My deepest sympathies go out to the servers, cooks, and custodians at restaurants across the country who have been laid off due to the current health scare. But now seems like a good time to talk about what was wrong with dining out before the coronavirus — which is to say, everything.
New York-based chef and restaurant owner Amanda Cohen bitterly wondered Thursday in the New York Times whether, once the coronavirus has been suppressed, customers would “be willing to pay $8 for a latte instead of $5 if it means their barista has health care” and whether they would “be ready to make sacrifices to build a better future for the people who pour our coffees and mix our drinks?”
Or, she asked, “will we turtle up with a vengeance and focus on our own comfort until the next disaster?”
Cohen acknowledged that “customers are willing to pay only so much for food,” even as “rent, utilities, insurances, taxes and food costs keep going up.” But she never addresses why customers with disposable income, money that by definition they want to spend, reach a cap when it comes to dining out. It’s because the experience is almost never good anywhere.
Take Dirt Candy, which Cohen owns in New York. I can tell just from its menu online that it is precisely the type of restaurant I avoid like a deadly, flu-like virus. Dirt Candy’s menu says at the very top that the restaurant “doesn’t have an à la carte menu at dinner but instead offers two tasting menus.” One is a $65 five-course option called ”the vegetable patch.” The other is a $99 10-course meal called “the vegetable garden.” Who wants to eat anywhere where these are their only two options?
It’s not entirely the fault of people like Cohen. Liberal cities like New York City and Washington do everything they can to make it impossible for normal restaurants to open. The Washington Post did excellent reporting on this in 2016. Zoning laws, ridiculous minimum wages, and astronomically high rents serve as a massive impediment to would-be restaurant owners opening up eateries with decent food at reasonable prices. Instead, in Washington, we get an infinite number of “tapas,” “small plates,” “shared plates,” and — worst of all — any ethnic cuisine labeled “new” or “fusion.”
Restaurants are going through hell right now because of the coronavirus. The whole dining experience, however, needed saving before any of this.
