they deserve is to raise prices. It’s unthinkable. People already think restaurant food is too expensive and now you’re seeing these prices go up. You’re hearing the people saying that they’ve got to raise prices by 10 to 30 percent because they cannot attract employees with what they were offering before. They are saying, “I can’t pay people $14 or $15 an hour. Everybody wants to start at $20 an hour. I can’t even get people in for an interview offering less. So prices have to go up.” It’s a long way of saying we’re currently in the period of a big dramatic reset on just talking about compensating kitchen staff. Never mind the way they are treated personally.
“Workers, more than ever, feel empowered to voice their objections and to also not take jobs.”
Ziv: Is it fair to say that abuse is rampant in kitchens?
Corey: I do get a feeling like a lot has changed culturally in kitchens in the last year or two. Look, there are so many forms of abuse. There’s the verbal abuse; the classic Gordon Ramsay screaming at you kind. And there’s the physical abuse. Picture, for example, a chef who comes around and puts their big meaty hand on your shoulder to complain about your work-station not being clean but they clamp their hand on your shoulder and pin you in a way that if someone came up to you in the office like that, you would immediately call HR. There’s also sexual abuse and harassment and the abuse of stimulants in the workplace because people work to midnight every night and there’s alcohol lying around. I’m sorry if I left out the racial discrimination in hiring practices. All of it has bubbled up to the surface and people are talking about it.
It’s dangerous to mistake public discourse for change, but I do see that all owners feel pressured to make some change. Some owners are making a veneer of change to get with the times and not get into trouble and some are committed to actual change. They cannot continue to treat people like this. The demands are coming. But, ultimately, most restaurants are small independent fiefdoms that don’t really have the kind of bandwidth to dedicate to the human resource issues that large organizations do. Not that every office does a good job of policing those things, but restaurants are just so small and often operate very independently of society and the law. So it’s hard to affect change in that field but I do see it happen. I don’t want to be obtuse about it. I don’t want to fantasize that everything’s going to be fixed but I do hear that more and more things are changing [in kitchen workplaces]. Workers, more than ever, feel empowered to voice their objections and to also not take jobs. Look at the desperation of employers right now. If I want to keep people or track people I have to have a reputation as someone who is good to their workers.
Yarden: Within the culinary world, we’ve seen the trend of home cooks selling their foods on online platforms like Facebook Marketplace. How else do you think the food scene is going to change here in Toronto in a post-pandemic world?
Corey: Nobody has a crystal ball. I think the last year has seen an explosion in the grey market because a lot of people have had to find alternate sources of earnings. I’m not in Toronto anymore. My family and I moved, last summer, to Winnipeg and I miss a lot of things. One of the things I miss the most is Sri Lankan food. Toronto has a huge Sri Lankan diaspora and I got very much into that and there’s like one restaurant serving that cuisine here. I followed the advice of friends who taught me how to find that hidden food and went on Facebook Marketplace where I found someone making Sri Lankan food. I went to his house to pick it up and it was just okay. Then, like six months later, I found somebody else and it was awesome. It was so good and I’m going back tomorrow to pick up dinner for my wife. I texted my friend too asking him if I could bring him anything and he told me to bring food for his whole office because when you find food that you love you want to share it with everybody. So I think there’s been a big boom in that and there’s always the potential for transition.
For people working in the grey market, at a certain point, you can’t scale up. For now, the government is kind of looking the other way and I don’t think by-law officers in any municipality in Canada are particularly hunting for people selling food online like that. You cannot commercially sell food produced in a residence that’s not inspected. It’s buyer beware. I’m fine with it. But the hope of those people is that they transition out of that. Some smart cities are supporting such a transition. For example, San Francisco has an organization called La Cocina which is an incubator kitchen specifically to find the people who have built up some kind of audience selling food underground and put them in this kitchen, mentor them, help them find commercial real estate, train them to run a business and it focuses on immigrants and women. Why doesn’t a city like Toronto run a program like that? It is such an obvious win-win, right? You don’t want people cooking in their homes and selling it and you do want to unleash the economic potential of immigrants and produce delicious food. So that’s the sort of grey market situation. It’s impossible to quantify. I can only tell you I’m living somewhere that has a nearly imperceptible Sri Lankan population and I was able to find people making this food. What a special thing. I couldn’t have found that in the restaurant scene.
The third-party food delivery app is something that has been playing over the last decade. In the last few years, the general wisdom from industry watchers has been that takeout and delivery off-premise sales have been growing as a percentage of total revenue and, at a certain point, they are going to overtake dine-in sales and so restaurants need to adapt. It was predicted that, in the next five years, pre-pandemic restaurants would need to change the way they do business to optimize for off-premise sales; that meant the redesigning of the kitchen and the dining room to make space for couriers and to maximize space for storage and production. Of course, we all know what happened in March of 2020. People had to do in a matter of weeks what they thought they were going to have to do in a matter of years and a lot of businesses have done that. You know, from a purely cultural standpoint, many restaurateurs are frustrated because they like serving people; they like actually bringing food to your table and seeing you eat and be happy and they don’t want to just put their food in bags but they also want to stay in business so they have to be pragmatic about it. The real issue is these 3PD companies that take an unreasonably large bite of commission—generally around 30 percent—and the profit margin you have at restaurants is closer to between 4 and 12 percent. A number of cities have put in temporary commission caps over the course of the pandemic. New York and San Francisco have voted to make those permanent. I am sure we can expect a legal challenge from Door Dash, Uber and all these food delivery companies. So there’s a big kind of Ragnarok-style battle that is playing out for the future of the sort of small, quick-service restaurant. Is it going to be the sort of entrepreneurial market that people got into the first place with the idea that you can create your own company and be your own boss and sell the food that you love and serve your community? Or is it going to be sort of a duopoly where one or two companies in California are effectively managing an industry on a national scale and restaurants are kind of sharecroppers working for them?
And the third thing is the ghost kitchens. The potential upside for them is expanding an established restaurant. The downside is the potential that the ghost kitchen operator companies are just farming the data from their tenants and are going to turn around and cannibalize their tenants (the businesses) the same way that Amazon has done. You know, once they figure out how you make your burgers or your burritos or whatever it is your business makes, and they know exactly what time of day your customers order what they order and the distance, the time, the price-point that is optimized, then they don’t need you anymore. They don’t need to be giving a percentage to you and they could do it on their own. I think that’s the kind of concern around ghost kitchens.
Note: Ghost kitchens are physical spaces where cooked meals are produced for off-site consumption by consumers. They do not contain the feature of on-premises dining or wait staff. Their growth has been said to have accelerated during the pandemic and they operate in collaboration with third-party food delivery apps.
It should also be noted that in recent months, delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash have filed lawsuits against cities like New York City and San Fransisco over legislating permanent commission fee caps.
Ziv: Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share about the restaurant industry?
Corey: As consumers and as diners, if we care about people being treated with respect, we should expect to pay for that. Workers should be paid a living wage throughout the supply chain, which means prices will go up. If food is cheap and seems really affordable and we can eat it five nights a week from restaurants, it means that someone is being exploited. If we want to avoid that, it means we have to pay for that as diners.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
About the creators:
Yarden Haddi: Graduate of the Image Arts Centre at Ryerson University. Digital Marketer at Grenis Media Inc.
Ziv Haddi: Graduate of the Master of Media in Journalism and Communication program at Western University and a former intern at 680 News and q on CBC Radio. He currently produces a current affairs program on Zoomer Radio.