Journalism Won't Fix Port Fonda

Stripping copper wire from the basement of the Fourth Estate

I haven’t had much appetite for levity the past couple of weeks, in part because I spent most of them stressing over a long restaurant exposé for The Pitch (co-written with fellow restaurant critic Natalie Gallagher).

If you missed our story about the co-owners of Port Fonda, you can read it here—and you might want to do that before you read the rest of this newsletter. The CliffsNotes: throwing KitchenAids and plates and chairs across the room, serving food out of the trash, screaming at and belittling employees, sexually harassing female subordinates, literal grab-assing, and anti-Black racism.

Readers always have strong feelings about these stories, including whether they should be written at all. I don’t have much to contribute to that debate except to say that people have been writing exposés about powerful individuals and institutions long before anyone thought to use “cancel” as a human-centered verb. I like Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” because it has a delirious excoriation of public shamers that could have been written today. (People named Patrick Ryan should CTRL+F “journalism” for a treat. It’ll make you feel better—or at least more righteous.)

What I’m more interested in is what happens after the story and any attendant backlash fades from public consciousness. In the aftermath of a public reckoning, workers watch closely to see how powerful people in their industry comport themselves. They’re looking for signals—if you can brush off an “extreme” case with dozens of whistleblowers, will you even listen to a complaint at your own restaurant? Or, on a more fundamental level: am I safe with you?

I suspect the silence of most local industry leaders last week was instructive.

That (lack of) response might be because worker abuses in the industry are still seen as relatively common. Or, to quote one email I received: “what’s the story?”

The story is that the culture is changing and leaving the bewildered behind.

The ubiquity of sexual harassment, racism, and other worker abuses does not magically make them less damaging. It just makes them “stickier.” The weight is no less oppressive, but it’s twice as hard to remove from your chest.

I don’t buy it when people try to present the hospitality industry as an inscrutable, war-bonded clique that deserves special moral dispensation on those fronts. I’ve worked in restaurants. My cowriter on the Port Fonda story worked in restaurants. Most people without trust funds or finance degrees have done at least one tour in the hospitality industry. Yes, it’s unique—like every other industry. No, it doesn’t have to be uniquely miserable.

If restaurants can cling to the brigade system—one of the most structured, hierarchical approaches to work imaginable—I’m confident they can master the basic harassment, reporting, and mediation protocols other businesses have had for decades.

Unions could help make strides in those areas, but the industry lags there, too. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 1.6% of accommodation and food services workers belonged to a union in 2020.

Unions are more than just complaint departments, of course, and could benefit industry workers in other ways. BLS data suggest union members have had consistently higher earnings than their nonunion counterparts over the last five years. In 2020, the median weekly earnings of union members were $130 higher than nonunion workers. That difference can add up—consider that food service workers make, on average, less than $23,000 a year.

New business models are emerging, too, promising solutions to some of the more pervasive industry ills. Worker-owned collectives are gaining popularity, including in Kansas City. And employee support groups and initiatives such as Ben’s Friends and I Got Your Back have sprung up to challenge dominant industry narratives around substance abuse and burnout.

So what’s the point?

Most of those solutions are about worker power and organization—not playing Whack-a-Mole with shitty chefs.

I do (obviously) think journalism has a role to play in telling stories about abusive workplaces, especially now. A growing segment of diners favors “voting with [their] dollars” and supporting restaurants that operate in line with their principles; stories on issues in specific environments can help consumers make more informed decisions. Stories can help new industry workers make better decisions about where to work, too.

I also think it’s impossible to write thoughtfully about the output of an industry while ignoring its inputs—labor in particular. Industry exposés are part of that domain.

But journalism seems too blunt and tardy an instrument for improving worker conditions. Journalism can document progress—catalyze it—but is a poor engine on its own. (Never mind that its horsepower has faded to a Flintstones foot-powered car largely “driven” by freelancers like me.)

It’s too early to tell how the Port Fonda drama will resolve, but I don’t expect 4,000 words to inspire durable change. Usually, these stories end with a punitive “reckoning” rather than anything constructive. A business removes a bad actor; they leave unchanged the conditions that allowed them to thrive.

It reminds me of Jessica Koslow scraping off the mold from her jams at Sqirl and serving them. A simple solution, right? Far easier than changing the low-sugar recipe that had made her famous.

There’s an analogy there, if you want it.