West Coast wage war wobbles kitchens, allegedly

Twenty years ago, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association essentially broke the union, and into the vacuum stepped the local government. Cue nostalgia.

In November, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about the crappy kitchen wages in the city by the bay, and the potential shortage, therefore, of talented cooks. The article implicated two groups that restaurateurs already regard as the legions of darkness—waitstaff and the government—so the on-line comments from owners have been predictably enthusiastic.

This was all news to me. Twenty-some years ago my wife and I moved from Minneapolis to San Francisco, and I suffered several kinds of culture shock. The first was ignorance: I had been a cook for six years by then, and thought I knew a thing or two. Turns out I was right, but two things were not quite enough.

The second shock was alcohol. I had to beg Mr. Kwang—our elderly night cleanup man—to leave the brandy out of my coffee when he brought the tray to the kitchen at 6:30. And it was only after a couple of months that I had settled in enough to let Liam resume dropping off my six-pack when he stocked the bar at nine.

The third was respect. When I left Minneapolis, cooking was not the glamorous profession it has recently become. Cooks were accorded a status just above “inmate,” and it was commonly assumed that the two places were interchangeable. We were at a dinner party shortly after moving to California, and the people introduced themselves around the table: lawyer, software engineer, et cetera—and when it was my turn, the circle interrupted itself to ask what I thought of the new chef at Le Castel and if I knew why most places served such lousy sweetbreads.

And the last was money. I’d left a union job at the venerable old Black Angus, where as the lead cook on the charcoal broiler I was making the top scale of $5.57 an hour. The benefits package was typical of the period: a free Tom Collins (I was young, OK?) at the end of each shift. A couple months later I started at the Washington Square Bar and Grill as the absolute bottom line cook in another union kitchen, and I made $64 a shift, with full medical and dental benefits for my entire family—no deductibles—life insurance, and paid vacation. Housing was more expensive, sure, but I’d expected that. What I didn’t expect was that line cooking would be treated as a skilled trade, to be rewarded and respected accordingly.

The result of all this was an amazing average level of competence in any given kitchen. My wife and I made a game out of dropping into restaurants we’d never heard of—it was “close your eyes and point,” really—and we never had anything close to a bad meal that way. At the Square, the two night sauté cooks seemed to have worked together since birth and would give Saturday night displays of virtuosity beyond all reason or possibility. Then they’d sit down after serving 350 people from an eight burner stove and 24 inches of grill and say, “Was kind o’ beesy, huh?” These guys never wanted to be head chefs—they were paying the bills by punching a clock; why take on the headache?

And that was the trade; phenomenal skill for decent wages. You found it all over town, from Vanessi’s to the Taditch to the holes-in-the-wall out on the avenues. The waiters were still making more money than we did—but that was taken for granted; we had a decent life and more free beer. And at many places, the waiters would occasionally tip the cooks—I found the staffs to be more cohesive, in general, than I’ve found elsewhere.
So now I read that cooks’ wages have been “effectively frozen at $10 to $15 an hour.” Interesting—I was making ten (plus that amazing benefits package) when I left there 21 years ago. And to blame, according to the Chronicle, is the gu’mint.

Minimum wage in San Fran is now $9.14 an hour, and there’s no “tip credit.” For those of you who are new to this particular controversy—journalism students reading this for research on shady industries, culinary students who wish to enter the profession with a full-fledged set of grudges—here’s a tip credit primer: 43 states have a variance in their minimum wage laws. Under the presumption that tipped employees sometimes receive tips, a lower minimum wage is set for them if employers can prove that the average tips at least make up the difference. Restaurateurs say that tip credit is necessary to allow them to pay more to the Untipped Unwashed in the back of the house; servers say that the difference will only go to buy mink mudflaps for the owners’ Maseratis.

Did I call my beloved profession a “shady industry”? I can only wish. Gone are the days when every owner kept three sets of books—one for the IRS (poor, poor me); one for the prospective buyer (rich, rich me); and one that had a faint odor of objective reality. Gone are the days when every cook knew how to cut a line, a lamb leg and a deck of cards. Gone also, apparently, are the days when you could go to any restaurant in San Francisco looking for a job, and know that it would take good care of you until you inevitably died of cirrhosis. The Golden Gate Restaurant Association essentially broke the union during the strike of ’84, and into the vacuum stepped the local government. I wonder how the Association feels about the trade, particularly with mandated benefits looming in the near future. Are they ever a little nostalgic for the days when they could scream at the damn union, and the union would scream right back? I expect the cooks are.