Silicon Valley Disrupts Dinner

Collateral damage. JL

Daniel Duane reports in the New York Times:

Tech companies scoop up culinary talent to run lavish free food programs that offer workers “all-day bacon and lobster rolls and tacos.” This kills the incentive for employees to spend a penny in restaurants. The average cook’s salary of about $53,000 doesn’t nearly cover the $3,490 average rent for a one-bedroom apartment. (People say) they can’t count the number of times (they) have heard an Uber or Lyft driver confess to being a former chef.
At a fancy Silicon Valley restaurant where the micro-greens came from a farm called Love Apple, I got a definitive taste of California in the age of the plutocrats. This state — and this native of it — have long indulged a borderline-comic impulse toward self-expression through lifestyle and food, as if success might be a matter of nailing the perfect combination of surf trunks, grilled lamb hearts and sunset views. For baby boomers who moved to the Bay Area in search of the unfussy good life, in the late 20th century, it was all about squinting just right to make our dry coastal hills look like Provence — per the instructions of the Francophile chefs Jeremiah Tower and Alice Waters of the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. By the early 2000s, that Eurocentric baby-boomer cuisine enjoyed a prosperous middle age as “market-driven Cal/French/Italian” with an implicit lifestyle fantasy involving an Italianate Sonoma home with goats, a cheese-making barn, vineyards and olive trees, and a code of organic-grass-fed ethics that mapped a reliable boundary between food fit for bourgeois progressives and unclean commodity meats.

Today, Northern California has been taken over by a tech-boom generation with vastly more money and a taste for the existential pleasures of problem solving. The first hints of change appeared in 2005, when local restaurateurs sensed that it was time for a new culinary style with a new lifestyle fantasy. That’s when a leading San Francisco chef named Daniel Patterson published an essay that blamed the “tyranny of Chez Panisse” for stifling Bay Area culinary innovation. Next came the 2009 Fig-Gate scandal in which the chef David Chang, at a panel discussion in New York, said, “Every restaurant in San Francisco is serving figs on a plate with nothing on it.” Northern California erupted with an indignation that Mr. Chang called, in a subsequent interview, “just retardedly stupid.” Mr. Chang added that, as he put it, “People need to smoke more marijuana in San Francisco.”

By this point, I was a food writer of the not-anonymous variety, by which I mean that I joined the search for the next big thing by eating great meals courtesy of magazines and restaurants, without hiding my identity the way a critic would. In 2010, a magazine asked me to profile the extraordinary chef David Kinch of the aforementioned fancy restaurant, which is called Manresa and lies in the affluent suburb of Los Gatos.

I went there twice for work and concentrated both times on the food alone. I was knocked out, especially by a creation called Tidal Pool, which involved a clear littoral broth of seaweed dashi pooling around sea-urchin tongues, pickled kelp and foie gras. I know that I will set off the gag reflex in certain quarters when I confess that, in my view, Mr. Kinch took the sensory pleasure of falling off a surfboard into cold Northern California water and transformed it into the world’s most delicious bowl of Japanese-French seafood soup. Mr. Kinch, I concluded, was the savior sent to bring California cuisine into the 21st century.

Two years later, in December 2012, a magazine editor said that he could expense a Manresa dinner for the two of us. He suggested that we bring (and pay for) our spouses. I had never once eaten at a restaurant of that caliber on my own dime because I did not make nearly enough money. But I liked this editor, I loved Mr. Kinch and I calculated that my one-quarter share of the evening’s total would be $200. I decided to make it a once-in-a-lifetime splurge. After we sat down, Mr. Kinch emerged and said something like, “With your permission, I would love to create a special tasting menu for your table.” Because the editor and I were pampered food-media professionals, we took this to mean something like, Don’t sweat the prices on the menu; let’s have fun, and I’ll make the bill reasonable.

The meal lasted five hours, consisted of more than 20 fantastic courses, and we all felt that we had eaten perhaps the greatest meal of our lives. Then the bill came: $1,200, with tax and tip. It turned out that “a special tasting menu” was a price point marked on the menu. My editor friend confessed that he could charge only $400 to his corporate card, and I felt sick with self-loathing. I knew this was my fault — not Mr. Kinch’s — and I looked around the dining room at loving couples, buoyant double dates, even a family with two young children for whom a thousand-dollar meal was no stretch. I had been a fool in more ways than I could count, including my delusion that one could think and talk about food outside of its social and economic context.

Like any artisan whose trade depends upon expensive materials and endless work, every chef who plays that elite-level game must cultivate patrons. That means surrounding food with a choreographed theater of luxury in which every course requires a skilled server to set down fresh cutlery and then return with clean wine glasses. A midcareer professional sommelier then must fill those wine glasses and deliver a learned lecture about that next wine’s origin and flavor. Another person on a full-time salary with benefits must then set down art-piece ceramic plates that are perfectly selected to flatter the next two-mouthful course. Yet another midcareer professional must then explain the rare and expensive plants and proteins that have been combined through hours of time-consuming techniques to create the next exquisitely dense compression of value that each diner will devour in moments. Those empty plates and glasses must then be cleared to repeat this cycle again and again, hour after hour.

In the case of Northern California, these restaurants must satisfy a venture-capital and post-I.P.O. crowd for whom a $400 dinner does not qualify as conspicuous consumption and for whom the prevailing California-lifestyle fantasy is less about heirloom tomatoes than recognizing inefficiencies in the international medical technology markets, flying first-class around the planet to cut deals at three-Michelin-Star restaurants in Hong Kong or London and then, back home, treating the kids to casual $2,000 Sunday suppers.

The foragers and farmers and fishermen of the old Chez Panisse fantasy still figure, but now as an unseen impecunious peasant horde combing beaches and redwoods for the chanterelles and Santa Barbara spot prawns that genius chefs transform into visionary distillations of a mythical Northern California experience that no successful entrepreneur would waste time living.

In a normal metropolitan area, super-upscale places like Manresa have such narrow profit margins that ambitious young chefs open them mostly to establish their reputations; later, to pay the mortgage, they open a profitable mid-range joint nearby. According to Mr. Patterson, the opposite is now true in tech-boom San Francisco.

Photo

Credit Mark Pernice

“Busy high-end places are doing fine because they have more ways to control their costs, but the mid-level is getting killed,” Mr. Patterson told me. “I’ve heard guys say they’re doing eight million a year in sales and bringing home less than 2 percent as profit.” As a result, high-end places are proliferating. A partial list would include Coi, Benu, Atelier Crenn, Mosu and Saison, at which dinner for one runs $641 all-in. (Manresa is now comparable.)

Meanwhile, those so-called midlevel restaurants — by which I mean restaurants that cater to the merely loaded — exhibit all the innovative exuberance and anxiety of the tech-employee class for whom money would be abundant if not for the cost of local living. On the upside, that cohort’s meritocratic multiculturalism, its “you do you” faith that anybody might have a million-dollar idea, has encouraged an inclusive culinary scene that supports fantastic upscale Mexican places like Cala and Californios, countless soothingly hip Japanese restaurants like Izakaya Rintaro, intensely flavored street-market Thai at Hawker Fare and what has to be the planet’s most interesting upscale Hawaiian comfort food at Liholiho Yacht Club. Nobody calls any of these restaurants “ethnic,” and taken together, they give San Francisco dining the most cosmopolitan feel it has ever had.

On the downside, in a perfect parallel to the tech sector, the San Francisco restaurant industry has the worst racial and ethnic pay gap in the United States, and the average cook’s salary of about $53,000 doesn’t nearly cover the $3,490 average rent for a one-bedroom apartment. In San Francisco, where public transportation shuts down at midnight and barely reaches the satellite cities that are going through their own real-estate booms, it is essentially impossible for cooks to work downtown and live anywhere reasonably close. As a result, restaurant owners talk about creating dormitory-style housing for employees. Others say that five years ago, when they listed a job opening, they got 50 qualified applicants; now they get five or six.

I am all in favor of San Francisco’s $13 per hour minimum wage (which rises to $15 by 2018), plus mandatory paid sick leave, parental leave and employer health care contributions. But labor costs at restaurants are inching past 50 percent of total expenditures, an indicator of poor fiscal health. Commercial rents have also gone bananas. Add the ever-rising cost of frisée and pastured quail eggs and it’s no wonder that many restaurants are experimenting with that unique form of sadism known as “small plate sharing,” which amounts to offering a big group of hungry people something tiny to divvy up. Even nontrendy joints now ask $30 for a proper entree — a price point, according to Mr. Patterson, that encourages even affluent customers to discover the joys of home cooking.

THIS is all fine at the handful of places that are full and profitable every night — State Bird Provisions, Lazy Bear — but, according to Gwyneth Borden of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, an alarming number are not. The bigger tech companies worsen the problem by scooping up culinary talent to run lavish free food programs that, as Ms. Borden said, offer workers “all-day bacon and lobster rolls and tacos.” This kills the incentive for employees to spend a penny in restaurants, especially at lunch. (Ms. Borden also told me that she can’t count the number of times she has heard an Uber or Lyft driver confess to being a former chef.)

Constant traffic jams and great restaurants in less congested cities like Oakland discourage suburbanites who used to cross the Bay Bridge for date night in San Francisco. Besides, as Mr. Patterson says, the city clears out on holiday weekends. “They all go to Tahoe,” he said. “You want to get a reservation somewhere? Just book a table during Burning Man.”

The tech-boom economy also infects everyone inside and outside of it with both dreams of striking it rich and fears of getting priced out of town. That’s why chefs don’t just open that one restaurant they’ve always dreamed about. They invent catchy new restaurant “concepts” and borrow mountains of money to create dining rooms that end up with no human touch and food that looks remarkably similar to Instagram photographs of dishes created by trendsetters like Mr. Kinch and Mr. Patterson.

“The concern,” Ms. Borden told me, “is that when the economy slows, who is going to survive? We’re already seeing quicker openings and closings because restaurants open with so much debt” — hundreds of thousands to a million dollars or more, from construction and months of astronomical rent before anyone sells a single $17 grilled-octopus appetizer — “that if you’re not full from Day 1, it’s really hard to stay open.”

The net effect is an ever-more frantic pursuit of eye-catching innovation and, as everyone trades in whispers about a cooling venture-capital market, a mounting fear that a restaurant apocalypse is nigh. As Mr. Patterson explained, “The food has never been better and the business climate has never been worse and so we are speeding toward a cliff.”

One delicious irony, for Californians of a certain age, is the inversion of an old joke about Northern Californians hating the superficial glitz of Los Angeles and Los Angelenos never thinking much about Northern California. This made sense for the mid-to-late 20th century, when the entertainment and defense industries secured Southern California’s place at the center of West Coast economic power. Now Los Angeles is where San Franciscans move when they can’t afford Oakland. Every young artist and musician I meet in San Francisco tells me that he or she wants to move south for cheap rent and a better creative scene.

And while San Francisco restaurant culture is driven by Michelin stars, Los Angeles isn’t even included in the Michelin guide. Sure, Los Angeles has expensive restaurants, but its biggest food celebrities are Jonathan Gold, a critic famous for supporting affordable eateries, and Roy Choi, king of the food trucks.

Sang Yoon, the chef and owner of Lukshon in Culver City, sees it as a difference between hyper-glorification of the chef and the farm in Northern California and, in Los Angeles, celebration of middle-class immigrant culture. “Half the restaurants I go to, I don’t know who the chef is! It’s not so personality-driven,” he said. “In L.A., we can celebrate a cuisine and not rouge it up.”

Mr. Choi explained it to me like this: “All these mom-and-pop restaurants that really are California cuisine and that have been here for 30 years cooking for their own community are now filled with patrons they’ve never seen before because of social media and instead of becoming angry or skeptical, they’ve embraced it — that’s the soul of a cook, you never discriminate against the people eating your food nor do you judge them, you are so happy they have arrived. And their food is getting even better.”

In yet another sweet twist, the pop-cultural reach of Mr. Choi and Mr. Gold has Los Angelenos teaching San Franciscans left out of the gold rush how to find fellow travelers. Last week, my friend Wen Shen recommended an affordable Vietnamese place called Yummy Yummy in the unpretentious Inner Sunset neighborhood. A wall-mounted video monitor played scenes of daily life in Vietnam, where I have never been. I felt as if I had come home, mostly because, race and ethnicity aside, Yummy Yummy’s clientele appeared to be blessedly middle class. I also liked it when our waiter saw me fumbling with a rice-paper wrap for the lemongrass shrimp and said, in the most common of California languages, that I should roll it up “just like a burrito.”