Kitchen culture makes organizing an uphillâââbut necessaryâââbattle for restaurant workers.
I was extremely heartened to hear that the Chicago restaurant Lula Cafe is closing today in support of its workers who are participating in the general strike for International Womenâs Day. As a male line cook in a small from-scratch restaurant, I think of the ridicule, stigma, and resistance I would face from owners and fellow workers alike if I were to strike today (I happened to have the day off anyway), and I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I were a waitress or female line cook.
Part of what makes this industry so unique and compelling is its deep and long-established culture of discipline, camaraderie, and passionate enthusiasm. All too often, however, that culture becomes a tool used by owners and management for the exploitation of their workers. Never mind voluntarily strikingâââeven calling out sick in a restaurant is widely considered a personal failure, as a way of letting oneâs team down, when in reality it is a failure on the part of management to adequately staff the restaurant taking into account the obvious fact that human beings sometimes fall ill. Suggesting that such understaffing is unavoidable, owners constantly remind us of the tight profit margins inherent to the restaurant industryâââitâs a âlabor of loveââââand alternately cozy up to us by making small talk about their vintage car collections.
On the other hand, owning a restaurant should be an extremely easy task for a capitalist because restaurant workersâââat least serious cooksâââtend to self-discipline (I think of an anecdote about a line cook who cauterized his own wound on a frying pan to keep cooking a busy service). We regard the success of the restaurant as a measure of our own artistic worth. We take masochistic pride in being overworked and understaffed: working 60â80 hour weeks leaves little time to develop class consciousness, unionize, or organize solidarity with other social movements. For this reason cooks often remain apolitical, or rather de-politicized, and frustratingly tolerant of casual racism, sexism, and homophobia in the workplace. Any resentment we might feel against the owners who extract the value of our labor is mediated by our intense loyalty to our chefs and teammates. When we sacrifice our physical and mental health, our personal relationships, our holidays, weekends, and leisure time, we think of it as a tribute to them and not as a direct deposit into the ownersâ bank accounts.
Gestures like Lula Cafeâs closure today, the (moderate at best) discussions of a better kitchen culture among celebrity chefs like Rene Redzepi, and the strength of the Fight for 15 and fast food workersâ unions are important steps toward establishing social and political struggle in the restaurant. But the restaurant itself will have to undergo radical structural change if it is ever to become a livable, inclusive, and just institution for the workers who produce its value. Not only fast food workers, but chefs, line cooks, bartenders, and waitstaff must organize and form unions together. Too often the (typically gendered) division between front and back of house is an obstacle to restaurant worker solidarity which benefits only the owners. Harassment, sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia must be rooted out not as a matter of finger-wagging political correctness but as a matter of resisting the ongoing and historical structural violence waged by elites against marginalized groups. We should always do our best to support and establish restaurants and kitchens that are collectively worker-owned and democratically governed, where the wealth produced by our labor is distributed fairly among the workers and not squandered by owners whose only qualification is providing the capital to open the business (which simply means they happened to be rich or to schmooze with someone rich at some point).
The culture of the kitchen is deeply entrenched and, with its reverence for discipline, hierarchy, and tradition, in some ways very conservative. The struggle for socialism in the restaurant will not be an easy one by any means, but until we give it a shot our passion, artistry, livelihood and health are extracted and wasted on some car parked in the ownerâs hobby shop garage.













