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The plight of restaurants and their workers has been much discussed in recent years. Two articles written during the pandemic and Washington, D.C.’s restaurant reopening period, headlined “Employees Reveal the Frenetic Conditions of Working in Understaffed Restaurants [ [link removed] ]” and “Eat, Pay, Leave: How to Be a Better Customer at D.C. Restaurants As They Reopen [ [link removed] ],” highlight the prevailing attitudes at the time:
“Restaurants and bars are having trouble hiring the professionals they need to provide the experiences District diners expect.”
“Restaurant managers and owners are trying to recoup lost revenue while simultaneously figuring out how to professionalize their workplaces.”
“‘When you have a complaint, hold a mirror up and complain into the mirror and look how ugly and entitled you look.’”
“The workload scares away new hires.”
“When D.C. gets a summer day with zero humidity, it’s natural for diners to want to linger on a restaurant’s patio. But with restaurants operating at limited capacities, their need to turn tables intensifies.”
All these quotes are interesting and point to tricky challenges in the industry. But the last one sticks out to me most of all. It might have been the pandemic that laid bare the raw commercial mechanics of restaurants: table turnover, revenue per customer. It might have been the pandemic that emphasized the idea that not only did workers have rights, but that customers had responsibilities: to order drinks and appetizers and not just entrées; to tip generously no matter the real or perceived quality of the service; to watch the time and move over for the next party.
These COVID-induced norms have not disappeared, however, and have become, in a less visible and intense way, part of restaurant dining’s new normal. I’ve seen it a lot: the Twitter comments about customers “camping out” at tables or not ordering enough drinks. The Korean barbecue restaurant that brings the short ribs when you’ve still only half-finished the pork belly. The crowded restaurant that fits us in for a “one-hour table, not a two-hour table,” as if the once-rare two-hour limit were now a silent industry standard.
The online, and maybe real-life, consensus that a generous tip should now extend up to 30%—based on greatly inflated menu prices vis-a-vis the “before times.” The Indian lunch buffet tacking a $3 tip onto the $22 weekday meal, not showing me my receipt and thus prompting me to spend almost $30 for plain rice and butter chicken that tasted more like penne alla vodka.
All of this makes me wonder: What are restaurants really for? Are they for hospitality, where the customer is guest and king? Or are they purely profit-making enterprises, with hospitality and service mere tangential concerns? Has the industry writ large gone fast-casual regardless of floor plan, where the goal is above all to churn out food and turn over tables?
Granted, restaurants are a very tough, grueling business, and operating them profitably during the pandemic was an almost impossible achievement—for the ones that survived. But while it was both kind and in our self-interest to patronize struggling restaurants and tip extra, even for poor service or food that wasn’t quite on the mark—you wanted them to make it through and be there on the other side—that urgency and solidarity is harder to summon post-pandemic.
Restaurants are not just commercial kitchens to churn out food. They are places to gather, and linger, and chat. To refer to customers “camping out” at tables is one step away from “Here’s your slop, pig, chow down and step away from the trough.” It’s off-putting and brazenly transactional. There is a limit to what an ordinary restaurant with ordinary staff can provide. But there is also a limit to what customers will pay for and put up with.
But a little more on “ordinary” restaurants. What is an ordinary restaurant? The industry has changed quite a bit since my parents were going out to eat as kids, or even since I was a kid. If restaurants weren’t high-end or fine dining, with highly trained staff and refined service, they were mostly decent, informal places. Most dining-out options were either the suburban chains like Olive Garden, Red Lobster, TGI Friday’s and Chili’s, or else diners, pancake houses, red-sauce Italian restaurants and pizzerias, Chinese restaurants and bar-and-grills.
They were frequently staffed either by senior citizens or high school students. The owners were often there working too. Reading about such establishments in previous decades reveals a different world: Somebody on a Northern Virginia forum recalled working at a pancake house in the 1960s as a kid and trying to cook a pancake the size of the entire griddle during some down time.
Today, with “experiential,” “chef-driven” or “Instagrammable” notions of dining trickling down to everyday, mid-priced establishments, the overall bar is higher. Maybe restaurants are trying too hard; maybe customers are sometimes treated as an afterthought. But it seems increasingly likely to me that customers just expect more of the average restaurant than it is possible for it to give.
More broadly, I’ve begun to wonder: Are restaurants as we know them—or at least as we came to know them in the 2010s—truly sustainable at all? Can they actually turn a profit sufficient to operate over the long term, at price points customers find bearable? Expectations of higher tips on top of inflated prices have pushed the price of a single ordinary entrée to the point where the whole psychology of dining out changes. At $15, you’re arguing for the food. (“These fries are a little soggy, but they taste pretty good!”) But at $25, you’re arguing against the food. (“Almost 30 bucks for cheap soggy fries? What a rip-off!”) Once that switch flips, it becomes difficult to feel good about what you’re spending. Dining out becomes an internal conflict, a psychologically unpleasant experience.
This isn’t really fun for anyone, but it might hit families the hardest. For a harried middle-class family with kids, paying more and being rushed comes close to pushing the basic dining-out experience out of reach. Restaurants are at risk of becoming a sort of luxury good, after years of becoming more affordable and widely patronized. 2015, the first year [ [link removed] ] in American history in which restaurant spending exceeded grocery spending, feels far away.
The casualness with which millennials ordered in or ate out for the past decade feels circumscribed, perhaps permanently, in today’s world of higher interest rates, higher labor costs and more awareness of what the restaurant industry does to its workers: how it burns them out, denies them health insurance, denies them a living wage. There’s no free lunch; these, all along, were the invisible costs. And they are costs that, in the form of higher prices, it is probably right to pay.
What if restaurants are experiencing the same sort of deflation as WeWork or Uber or, fittingly, any of the third-party food delivery apps? What if the free-spending urban culture of the 2010s is coming to a close? The apparent profitability of most of these operations may always have been a mirage. Once interest-free money dried up, there was no real business there, just a lot of money changing hands.
Like the old joke, you can’t make it up on volume.
I compare all of this, with some confusion, to the experience my wife and I had in Europe—coastal Croatia, specifically—in early 2022. As you would in many European countries, we frequently spent close to three hours at dinner. The waiter won’t even bring the check unless you ask him for it—let alone bring it before you’ve even finished your entrée. (The American server’s “Whenever you’re ready” is a euphemism.) At one restaurant, we saw half the tables sit empty for most of the evening, locked up with mid-evening reservations. People didn’t even sit down until 8 p.m., and at 10 p.m. they were still there. An American restaurant would have already turned those tables over at least once. More to the point, it would seem impossible for an American restaurant, given what is recounted in those D.C.-reopening articles, to even exist on this business model.
Croatia is a somewhat less-developed country with lower labor costs, as Europe goes. But the same basic slow-dining culture exists in Italy and even France. This attitude is largely cultural, but somehow, the economics of it work. Are these relaxed restaurants secretly the same harrowing places that D.C.’s reopening-era restaurants were? Or has a mostly post-pandemic Europe, facing many of the same economic forces, managed to genuinely hold onto what looks like an unprofitable approach to restaurant dining?
Maybe the restaurants are OK, and it’s D.C. that’s the rub. The pancake houses staffed by friendly retirees and goofy high schoolers are still out there, in smaller cities and towns, and their business model probably hasn’t changed too much. If there was an urban restaurant bubble, floating on cheap money and awful working conditions, perhaps its popping was a pandemic silver lining. Perhaps dining out should revert to something a little more rarefied, elegant and rare, on the one hand, and a little less formal and fancy on the other. And if the old-school, down-home places are a little farther out, maybe it just means pairing dinner with a road trip.

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