Kitchen Spy
I end up in the prep kitchen by making a deal with Freddie. After a couple weeks, he’s begun talking about making me a “Neighborhood Expert,” so I can train other people on expo. This comes after last week’s staff meeting—held at 10:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, everyone standing awkwardly around the prep table—when I was among the dozen “Applestars” for the month, taking the not-terribly-competitive prize of Best Newcomer. (There were, by my count, two others eligible.) I figure this gives me some pull with Freddie, so I make a proposition: I’d like to learn how the kitchen works. He’s mentioned wanting me to train people on expo, so I should know more about the kitchen, right? And since I typically work Friday to Sunday, racking up about thirty hours, I still have another ten before I hit overtime. Can I do some work in prep? Freddie doesn’t hesitate. Can you come in on Wednesday at 9:00 a.m.? Definitely, I say. It’s a deal.
I’m paired on my first morning with Denzel, a skinny kid who immediately sets me to scrubbing Idaho russets for baked potatoes. These go into a steamer, a metal box resembling an oven, along with a half-dozen redskins destined to be quartered and steamed with a sprinkling of spice powder for Weight Watchers herbed potatoes. As we load the potatoes into the steamer, Denzel tells me not to eat the mashed potatoes here because they only rinse those potatoes, they don’t scrub them. They can’t usually scrub every potato, he explains; the dust gets washed off, but the dirt stays on the skin.
About half my work for the day involves measuring out individual portions of food. I stand over a bin of cooked rice and divide four-ounce portions into plastic baggies. When I finish, I take a sticker gun and label each bag with the date when it should be thrown out. While I’m at it, one of the lunch cooks hands me a half-full tray of expired bags of rice and asks me to change their use-by date from yesterday to tomorrow.
Isn’t that kind of gross? I ask Denzel.
You’ll see all kinds of things here, he says. Throwing it out wastes money.
After the rice, there’s linguine to portion out, and then penne pasta—all of it slightly undercooked, so that when the cooks on the line throw it in the microwave it doesn’t get too soggy. Later on, there are endless trays of mashed potatoes that get divided into ten-ounce portions and bagged. Most of what we portion into baggies, I realize, is bound for the microwave.
Everything we make gets dated according to a chart on the wall that denotes the number of shifts before it should be thrown out. Followed closely, these directions remove the need for anyone to know what happened in the kitchen even an hour ago, or to be able to gauge whether food has rotted or not. The chart, the stickers, and the dates mean we don’t have to know anything, really, other than how to read. Just as assembly lines pare down the skill and education needed by individual workers to, say, build a car, the structure of the Applebee’s kitchen removes the need for culinary training. Even so, I get to make food.
Bro, let her make something, Freddie calls to Denzel as he walks through the back and sees me portioning out the penne. Have her make something.
So then I’m tasked with making garlic cherry tomatoes for one of the pasta bowls. I slice grape tomatoes into halves and portion one-quarter of a cup of them into a plastic baggie, adding one tablespoon of minced garlic that comes pre-chopped in a one-quart tub. I make fifteen bags; they’re good for only one day, so they’re made fresh every morning. These will get emptied onto the flattop and grilled, then scooped onto penne that’s been nuked along with pesto scooped out of the plastic container it was shipped to us in, and Alfredo sauce defrosted from a bag.
Freddie keeps walking through and telling Denzel to give me a recipe. There’s a thick binder on a shelf, filled with black-and-white photocopies, that lists ingredients and ratios to Applebee’s specifications. The recipe for mashed potatoes: A sack of steamed redskins and a defrosted bag of garlic milk. For broccoli? Three 3-pound bags of florets, a quarter-cup of minced garlic scooped out of the plastic container it’s shipped to us in, and one batch of dressing made from an envelope of powdered spice and thickeners mixed with warm water. It would free up Denzel if I had the recipe, instead of asking him how to do things, but Denzel tells me he doesn’t like looking through the books. He’ll just tell me the right way.
Next I make the Asian vegetable mix for the Orange Chick Bowl; the veggies will get nuked in their baggie and mixed with boneless wings out of the fryer and sweet-and-spicy sauce. I slice open pillowy bags of broccoli florets, their cut edges vaguely faded and parched, and mix them with fresh-cut strips of red pepper, preshredded carrots, presliced mushrooms, and defrosted snap peas. When I ask Emmet, a prep cook, where the vegetables are from, he shrugs: a warehouse somewhere. Then there’s the filling for the chicken wonton taco appetizers. I dice several batches of chicken breast that had been defrosted from the cases in the freezer and grilled that morning, and mix it with a gelatinous sweet-and-spicy sauce poured from a plastic bag.
The last thing I make before being pulled onto expo for the lunch rush, summoned by Freddie with a “Tracie, come here, my love,” is pesto Alfredo sauce. I scoop out pale sauce, thick like pudding, from a plastic bag and deposit it into small foam cups, then add a scoop of pesto, also premade and delivered to Applebee’s, and some preshredded Parmesan cheese pulled from a big, square plastic bag in the walk-in. I put lids on the cups, date them, and head to the line, coming back an hour and a half later to portion out mashed potatoes until I go home.
Every ingredient arrives by the grace of Customized Supply Chain Services, LLC, a cooperative purchasing agent. Formed by Applebee’s parent corporation, Dine Equity, in 2009, CSCS buys supplies for Applebee’s and its sister company, International House of Pancakes. Combined, the two restaurants spend roughly $1.8 billion a year on the goods that come in through CSCS: the meat and bread, the spices, the soda syrup, the fish filets, the minced garlic tubs, the cartons of coleslaw dressing, not to mention paper towels and plastic gloves and sanitizing solution and all the rest. Everything arrives at our store in Brooklyn via CSCS, which negotiates with manufacturers to either purchase something they sell already—say, ranch dressing—or to make it for us to spec. By bringing those functions in-house, Dine Equity announced in 2011, the company expected to save 3 to 5 percent on operating costs.
Most restaurants don’t go to the trouble of creating a separate purchasing arm, and instead contract with suppliers who do the negotiating for them. About 62 percent of restaurants outsource their fulfillment and distribution, typically using massive food service companies like Sysco—which supplies independent restaurants—or its affiliate, Sygma, which supplies chain restaurants and institutions. These kinds of companies operate as “broad-liners,” suppliers who can get you everything from Angus burgers to rubber gloves. These suppliers, in turn, negotiate contracts with the big food manufacturers, who provide incentives for ordering in bulk in the form of rebates. Critics call them kickbacks, but rebates are perfectly legal: If you buy enough, you get a discount.
These companies are dealmakers, negotiating purchases and sales, trying to leverage their massive buying power into lower prices for their customers. And once the deal is made, restaurant chains subcontract the tricky work of pickup and delivery to a logistics firm; Applebee’s, by way of CSCS, uses an industry giant called ArrowStream to coordinate and transport its supplies. The ground beef we use at Applebee’s may have carpooled on an ArrowStream truck with patties for Wendy’s, or wontons for P. F. Chang’s, or drumsticks for Church’s Chicken; those restaurants use ArrowStream, too. So does Sygma. In all, ArrowStream coordinates the movement of food between more than four thousand food manufacturers, distributors, and restaurants, consolidating shipments and streamlining costs along the way.
There’s no way for me to know the details of Applebee’s relationships with CSCS, ArrowStream, or the manufacturers and distributors whose stock fill our shelves. I have no idea if Dine Equity gets rebates from the soda manufacturers for stocking their products, or from Cargill for buying its beef, or the precise terms of its deals for produce. But I can see why restaurants might balk at bringing in locally grown goods: Who could match the convenience of a broadliner paired with logistics and freight?
I manage to eke out only one more shift in the prep kitchen, this time under the tutelage of Emmet, who intersperses a tour of dry goods with his basic life story. He was born and raised in Queens, and over here is where we keep the powder for vegetable seasoning. This here’s the powder for making gravy, and he spent a few years in Georgia but left when his girlfriend said she was going to call the police. I leave this nugget untouched, and instead ask whether we ever make anything from fresh ingredients here, a question that yields an incredulous look.
Nah, nah, nah, just add water, says Emmet. You’ll learn, you’ll learn.
The quality of the food being served here rarely comes up in the kitchen, and usually only if I prod gently by asking the cooks and servers about the other places they’ve worked. Then, a couple weeks later, Freddie’s unlocking the office—a windowless cubby of a room across from the kitchen’s ice machine—when he turns to me.
Tracie, I’m hungry, he says plaintively. But the food I want, we don’t have it here.
What do you want?
Freddie’s face goes a little soft.
I’m thinking fresh mozzarella, a little sundried tomato. His voice is pure Brooklyn; I would have guessed he was Italian, straight from Bay Ridge, if I hadn’t heard him talking about his Cuban temper.
I nod along. Oooh, buffalo mozzarella, in the water? Fresh vegetables?
Freddie nods, casts a glance as if toward the heavens. Now you’re talking!
One of my great weaknesses is kitchens. There are different ways to love a kitchen, of course: for the ease conferred by fine cookware, for the familiar lure of the meals shared within it, for being the final stop on the human animal’s work of feeding itself. Yet what I love most about kitchens is the way they embody all of this lofty rhetoric while still being, at their core, deeply practical places. As much as we like to talk about humans as omnivores, just one more species selecting from nature’s mind-boggling array of options, in truth, we’re cooks.
Writers have noted cooking’s deep cultural power for nearly two centuries, stretching back to Brillat-Savarin, a French gastronomist of the nineteenth century, who argued that it was through fire, and thus cooking, that man “tamed Nature itself.” In the 1960s, Claude Lévi-Strauss called cooking the mark of our transition from nature to culture, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, the historian Michael Symons pinned “our humanity” on cooks. Yet it’s Richard Wrangham whom I find the most persuasive.
A primatologist at Harvard University, Wrangham’s work argues that apes did not evolve into man and then begin cooking, but that apes’ acquisition of cooking skills is what turned them into humans—literally. By providing us with softer and more digestible foods, cooking reduced the amount of time dedicated to eating. In turn, this opened up time to spend on hunting, increasing the intake of meat and protein as well as cooked foods, all of which allowed our digestive tracts to shrink, relatively speaking, and our brains to grow. It also created an impetus for social structures that revolved around households and the sharing of food—practices that form the bedrock of human culture, rather than the everyone-for-himself ethos that rules most primate species when it comes to food. “We are not like other animals,” writes Wrangham in Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, later adding, “we are cooks more than carnivores.” We are cooks by evolutionary design; competence in the kitchen has always been key to our health.
In contemporary America, we’ve made saving time on food procurement into both art and science. Food processing techniques free us up even more, while increasing the calories we can absorb from our meals. Researchers have only recently begun to examine the connection between home cooking and obesity rates, but preliminary data suggest that people who take the time to prepare their own meals are less likely to be obese. Similarly, frequently eating out is correlated with higher BMI.85 And it’s this curious expression of an elemental evolutionary drive—to reduce the time put into cooking while maximizing the calories we derive from it—that I see on full display in the Applebee’s kitchen. I’d come here with a vague notion that a restaurant kitchen would be a place where people cooked differently than time-strapped families throwing a Hot Pocket in the microwave. Certainly, it would be different than fast-food joints. But instead, I watch an endless assembly line, a large-scale mash-up that hits the sweet spot between McDonald’s and Sandra Lee’s Semi-Homemade Cooking.
Processed foods entered home kitchens decades before they arrived in restaurants. The first introduction of “convenience” foods for home cooks came in the 1930s, with Duncan Hines cake mixes in 1929 and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in 1937; by the 1940s both Pillsbury and Betty Crocker were selling cake and pastry mixes. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that full-on replacements for home-cooked meals, modeled on rations developed for the Naval Air Transport Service during World War II, were being hawked in grocery stores. Within a decade, convenience foods were so popular that the federal government undertook a four-city study analyzing their cost, quality, and preparation time, reprising the study in the late 1970s with the addition of a detailed taste comparison by government home economists. In 1979, convenience foods accounted for nearly half of all food bought for the home. By 2010, researchers found that nearly every dinner Americans prepared at home involved a convenience food product, a category that included everything from bagged salads to frozen dinners (but excluded basics like canned beans and plain bread). Today, despite all the concern about our reliance on fast food, only 14 percent of dinners eaten by two-parent families are fast food or other kinds of takeout; another 5 percent mix takeout with something made at home, and 3 percent are eaten at restaurants. But 70 percent are prepared in families’ kitchens, and almost always include some kind of convenience food.
As I become more comfortable in the kitchen at Applebee’s, I’m overwhelmed with an eerie sense of déjà vu. It takes me a few days of thinking I have been here before before I make the connection: The kitchen I’m now in resembles the one I grew up in, writ large. Just like the meals my family lived on throughout my childhood, much of what’s served at Applebee’s actually wouldn’t be that difficult, expensive, or time-consuming for a competent cook to make from scratch.
Discounting the stuff that comes out of the deep fryer,86 most of what Applebee’s serves is basic American fare that’s easy to make: steak, chicken breast, potatoes, broccoli. Take, for instance, one of the lighter options on the menu, asiago peppercorn steak. It’s a seven-ounce sirloin, grilled and topped with melted cheese and cracked pepper, served with steamed vegetables. We sell it for $16.99, and between the time required to get to the restaurant, ordering, and getting the meal, it probably takes forty-five minutes after leaving home before there’s food on the table. A cook with solid, but basic, skills can probably match the time frame for preparation: cutting up vegetables, throwing them in a steamer, grilling the meat. Costwise, there’s no contest. The ingredients for a comparable serving of steak, potatoes, and vegetables would be $3.72—a discount of nearly 80 percent for doing it, and the dishes, yourself. In strict dollars and cents, eating out costs four and a half times as much as eating at home.
The economics of something like Hamburger Helper are different, of course. The mix, milk, and beef required to make it cost $6.23 when I price it out at a store, and it takes 22 minutes from start to finish to make. Making a similar dish from scratch, though, costs $4.37 and takes 23 minutes to make. Most families eat more than beef and noodles at dinner, of course, and whether it’s made entirely from scratch or thrown together with a few helpful kits, an average family dinner takes just under an hour to make. When researchers watched thirty-two two-income families cook dinner for four days, here’s what they saw: It took people an average of fifty-two minutes from the time they opened the refrigerator door to the time they sat down at the table, whether they used a box kit like Hamburger Helper or cooked everything from scratch. The only difference was that meals cooked from scratch required about ten minutes more active time—minutes spent chopping and sautéing, for example—than box mixes.
Box meals don’t save us time any more than going out to eat does, and they don’t even save us money. What they do instead is remove the need to have to come up with a plan for dinner, something that’s easy when you’re a skilled cook—and bafflingly difficult when you’re not. The real convenience behind these convenience foods isn’t time or money, but that they remove one more bit of stress from our day.
And that’s why Applebee’s feels so familiar to me. The meals we serve here share a kind of social DNA with Hamburger Helper. Both are the fastest, easiest answer to the endlessly infuriating equation of health, time, money, and mental energy that American families calculate every day. And if we want to come up with a new solution, there has to be rejiggering of the equation itself; a changing, if you will, of the ground rules.
Today, most of us understand the planning of our eating lives as a zero-sum game. You can pay extra money for someone else to make your salad and bake your bread if you’d like to spend less time and energy while maintaining health. Or you can keep costs low by sticking to whole ingredients like heads of cabbage, sacks of onions, and bags of rice, but you’ll spend far more time and energy to do it. The only variables we ever consider changing are time and money.87 We forget that the final variable—energy, or the mental headspace—is just as fungible as the rest.
The key to getting people to eat better isn’t that they should spend more money, or even that they should spend more time. It’s making the actual cooking of a meal into an easy choice, the obvious answer. And that only happens when people are as comfortable and confident in the kitchen as they are taking care of the other endless chores that come with running a modern family—paying bills, cleaning house, washing the car. It only happens, in other words, when we can cook well. It doesn’t take advanced culinary acumen to know that making a pasta-and-ground beef one-skillet dinner from scratch isn’t actually any more difficult than using a box, but it does take education and training. Enough, at least, to convey that grilling a steak and steaming vegetables is just a basic household task.
Because, really, that’s what I’m helping with back here amid the grease and the steam and the clang of tongs on metal: Coordinating a basic household task. There will be days for every person, every family, where it is worth paying four times more for the service. That’s fine. But the longer I’m at Applebee’s, the more I think everyone should be making that choice from equal footing: with easy access to fresh ingredients, and a solid ability to cook. Our health, as that of our ancestors, depends on it.
Even if I find Applebee’s reliance on processed foods oddly familiar, the near absence of fresh food is unsettling. In our walk-in refrigerator, the produce takes up a small set of shelves, a stack of four or five roughly six feet wide and two feet deep. Primarily, this space is used for bags of produce already cut up in some far-off processing plant: precut broccoli florets, bags of shredded cabbage and carrots for coleslaw, bags of chopped romaine and baby spinach, shredded carrots, sliced mushrooms.
As far as whole produce, the stuff we cut up ourselves, there isn’t much. I see a box of tomatoes, a few dozen heads of iceberg lettuce for burgers, grape tomatoes, a few sweet peppers, lemons and limes. The meat comes in frozen, but, save for the ribs and fried foods, uncooked; the Cargill ground beef gets portioned into hamburgers from the five-pound packs in which it is shipped. But everything else we have in the kitchen, every soup and sauce, every chicken wing with bone or without (the latter being, essentially, chicken nuggets) comes premade in a bag, often frozen. Even the seasonings come this way.
The lack of produce can be explained easily by one thing: cost, the cost of the produce itself and of the labor it takes to prepare it. Restaurant executives often sideline fruits and vegetables not just because of their high price tags, but because they are harder to store, can spoil and lead to waste, and undercut sales of more profitable items—like processed foods. Produce also gets sidelined because of the “special handling” it requires, which is to say it must be cleaned and chopped before it gets anywhere near the line.
The same economic calculus applies to the overwhelming presence of processed food, particularly preprepared foods like the chicken wings, which need only to be dropped into the fryer for reheating and crisping; the ribs, which come precooked and presmoked, reheated on the grill with a slathering of sauce; and the frozen Triple Chocolate Meltdown cake, nuked by Rico and Hector, thrown on a plate with a scoop of ice cream, and squirted with fudge sauce. None of this requires more than the most basic attention on the part of the cooks. And it saves incredible amounts of time and money. I never get a look at Applebee’s inventory and cost documents, and food distributor data are notoriously hard to come by. But in 2007, Slate reporter Ulrich Boser found that an Angus country-fried steak from Sysco typically yields a five-dollar profit. This kind of faux cooking graces the white tablecloths of high-end restaurants as well as the booths of Applebee’s. Thomas Keller, the renowned chef heading up the French Laundry, was using frozen fries in his kitchen in 2007, and the same year Belhurst Castle, a prestigious spa and inn lauded by Wine Spectator, was serving Sysco’s Imperial Chocolate Cake, defrosted and garnished with fresh raspberries.
For what it’s worth, the cooks I work with know the difference. On one of my first nights in the kitchen, Calixto chatted me up, asking about where I’d worked before, and had I ever been in a kitchen? I said not really, and asked him where he’d worked besides Applebee’s.
Over at Junior’s, he said, indicating a famous Brooklyn diner-style restaurant. And they’ve got a real kitchen over there, not like here.
What do you mean? Isn’t this a real kitchen?
Nah, nah, he said. For onion soup, you cut up the onions and make the soup, he said, closing his eyes in reverie before snapping them back open. Not defrost a bag of it like here.
Due to both convenience and cost, Applebee’s meals begin to feature prominently in my diet. As a kitchen employee, I get an eleven-dollar credit toward a meal every time I work, so I never bring food; I just order from the cheaper end of the menu. The seafood entrées are out of my price range, but salads and sandwiches are not. At first I try the salads, but the vegetables—having been precut and in bags—taste dry to me and, more important, I’m always starving again within the hour. Instead, I rotate between burgers, grilled chicken, and fish sandwiches matched with fries, baked potatoes, or broccoli.
Most of the kitchen staff do the same, though one afternoon I see Pedro, one of the cooks for mid, load a plate with Mexi-rice, dot it with pico de gallo, and then unload a Tupperware container of home-cooked pigs’ feet onto it, a cold perfume of pork and cumin wafting up before he pops it in the microwave. Maria, a mother in prep, tells me she cooks big pots of stew, rice, and beans every few days for her two teenagers; Claudette cooks on her nights off.
At home, my local supermarket, Western Beef, dictates my diet. It’s huge by New York standards, 42,000 square feet, and the parking lot—itself unusual in Brooklyn’s real estate market—is separated from the doors by heavy metal fencing designed to keep shopping carts from leaving the premises. The aisles are crowded and narrow; shelves crammed with imported products from various Caribbean nations stretch to the ceiling. A few outlying aisles resemble a dollar store more than a supermarket, dedicated to the equipment of immigration and poverty: plaid, zippered bags that could encompass suitcases; crinkled cookware of heavy aluminum foil; tiny skyscrapers of patterned plastic dishware. A Trinidadian flag hangs from the rafters over the registers; soca blares from the speakers.
The produce section is solid, with the stuff trending toward Caribbean palates being the freshest: neon scotch bonnet peppers and glossy jalapeños, waxy yucca root, pineapples, avocados and garlic and squash. Stacks of corn tortillas still soft and pliable. Like the original Fairway, a higher-end market popular among the Manhattan’s upper-middle class, Western Beef has an entire refrigerated room for its meat and dairy, hawking family-oriented specials like chicken legs and backs for thirty-eight cents per pound, sold in great, sloppy plastic bags of seven pounds or more. On average, New York City is more of a food desert than Detroit, with only 1.5 square feet of grocery store space per person, and my neighborhood is technically even worse. In 2010, a city analysis of supermarket access showed that Prospect-Lefferts Gardens had 1.0 square foot of supermarket space per person; I am lucky, then, to be so close to one of the neighborhood’s few stores.
At first I cook myself wintry meals in the mornings before work: oatmeal turned creamy with peanut butter and a cooling splash of milk; huge, quartered squash with stringy orange flesh and hard green rinds, roasted and mashed to eat later; stews of chickpeas, chicken legs, spinach, and spices that I can freeze. But the longer I work, the more my home kitchen fades from my daily life. I’ve been put on Thursdays for expo, too, freeing Claudette up for another—and far more lucrative—shift on the floor. I find that by sleeping late, eating breakfast, taking care of laundry and such and then heading to work, I can keep my meal requirements to just two: late breakfast and then my free late-afternoon meal between the lunch and dinner rushes. I can feel apathy about my meals settling in, just as it did during my time at Walmart.
And just like at Walmart, I’m suddenly keen to take advantage of any more-affordable food options that come my way. I find that if there’s any gnawing hunger between my meals, on workdays I can placate it with soda or “dead” food—a dish, usually a trio plate of wings, that has sat under the heat lamp too long to be saleable. Accordingly, my grocery bills plummet; in my second month, they average less than ten dollars a week, spent mostly on oatmeal, coffee, and the tortillas and crema that I’ve come to rely on as my postwork snack, usually washed down with a tallboy of Modelo from the bodega between the subway station and my house. I feel guilty spending my limited money on beer, but it’s a cheap, easy way to counteract the lingering hyperkinesis of the kitchen.
All this thrift is being driven by economics, for I’ve run into some problems with Applebee’s and my paycheck. Since I’d signed up for direct deposit, and kept forgetting to ask for my pay stub, it took me a week or so to figure out that I wasn’t being paid what Freddie told me I’d be paid. The first problem came when I forgot to clock in on Valentine’s Day, a twelve-and-a-half-hour day without a break; Matt said he’d fix it for me, and I saw him go to the computer, so I mistakenly assumed he did. Then I realized that my training wage is the state minimum—$7.25—instead of the $8 an hour Freddie had offered me. By my calculations, the combination yielded a paycheck that was short by $155. I mentioned both problems to Freddie, and he said he’d add some hours onto the next check for me. When I get my next paycheck, I can see that the difference in hours has been made up, and that I’ve been paid for the staff meeting, but my wages are still lower than they should be. I’m being paid $8 an hour for my work on expo instead of the $9 that I’d been told. This is a bigger deal, amounting to a steady and permanent underpayment of $30–40 a week. I mention it to Freddie and he explains that someone must have coded me in wrong; he’ll look into it.
There’s always food stamps, of course, but at my $8 an hour, I’m hovering at the borderline of being too affluent to qualify for them. At this rate, I’m not going to amass much in savings, but with diligent budgeting and some discipline, I figure I should be able to make rent.
Then my bank’s fraud-detection department calls, and my financial picture falls apart. It takes hours to sort out, but $678.95 has been spent out of my account. They’ll start investigating right away, but won’t refund the money for weeks. I’m back to where I was with Walmart: Taking out an advance on a credit card, an errand that morphs into a three-hour odyssey involving two banks, one post office with a crazy woman waving a stack of money in a menacing fashion at her fellow patrons, and a tidy check-cashing spot housed in the building of a gas station. Workwise, though, things are looking up: I’ve relented to Freddie’s entreaties, and today I start my training as a Neighborhood Expert.
No, no, you want to eat at a restaurant that’s got chefs, not cooks, like we got here.
Vinnie, a heavyset, freckled Puerto Rican waiter, has slid into the booth with me and Kayla, a hostess, and is entertaining us with his ruminations on food. He grew up in the projects, he says, but now he lives near good restaurants in Brooklyn, and it’s great. Eating healthy is too expensive, he continues. And you only live once. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it to the fullest, you know?
Kayla prefers to eat healthily, though she doesn’t recommend the salmon here, and while she likes to cook, she hardly ever has time. We’ve been sitting here since 1:00, waiting for the expert training to start and wondering whether we’re going to get paid for coming in. They said we don’t need to clock in, so we’re dubious.
Two hours go by before Maya from Apple Metro calls us into the bar along with a handful of servers and Emmet from prep. Rolando, a veteran server, is here to get recertified, and so is Rick, who tells me before we start that he wants to go to culinary school, too, though he’s thinking he’ll go into the navy first to pay for it. Michelle, another server, is exhausted in her Hunter College sweatshirt because she just handed in a paper for school that took all night.
We each sign a Neighborhood Expert agreement, agreeing to “approach the management team with solutions, not problems” and to “invest [our] time willingly and unselfishly so that others may succeed.” There’s a series of essay questions ferreting out our commitment to the company’s approach, asking things like, “Which parts of the Applebee’s service ethic make the most sense to you?” We get handed “finals,” and at first Maya tells us to take them right now and disappears, leading to rampant cheating among all of us aspiring experts. Mine, for expo, focuses heavily on food presentation (What are the correct items on the Mozzarella Sticks and at what position? Correct answer: Marinara at 6:00, though, under Freddie’s tutelage, we typically position it in the center). Then Maya comes back and tells us to just do the finals at home. There are a series of questions on mine suggesting that I may have missed some training: inquiries about the proper method for washing hands, temperatures at which foods may rot, protocol for sanitizing.
We listen to Maya extol how well the restaurant is doing, up to three trucks of food a week—it was just two a month before. And then, less than an hour later, she tells us she’ll schedule another training in about a month. Class dismissed. We all look around, incredulous: That was it?
Later, I analyze my pay stubs and time cards to see if I was paid for the three hours I spent at Applebee’s on my day off. My time cards never indicate that I was at the restaurant that day, and I’m never paid for my time. In the wonky terms of social science, this is a “partial nonpayment,” or, optimistically, “a backlog.” Either way, there’s another word that researchers who examined New York City’s restaurant industry in 2007 use to describe it that I find even more disheartening: common.