Abolish Restaurants!

Service! This week, we are hovering around ‘the pass’, checking our plating is okay, and asking how a simple labour-saving device, a coffee shop palette knife, caused Kasia so much angst and strife – “like a dagger to my heart”? Maybe it’s because of the uniquely painful and exhausting nature of working in food and drink service.

Kasia and Dan discuss the legendary pamphlet Abolish Restaurants, the politics of tipping, the way food TV and memoirs (even the sainted Anthony Bourdain!) valorise a macho, masochistic attitude to epically long shifts in the kitchen, and the objects which symbolise the drudgery of low-paid work. Why do the same restaurants and cafes that bang on about how sustainable their ingredient-sourcing is never EVER talk about how their workers are treated?