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Man I generally like the Sporkful Podcast because I like food/recipe/restaurant talk, but this latest episode on fine dining was just... really not good.

Ok, so the premise is that fine dining, as a whole, has been on the downturn for a few years. This is due to a lot of things -- covid being the most obvious, but in general there has been less revenue in the fine dining space for years now, and a lot of big name chefs have been pivoting to some "less fine" dining options: fast casual, fast food, whatever.

Kind of simultaneous to all this (and perhaps contributing but who knows how much), there has been a renewed interest in the shitty labor practices of fine dining restaurant culture. This can be a lot of things but the podcast is mostly interested in one: the practice of staging, which in simplest form is basically unpaid internships.

Naturally, all of this is causing a bit of an existential crisis in the fine dining space, so the host of Sporkful, Dan Pashman, does this podcast with two guests -- Adam Platt, a food critic; and Vivan Howard, the owner of a (currently nonoperational due to covid, but planning to come back) fine dining restaurant Chef & the Farmer.

When the question of staging was posed, the answer from Howard, paraphrased, was "well, I don't allow it at my restaurant but I don't see the harm in it". There is no pushback from Pashman, the host, to this response, even as he elaborates a bit outside of the interview frame on how this practice is obviously problematic for a million reasons.

Sporkful is, as I mentioned, not the best podcast on the planet imo -- I think they rely heavily on Celebrity Episodes to their detriment, even as the episodes that are about actual chefs or just weird food ephemera are generally really good. But the limp critique of a really shitty practice, especially one so prevalent that it routinely made the news, was bizarre.

And why weren't any employees interviewed? What a truly bad approach to this issue to only talk to a comfortably wealthy restauranteur instead of the people in her kitchen -- or for that matter any kitchen? An entire episode about whether or not fine dining "should" exist and not a single interview with a person who works in a kitchen?

god, maybe it's my own history of working in kitchens or maybe it's just I generally try and pay attention to what workers have to say but this episode really left a bad taste in my mouth. Blech


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in reply to @dante's post:

i haven't listened to it yet, but tbh, every chef any of my friends have ever worked for (including some really important ones) were huge assholes and i don't care at all what they think tbh. they're like the landlords of restaurants

oh yeah that is definitely overwhelmingly the case. it's really a toss-up whether they are the "crotchety, but well-meaning and usually bearable" type or the "just a nexus of workplace abuse" type. the latter is much more common