THE LISTS ARE NOT ENOUGH. LET’S WRITE A BETTER FOOD FUTURE.
February 4, 2021
On January 20th, 1888, an inspector arrived at Café Philip in downtown Buenos Aires to inspect the booklets of good conduct of the restaurant's waiters and kitchen staff. A then relatively new city ordinance required that all service workers, which also included house cleaners, drivers and hotel staff, keep a certified booklet in which all of their previous employers evaluated their behavior. The story goes that the owner and the inspector began speaking condescendingly about the restaurant's servants which, combined with a blisteringly hot summer day, was too much bullshit for one day. The entire staff grabbed their hats and walked out and the following day had the support of 3000 other service workers that multiplied as the days went on.
Police staked out big hotels to stop instigators from convincing staff to join them and broke up large congregations where socialist and anarchist newspapers were being passed out for free to workers. National newspapers debated the ordinance and the city promised the largest bakeries to bring in strikebreakers. This is what ultimately broke the strike in favor of the workers. Baking, skilled labor performed by hand, couldn’t be replaced by just any worker and the citizens of Buenos Aires were becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of their daily bread. After seven days, the ordinance was nullified and other unions used the momentum to continue fighting for better pay and treatment.
As I read the story, I wondered: how far has the restaurant world actually advanced?
The other day I was talking to a friend who had just interviewed at a restaurant, apparently one of the continent’s best, for a head chef position. The job was 6 days a week and at least 10 hours per day for 20,000 pesos, which is not enough to rent a room in a shared apartment. It would be good for her CV, they told her. “I can’t afford to wipe my ass with that kind of money,” she told me. I asked another cook friend if he knew of any restaurants with sustainable missions to prioritize in my writing. He suggested one that works almost exclusively with organic producers. Except I was told by one of their ex-employees that they habitually take on apprentices with promises of employment that never comes. Allegedly the owners, celebrated young restaurateurs, refuse to hire the apprentice once the probation period finishes, over and over again, to constantly rotate new and free help rather than hire a line cook. “Lots of people do that though,” my buddy responded unmoved.
Of course, I would never feel comfortable covering these places, unless the allegations were disproven or conditions improved. I’d stop working before I wrote a gushing review about a person whose work was constructed atop the abuse of their power.
“Sometimes there are situations that are so obviously heinous that it isn’t enough to just stop including a place or keeping them out of prestigious lists. That is when journalism should critique. But it is very difficult to know where to draw the line and form a clear set of criteria,” says Pipi Yalour, bartender, podcaster and author of the newsletter Chicas Barra. “The only line I could draw with certainty is when some sort of violence has occured. I don’t think that violence can just be ignored. Journalism should denounce those situations. But if we begin to isolate, there isn’t very much left. If you start examining the places that are not chauvinistic, where you don’t have men actively enforcing misogynist policies, men that abuse their power, that fondle the women that work for them, men who hire a bunch of women because otherwise who else will they fondle, people who have all of their staff working off the books while they vacation in New York every year, there wouldn’t be a lot of restaurants left to review, would there? That is where I start to wonder: is the way to fix this to set everything on fire?”
I spoke with Yalour just hours after cook Trinidad Benedetti uploaded a video to her instagram alleging sexual assault at the hands of celebrity chef Pablo Massey. Massey worked in kitchens across Europe before landing a decade’s long job alongside Francis Mallmann. He eventually joined forces with a powerful restaurant group that built him a restaurant and landed him television appearances and two book deals.
In her video, Benedetti recounts her experience as a 20 year old pastry chef. After being assaulted, she asked her supervisor whether it was “normal for Pablo to grab his female employees' butts”. She was told yes and that there were two options: keep her mouth shut because everyone already knew he was an old perv or slap him across the face. When she spoke with another two managers, they feigned surprise before calling her crazy and ridiculous when she insisted she didn’t want to be left alone with him. “What do you think he’ll do, rape you in his office?” one responded.
Social media quickly came to Benedetti’s defense — not unsimilar to the way that social media called out Don Julio and international gastro party group Gelinaz for organizing a food event without inviting a single female chef, a conversation that was muffled by the restaurant’s top slot on Pellegrino’s 50 Best list days later. Will this be any different? Will food media begin to analyze the way that food writing legitimizes abusive bosses through celebrity-building and strengthens misogynist workplaces like the one where Benedetti was assaulted?
Yalour points out an important complication — where do you begin to break down destructive practices that are structural and thus normalized? The rampantness of abuse, abuse that happens in the open and with the consent of many, ironically, makes it difficult to call out. Precisely because people like Massey are not exceptions; taking advantage rather than questioning one’s power is often the rule.
“I am seeing changes. I think that we are a part of a generation that is in the midst of a transition,” continues Yalour. “In my experience I was always fighting against being told that this is just the way the restaurant world is. You treat the new person badly because you were treated badly when you were new, one way of not staying the victim is becoming the victimizer. I think that is really changing. What I hope for in the future is mainstream journalism that [sic] if we are going to talk about the best bars or the best restaurants, let’s also have the courage to look into what is going on behind the scenes before writing that big article in the big paper.”
How can writing accompany that transition? Certainly the standard profiles, reviews and lists, often written with the help of press releases and publicists rather than independent reporting and investigation, make already unequal power dynamics edge closer and closer to impunity. And if it is truly impossible to run a dignified restaurant — creating a safe environment, paying fairly with legal contracts, vacation and benefits — then it’s time we really talk about it. All of us. The owners and managers who perpetuate it, the colleagues that ignore it, the workers that suffer underneath it, the writers who put it in the lifestyle section and the customers that later consume it.
“Firstly, the amount of publications that write exclusively about food are very few,” starts Yamil Sfeir, who goes by El Conde Gourmand on Instagram. “The majority of articles are published in mediums that seem like they are fulfilling a quota and since they don’t give out food budgets, and many people think it is a crazy idea to pay to visit a restaurant for the first time, they set up invites in exchange for articles. That commercial exchange affects two parties. The journalist who is obligated to write an article that is practically tailor-made, and the reader who then reads the article. Without independence, there is never objectivity.”
Sfeir, a lawyer and cook, started writing about food on Instagram a few years ago. He sets himself apart from other instagrammers by recording the city’s restaurants and the people behind them through the lens of art, history and philosophy. “I have dissented. I’m not interested in writing for the person who wants to know where to go out to eat. I want to write for the person who is interested in learning.” Alongside his brother, an architect, he planned a series of gastronomic interventions in warehouses, theaters and art spaces, and more recently, has started building a support network between a local soup kitchen and restaurants.
“I would like for journalism to understand that talking about gastronomy is a lot more than covering restaurant openings,” Sfeir explains. “Food moves through every strata of society and to center ourselves so much in what is on trend means that we are not paying attention to a lot of more important things: the malnutrition and overconsumption that exist side-by-side all across this country, waste of resources, the way we exploit land and waterways, the use of agrotoxins, pesticides and the consequences of our consumption, processed foods and the ways that brands condition us. We lose sight of helping the cooks that are committed to a change but aren’t given the voice that they need and deserve. These are a few things that we owe our readership who decide to trust our word.”
At its most basic, food journalism revolves around a transaction. Coverage guides consumption. What is written can legitimize people, eating habits and work spaces, especially when the same coverage is repeated over and over again. Conversely, as Sfeir points out, a lack of information can have the opposite and equally powerful effect of invisibilizing. What is the point of covering a restaurant without understanding that restaurant’s values? It’s spot in the supply chain? What is served when we divorce the final plate from everything that made that plate possible? To write about the final act feels both silly and selfish; consumption for the sake of it. It conditions the consumer to not contemplate the meaning of their food and the structures they are investing their money into.
Shouldn’t we be searching not just for food that is delicious but food that supports more humane systems and ask our readers to demand the same? Couldn’t we contemplate restaurant coverage alongside better understandings of work conditions and power dynamics? Of anthropology? Of philosophy? Why is it so antagonistic to weigh out the sociopolitical, economic and ecological structures that our food represents considering the moment we are living in? If we changed the way we wrote about restaurants, would that catalyze restaurants to change?
Bruna Fontevecchia, a writer turned editor and publisher, is beginning to build that kind of a food magazine. Later this month she will officially launch Anchoa, a food publication focused on ingredients in Argentina. The magazine was inspired by anchovies; built to embrace the “layered intensity of our food and the supply chain behind it because if everyone is talking about the same thing and everything looks the same, that is a big problem.” Full disclosure, I wrote an article for Anchoa’s freshman magazine.
In Argentina, Fontevecchia pointed out, power and the narrative around it are heavily concentrated in Buenos Aires which obscures the reality of the country. That type of coverage both limits the potential for regional cuisines, producers and artisans and further isolates consumers from their food source.
“That is something we really need to break down, how do we represent our country? I was interested in finding people who have never received any publicity. I want people to understand that there is so much more out there. We need to understand diversity in a different way and stop treating it like a trend. We need to get used to seeing different spaces, different faces and different stories.”
Fontevecchia doesn’t see a problem with the lists, best of articles and first person restaurant chronicles but believes that it is necessary to enrich that consumption with significant understandings of science, supply chains and food systems.
Breaking the entire process down is the only way to hold people in power accountable, diminish toxic kitchens and work towards a more humane food system. This means we must change the ways we investigate and write lists, chronicles and profiles, which isn’t just the standard in Argentina but across the globe, and incorporate writing that offers a more holistic understanding of our food and the people that make it.
To get there, Fontevecchia, Sfiel and Yapoul seem to be in agreement: we need to change our understanding of what it means to go out to eat and the responsibility behind that, which is work of writer, cook and consumer in tandem. This means consciously deciding to put an end to the bullshit, kick out the old guard and empower new and younger voices and radically different approaches to talking about food in a world in need of a transition. Otherwise, like Fontevecchia pointed out, “The problem of erasing everything behind our food will just continue. When we look at food from a single perspective, we separate ourselves from our planet, our nutrition and all the nuances of gastronomy, and we end up with a false black and white world rather than the real one, which is complicated, intense and full of umami.”