The Next Supper
The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them, and What Comes After
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A searing expose of the restaurant industry, and a path to a better, safer, happier meal.
In the years before the pandemic, the restaurant business was booming. Americans spent more than half of their annual food budgets dining out. In a generation, chefs had gone from behind-the-scenes laborers to TV stars. The arrival of Uber Eats, DoorDash, and other meal delivery apps was overtaking home cooking.
Beneath all that growth lurked serious problems. Many of the best restaurants in the world employed unpaid cooks. Meal delivery apps were putting restaurants out of business. And all that dining out meant dramatically less healthy diets. The industry may have been booming, but it also desperately needed to change.
Then, along came COVID-19. From the farm to the street-side patio, from the sweaty kitchen to the swarm of delivery vehicles buzzing about our cities, everything about the restaurant business is changing, for better or worse. The Next Supper tells this story and offers clear and essential advice for what and how to eat to ensure the well-being of cooks and waitstaff, not to mention our bodies and the environment. The Next Supper reminds us that breaking bread is an essential human activity and charts a path to preserving the joy of eating out in a turbulent era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I'm convinced there's a better way to be a restaurant customer," writes food journalist Mintz (How to Host a Dinner Party) in his fiery work exposing "the twisted DNA of the dining industry." As the Covid-19 pandemic dragged on, he writes, it revealed a restaurant industry struggling to make ends meet, and one ravaged by a culture in which "fiefdoms" were rampant with "wage theft, tip skimming, and abuse." Through conversations with owners, chefs, cooks, servers, and delivery people, Mintz offers a searing critique of the food world, explaining why many of its standard practices—such as relying on apps for on-demand deliveries and tipping—have "train us to value convenience over price, quality, and fair wages"; how the brutal treatment of kitchen staff—from the underpaid to those not paid at all—has led to the current labor shortage; and the harms of operating under the ethos that the "customer is always right." As a corrective, he urges consumers to stop treating industry workers as "beneath our concern" and to "suss out... what kind of workplaces are worth supporting." Mintz also describes how thoughtful urban planning can preserve family restaurants and protect neighborhoods from being inundated by corporate franchises. With the hospitality industry poised at a point of inflection, this offers plenty of food for thought.
