Review of Abolish Restaurants

Reviewed by Brittany Shoot
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2010

Anyone who has worked in restaurants can attest to the fact that learning to balance an inordinate number of things on your hands and arms while running up a flight of stairs is only a small part of the job. On-the-job injuries are par for the course. The food preparation generally turns your stomach. There are no sick days, let alone vacation time. Miss a shift and lose your job.

Abolish Restaurants, a 60-page illustrated pamphlet from PM Press, chronicles the history of restaurants from France in the 1700s – including the intimate relationship between the food service industry and the rise of capitalism, urban growth, and the industrial revolution – to what restaurant staff tolerate today: the same songs, the same tacky decorations, the same customers, day in and day out.

Also considered are the relationships between the aristocracy and personal chefs; today, seemingly average middle-class families outsource their food preparation in a similar fashion. Most interesting are the sections that explore stress and health: how restaurant work comes in waves, rather than a steady predictable rhythm, and how food service employees are able to eat only when everyone else has been served.

The entire booklet is enthralling, especially for those unfamiliar with what goes on behind the scenes for underpaid, tip-based, non-unionized restaurant workers in North America. In the end, a restaurant-free world is hypothesized – though to be fair, we’ve got a number of similarly stressful low-wage jobs that should follow suit if we were to do away with restaurants.

No restaurant is immune to the shortcomings of the industry. As the pamphlet says, “All the restaurants that have had flowery write-ups in the newspaper, that serve only organic, wheat-free, vegan food, that cultivate a hip atmosphere with suggestive drawings, still have cooks, waiters and dishwashers who are stressed, depressed, bored and looking for something else.” Indeed.

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