Llewellyn King: Where have all the restaurant workers gone?
The Union Oyster House in Boston, open to diners since 1826, is amongst the oldest operating restaurants in the United States of America, and the oldest that has been continuously operating (except for several months in 2020) since being opened.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The restaurants are back. Bravo! Across America, the restaurants are open or beginning to open. Cheers!
But there is something amiss. Something unexpected and as-yet-unexplained is going on: There is a national shortage of restaurant workers.
During the lockdown, I was among many who lamented the fate of those who prepped, cooked, served and cleaned up, enduring bad hours, difficult conditions and uncertain earnings.
However, there have always been those who want to work in restaurants. For some, such as college students, it is a way of earning on the journey to somewhere else. For others, and there are many, it is because they love the ethos of restaurant life: its people-intensity, and its real-time energy and urgency.
And for those who link ambition with acumen, restaurant work has always fostered the possibility of, as I have heard waiters say, “a place of my own.” Chez Moi beckons to those who would sell foie gras, as well as those who would sell hot dogs.
For unabashed entrepreneurs, it is probably impossible to beat restaurateurs. The chance of self-employment, to my mind, is the great motivation of the free-spirited. A food truck is a start and maybe enough.
We knew the pandemic would change things. But to change employment in the restaurant industry, even a reduced one? That isn’t only a puzzle, but also a hint of how the pandemic has altered things.
There are those in Congress and the state houses who hold that restaurant workers are lolling at home because they would rather collect unemployment benefits. But I doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are so lazy, so work-averse that they would rather stay home -- after more than a year of staying home -- than returning to their restaurant jobs.
Something else is happening.
Horizons have changed, new jobs have been found, and the grueling but satisfying work of restaurants has given over to something else. After the plague, a new dawn.
The country is resetting, and lives are being reset, too. A waitress I know of in Florida found work in a print shop. She prefers the regular pay there to the uncertain income from waitressing. That is a reset in her life.
As we go forward, as the pandemic is less dominant in our lives, we are going to experience changes -- some anticipated, some surprising like the restaurant labor shortage.
We don’t know whether the full complement of workers will go back to their offices; we don’t know how schools will deal with the lost year; and we don’t know whether the mini migration from town to country that has been a feature of the last year is a trend to stay or a product of panic.
What we do know and rejoice in is that we can go back to being restaurant patrons. In brief travels around New England, Washington, D.C. , and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., I found that people are eating out with joy.
Restaurants are milestones of life. It is in them we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, advance romance, or simply eat something that we wouldn’t get at home.
But that isn’t all. Restaurants, however modest, are destinations. During this long pandemic, we have missed having a destination.
Restaurants in all societies are part of the fabric of how we live. Eating out is woven into our lives, whether it is a humble hamburger or a great ethnic food feast. The first step in the American Dream for many immigrant families is to start a restaurant, to employ the social capital that they brought with them: their cuisine.
Bon appétit! We need restaurants because, in their great variety, they add spice to our lives, especially after the long lockdown.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Rhode Island.
Web site: whchronicle.com
Boston restaurants of a certain age
You can still get your aphrodisiac fix at the Union Oyster House.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Durgin-Park, the Boston restaurant founded in 1827 (!) and famous for heavy “New England cuisine’’ and by turns rude (and often large) waitresses, is closing, to the gnashing of teeth of habitues, or, to be more accurate, mostly former habitues. It has always amused me that so many people who demand that a “beloved institution’’ stay open either have never been there or have long since stopped patronizing the joint.
And so another famous restaurant will join Locke-Ober and many other famous Boston eateries that haven’t been able to keep up with patrons’ changing tastes, demographics and daily schedules. Yankee pot roast and Indian pudding just don’t have the allure that they had 50 years ago. Boston is a big and rich city; there are more than enough prosperous people to keep the likes of Durgin-Park open – if restaurant romantics wanted to eat there. But it seems that many who did now just want to wax nostalgic or have shuffled off to the great dining room in the sky.
I’m hoping that an even older place, the Union Oyster House, started as a restaurant in 1826 but in a structure believed to have been built in 1704, will survive. I go there sometimes with a French friend. (Weird fact: Louis Philippe, the king of France in 1830-1848, lived in exile in that building in 1796, paying his expenses by teaching French to young women. But perhaps that’s not as weird as that the late Vietnamese dictator Ho Chi Minh had worked in the Parker House hotel.)
The Union Oyster House still has at least one big thing going for it: As the great oyster-eating scene in the movie Tom Jones demonstrates, oysters are a lot sexier than roast beef.
xxx
The Durgin-Park closing reminded me of another sign of the passing of generations and changing tastes. An old friend who teaches at a certain elite college invited her class to dinner and a showing of the classic movie Casablanca, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1943.
While you might think that the movie, with its suspense, witty lines, bittersweet romance and evocative music might be well-known across age groups, you’d be wrong. The kids had small reaction to the film and demonstrated little knowledge of its historical context of World War II. It seemed dead to most of them.
So they come and they go.
One bit of dialogue from the movie, with the French police Captain Renault (played by Claude Raines) and café owner Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, seems appropriate:
Renault: '’Why can't you go back to America? Why Casablanca?'’
Rick: “I came here for the waters?'’
'’The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.'’
‘'I was misinformed.'’