The Daily - A Forced Reckoning in the Restaurant Industry

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

When the #MeToo movement gained momentum in exposing abuses at the highest levels of power, the restaurant industry was exposed as a chief offender. In 2020, the James Beard Awards, the food world’s main kingmaker, announced that there would be no winners in either 2020 or 2021 after allegations against several top chefs.Brett Anderson, a contributing writer on The Times’s Food desk and a former member of the awards committee, discusses the attempts to hold the industry to account.Guest: Brett Anderson, a food correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading:Early indications suggest that the new vetting process for the James Beard Awards is vulnerable to failure in several ways.Behind the cancellation of the 2020 and 2021 James Beard Awards were worries about chefs’ behavior and a lack of Black winners.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tabernisi, and this is The Daily. When the MeToo movement swept through the country, exposing abuses at the highest levels of power, the restaurant industry was a chief offender. But the food world's main kingmaker, the James Beard Foundation, only recently began to reckon with that. Today, food writer Brett Anderson explains how those attempts to hold the industry to account prompted an entirely new firestorm.

It's Tuesday, June 13th. So, Brett, last week, the James Beard Awards were handed out. And I know the words James Beard, and I know they have something to do with food, but that's about the extent of it. So before we get into the changes at the awards, let's start with the basics. What exactly are the James Beard Awards? Well, the James Beard Awards are commonly likened to the Oscars of the food world, and I think that's a pretty apt description. When you win a James Beard Award, you become basically forever known professionally as a beard winner. It's something that attaches to your name that anyone in the food industry knows is recognition of some sort of accomplishment. It's something that can lead to restaurant opening opportunities. It can lead to partnerships with hotels and casinos.

It can lead to book contracts. So it can transform your life. It can transform your career. Okay, so these awards are a big deal. Who votes on them? Like, what's the system? Well, since the awards have been established, the voting body has always included food journalists, and I myself was a voter for many years, and also for a long time included past winners. If you won a Beard Award, it meant you could vote on future Beard Awards. It was sort of part of the perk of winning it. That changed in recent years.

And the last two award seasons, 2022 and the one that just completed, have involved a different voting process than they've had in the past. And what was different about this time? Well, historically, the Beard Awards have been meant to recognize culinary excellence, period. And in recent years, the foundation, the James Beard Foundation, which is the nonprofit in New York that administers the awards, has created new criteria that is beyond culinary excellence and recognizes personal behavior as well. Personal behavior. Okay, so not just cooking and chefery, but actual behavior, like how the chefs themselves act. Yeah, I think the James Beard Foundation is trying to address misbehavior and abuse in the industry that it's in, just like a lot of other entities are throughout our culture.

And as it happens in the restaurant industry, that's a really big job. There isn't a regulatory body overseeing any of that. How do you even begin to do that? Maybe let's start with this James Beard Foundation. What is it and why is it trying to police the food world? So James Beard was a famous cookbook author and sort of a food personality back before there was such a thing. He's known as the Dean of American Cookery. before there was such a thing. He's known as the Dean of American Cookery. And in the 50s and in the 60s, he was influential in sort of educating Americans about their own cuisine. At a time when

people thought of culinary excellence as being sort of the exclusive province of sort of French and Italians, he celebrated the food of Americans and the food of regional America. And he had a lot of influence on people who, his contemporaries, including Julia Child, who considered him something of a mentor and someone she really looked up to. And after he died, those people got together and they bought his small townhouse in Greenwich Village. And in 1986, they started the James Beard Foundation in that townhouse. And the mission at the time was to create a center for culinary arts. And it was a very, I think, small enterprise that was, you know, reflected by the smallness of the townhouse, if you've ever been there. Okay. So, small group of foodies together at this little townhouse, how does that end up becoming this giant thing

that's a kingmaker in the food world? Well, two things happen. In 1991, the Beard Foundation creates the James Beard Awards, the thing that we know today as the Oscars of the food world. And that turned out to be a really good timing because right around the same time... Next on Food Network... You get the creation of the Food Network.

The Food Network. But today we're going to be making some breakfast food. See how thin I'm slicing this? And notice my angle. I'm going not just down. I'm going across. It started out doing shows that were really similar to what you would see on public television.

It was instructional. And we're talking about the Italian cooking and our love for it. And then it started to change. It started to be less about cooking instruction and more about the chefs themselves. How do you like your anchovies? You want to do it cross? Good.

You start to have real personalities, like Emeril Lagasse. Oh, can you imagine being stuffed with anchovy like this? Stuffed right in there like that. And stuffed! Put just a few restaurants in New Orleans and became known all over the country. Bam! Bam! For yelling bam on his show.

And you just kind of bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam! Bobby Flay. All these other people. My name is Bobby Flay. My mission? To find the best of the best. Who sort of turned cooking instruction shows into these sporting events. And it created a celebrity around restaurants that just did not exist before.

Just exploding the restaurant and the chef culture out into the broader culture, right? That suddenly everybody was talking about it. Everybody knew about it. Absolutely. And, you know, by the time you get into the early 2000s, you had these celebrity chefs who I think were rightly like in the rock stars. And the James Beard Awards were right there in the middle of it becoming more and more relevant because chef culture was becoming more and more relevant. I mean, I have a little bit of reflection of how drastic the change was in my own professional experience. I started as a restaurant writer

and a food writer in the mid-90s in Washington, D.C. And at the time, I was working for a paper that had never covered food before and that it wasn't a job that people particularly envied. And by the end of that time at that job, I left that job in 2000, you know, I started going to cocktail parties and people were asking me about my work all of a sudden for reasons that went beyond wanting to know where to get good Vietnamese food. They wanted to know if I'd met these people. Interesting. When I moved to New Orleans in 2000 to take a job at the Daily Newspaper here, Emeril Lagasse had a show that was about to debut, a sitcom. Remember, Emerald, just be yourself. Okay, so... Wow.

Produced by the same people that created Designing Women on NBC. And now what we're going to do is add some essence. Bam. Now, I'm digging myself here, but that was a big deal, right? That was when network television was the biggest platform for a mass market. And he was on the same network as Seinfeld was on. So food really had become culture. Absolutely.

And then that culture sort of expanded. And you have the arrival of, importantly, Anthony Bourdain in his book Kitchen Confidential, which came out in 2000, and I think established sort of this punk attitude in celebrity chef culture that was kind of a reaction to the, you know, the arena rock bombast of what you saw on the Food Network. Right. Small shows and kind of grittier, dirtier, and less polished. Yeah. The restaurant world that Bourdain captured was one that was populated by bandits who didn't play by the rules.

They worked in environments that, in his view, not everyone could hack. And they didn't go chasing after celebrity. They didn't look presentable for cameras. They had knives. They worked around blood. They were cutting apart animals, right? I mean, this was a very different look at the restaurant world than we had been accustomed to on the Food Network.

And not for the faint of heart. It wasn't for the faint of heart. And I think the movement that Anthony Bourdain helped create, where you have this pirate version of the chef, the James Beard Awards honored all of these. They honored the celebrity chefs. They honored the pirate version of the chefs. They honored restaurants with white tablecloths and without white tablecloths. And through the 2000s and into the 2010s, you saw this expanding audience for this expanded idea of what a chef can be and what a restaurant can deliver. And the foundation benefited by being the foremost entity to validate excellence among all these different archetypes. So as food becomes a bigger and bigger part of culture and the chef's profiles rise,

the awards themselves become more prominent. And suddenly, the awards have become arbiters of culture. Exactly. And this ecosystem seems to be working for just about all involved until something really big happens. Now to those new allegations of sexual misconduct rocking the food industry. Very early on in the Me Too movement, the subjects of some of the most explosive investigations into the behavior of people included people like Mario Batali. The Times reports that in March, a woman told investigators that Batali drugged and sexually assaulted her in January of 2004 at his New York City restaurant. One of the most famous chefs in restaurants in America, a beard winner himself. Batali gave this statement to the Post, saying, I apologize profoundly to the people I have mistreated and hurt.

All of a sudden, these people that we were idolizing and celebrating start to be looked at with scrutiny. And we start asking questions as a culture about how the people who are employees of these restaurants, who don't really benefit from that celebrity, how they're being treated, and if they're being treated fairly. And what we should think about that industry and that part of our culture based on what we discover. about that industry and that part of our culture based on what we discover. Where I live in New Orleans, a chef named John Bash was the subject of an investigation that I did. And he was far and away the most famous food figure in a town that is basically defined by its culinary reputation. There was comments about what we were wearing, how we looked in the office, but then also... I found that this prominent restaurant company had what we would now call a toxic culture. And then he asked me if I would come back to his hotel room with him.

And I told him no, stormed out of the bar. There were no written words. Women in particular felt that they were sort of second-class citizens and that poor treatment of them was tolerated and maybe even in some instances encouraged. And I told him, you and I both know the reason that we're here goes back to when I wouldn't have sex with John. And that is why I'm being fired right now.

Both the Mara Batali and John Besch stories, I think, really opened the floodgates in the restaurant industry. And in my own personal experience, in the aftermath of the Besh investigation, I conducted over 100 interviews in the months after that came out here in New Orleans when I was working at the local newspaper. And that's a lot of people coming forward and saying, I've got a story of abuse that I experienced in a restaurant that I think you need to hear about. And I remember feeling, I really owe it to these folks to hear them out, that I need to be part of this reckoning in the business. And I imagine the James Beard Foundation

felt something similar, that they needed to do something to fix this culture that they had benefited from and maybe even helped to foster. We'll be right back. So Brett, after Me Too, what does the James Beard Foundation decide to do? Well, as far as we know, they don't do anything substantive to the awards program in the immediate aftermath. But in 2020, the foundation abruptly canceled the awards, which is something they'd never done before.

Why? There's two reasons that we know about. The foundation's leaders discovered that there was no Black winners in the awards that year in any of their major categories. And that happened while there was racial justice protests unfolding all over the country in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. Also, there was accusations that a number of the finalists were guilty of some of the misbehavior that we saw revealed in the Me Too movement. And so what they did is they ended up canceling not just the 2020 awards, but the 2021 awards. And they used that time to really try to overhaul their award system. And what exactly did they do? Well, it did three big things. The first was that it changed its voting body so that now

the voting body is made up entirely of judges that are handpicked by the foundation. So in other words, more control over the vote. More control, and they've created a deliberately a more diverse voting body. They also created a code of ethics that they require all candidates for awards follow. So if you are going to be eligible for a James Beard award, you vow to the foundation that you follow its code of ethics. And what was in the code? What do they want you to follow?

Well, the code basically says that, you know, you're not allowed to treat people poorly. You're not allowed to treat people unfairly. And you're not allowed to commit felonies. And that code of ethics is important. And it leads to the third big thing they did, which is the foundation created a tip line so that people can call into the foundation and inform them if they believe any of their candidates have violated this code of ethics. And then they created a process to investigate those tips. So suddenly, the James Beard Foundation, which started as this kind of tiny dinner club, is turning itself into a de facto investigative body, which is quite different.

And it's doing that in an industry which, as we all know post Me Too, is filled with some pretty difficult figures. It is. And this process is inherently difficult. When the Beard Foundation gets these tips through this tip line, they have an ethics committee, which is made up of volunteers, that looks into the allegations, and they determine whether or not they're worth opening an investigation. And if they do determine that the accusations are worth looking into, they hire outside investigators to do that work.

So they're essentially outsourcing an investigation into what is probably some pretty sensitive allegations. They really are. And in the lead up to the awards this year, this redesigned awards program really came into public view for the first time. A chef named Timothy Hansas, who is based in Birmingham, Alabama, was a nominee for Best Chef South, was disqualified. And he spoke publicly about it to reporters because he felt he was being treated unfairly. He says that he received phone calls from private investigators that were working for the James Beard Foundation and were looking into

accusations that he yelled at employees and customers at his restaurant. So, Brett, you reported this. You looked into it. What did you find? I talked to some people, both customers and past employees, who said that Hanses' behavior was alarming. But when I interviewed Hanses, he told me that he doesn't deny any of these accusations. He just says everything he's accused of is not as severe as the accusers are telling the Beard Foundation, and that none of them rise to the level of him having violated the code of ethics. He said that his problem really was with the process itself. He believes it wasn't fair. He believes he didn't get due process. He, for example, doesn't know who they talked to. And, you know, usually in a situation like this, you get to face your accuser, you get to hear what the accusation is, and you get to defend yourself at every step of the way.

But in this case, he only had one conversation with investigators. Then they went away for a few weeks, and then he gets an email one day saying he's been disqualified. Right, it's like a grand jury proceeding that, you know, happens behind closed doors in secret, except in this case, at the end of it, there's a verdict and he's guilty. Effectively, that's the case. And it turns out that he wasn't even the only candidate that was under investigation by the foundation this year.

The other chef's name is Sam Fore, and she works in Lexington, Kentucky, and she was a finalist in the Best Chef Southeast category. Sam has a restaurant called Tuck Tuck, and it actually is not even a brick and mortar restaurant. It's a pop-up restaurant that serves sort of Southern cuisine inspired by the Sri Lankan food that she grew up eating in a family of Sri Lankan immigrants in Kentucky. On the very day that Hanses went public with his own investigation and his issues with it, she received a call from private investigators herself. Forrest said that the investigators were looking into accusations that were made to the Beard

Foundation's tip line, that she was bullying people and harassing them through her social media posts. She shared with me examples of a couple of the posts that she was asked about. One was a public service announcement that she had made as part of a sexual violence awareness campaign that she did in her community. Others were posts that made accusations about people in her community, but that never named them. And this was something she said she was mystified by. And she said that she asked the investigators, look, we've been talking now for 90 minutes and you can't even tell me who I'm targeting with this bullying.

How can this be targeted harassment? Oh my gosh, right? And as a reminder, for Four, the stakes here are really high. A nomination could make a huge difference for a chef running a pop-up restaurant. Exactly. I mean, Four said that after she became a semifinalist

for the Beard Awards this year, she hired a public relations firm for the first time in her life. And her business, up until quite recently, included only one employee, herself. So she's in sort of heady territory here. Ultimately, Sam found out that she wasn't disqualified as a result of this investigation. But in the end, she felt like she'd been really put through the ringer for what she says are really bizarre complaints. Brett, what does the James Beard Foundation say about all of this? Like, what's their response?

Well, their blanket response is that they don't comment about any ethics investigations. They say they do this because they are committed to celebrating the industry and not shaming people, and that they want to protect the identity of both the accusers and the accused. I did continue to talk to leaders over there about this commitment to confidentiality, which I think raises other problems that both Hanses and Ford didn't even bring up themselves. For instance, Hanses,

even though he's publicly known to have been disqualified, his name remained on the ballot until the close of the judging for this year's awards. Effectively, that meant that people could vote for Hanses his name remained on the ballot until the close of the judging for this year's awards. Effectively, that meant that people could vote for Hanses to win an award that he had been disqualified for publicly. Crazy. Like, that's just a fundamental flaw in the process, right? Like, they didn't think it through. Well, it even goes further, because I asked then, well, will his name appear on the program at the gala in Chicago? And they said yes, that their commitment to confidentially even extended to that, which then puts the foundation in this position of having discovered that a candidate is actually not worthy of the award by their own standard,

but is remaining a nominee in the eyes of the public. I mean, that just doesn't make any sense. That's what I thought. It does seem to be a flaw with this process. And when I asked leaders there, they wouldn't come out and say that. And what I was left to believe is they just never entertained a scenario in which someone would go public with their disqualification.

Interesting. I mean, maybe, Brett, it just isn't all that surprising that in some ways, given that this is a food foundation, a tiny one, and it's taken it upon itself to be a kind of version of the FBI or the very least, you know, some kind of professional HR department to effectively endeavor what really amounts to a very muscular investigation into personal behavior and potential abuse. Yeah, I do think that they did not anticipate how adversarial such investigations could become. I do believe that they thought that the respect for the foundation was such that people in the chef community would just accept the decisions that were being made. My experience as a reporter,

as well as the co-author on this story, Julia Moskin, you know, we both have done a lot of these sorts of investigations. And even ones that don't lead to stories do end up with some pretty hard feelings on the part of people who are being asked about this behavior. And the foundation is primarily in the business of celebrating this industry. And, you know, it raises money based on having good relationships with people in the chef industry who cook at fundraisers for the foundation. So, Brett, when you look at the issues facing the food industry and the process that the James Beard Foundation put into place to address those issues, I guess what I'm really wondering

is, is all of this really aimed at reforming chefs? I mean, actually forcing change and forcing better behavior? Or is there a simpler and more self-serving explanation, which is, you know, that they're really just after protecting themselves, protecting the James Beard Foundation, you know, saving themselves from being embarrassed by bad publicity. To be honest, I think it's both. I think the second reason is inarguable, and I think it applies to all of the institutions that are in the food industry in the aftermath of Me Too. That said, I think it's an open question as to whether or not a program like this, an investigatory program, can have a real effect on a restaurant business where bad behavior continues to be a persistent problem.

I mean, we know there was a flood of media reports following Me Too and in the years since Me Too about bad behavior in the restaurant industry. And we know that that didn't eliminate bad behavior from the restaurant industry. It did not have that effect, right? I think it probably reduced the number of people who feel like they are entitled to abuse their power, but it certainly didn't eradicate power abuse

from the restaurant business. And to be honest, I'm not sure what will. But Brett, isn't there also a scenario where this process, as clumsy as it is, might accidentally lead to something good? I think that it could. And, you know, the process could improve. I find it hard to believe, though, that you could have an awards that routinely disqualifies people that won't routinely find itself in the midst of controversy.

Brett, thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on the show. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media mogul who became Italy's most polarizing and prosecuted prime minister, died on Monday. He was 86. Berlusconi transformed Italian television, making it spectacular and tawdry. And then, as a politician, used it to influence voters. influence voters. Through multiple stints in office, Berlusconi revolutionized Italian politics,

bringing a brash populism and perfecting the practice of victimization. He was a committed ally of America, but also an apologist for Vladimir Putin. In the end, even Berlusconi's many critics agree that he changed Italy, leaving his stamp on a generation of Italians who hungered for the wealth and confidence that he stood for. And JPMorgan Chase reached a tentative settlement with sexual abuse victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who died in a New York jail before his trial. The settlement followed a series of embarrassing disclosures about the bank's longstanding relationship with Epstein. One of the lead lawyers for the victims said the bank was prepared to pay $290 million

to resolve the lawsuit, which was filed in Manhattan last November. Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Carlos Prieto, and Ricky Nowitzki. It was edited by Devin Taylor and Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.