This was a hectic Holiday season for me, with many more social engagements than usual.  It’s usually pretty busy, but something happened this year that I have never seen before, and that is I had much trouble booking reservations for dinner engagements, which was very strange.   Because I am usually busy with this kind of thing during November and December, I have a base to say that this year differs from other years.  And that the occurrences were higher than usual indicates that statistically, we’re not dealing with an accident here, but statistical certainty.  But out of the 20 dinners I was involved in over the Holiday season, I had trouble with reservations on 18 of them.  This means that, on the first attempt, the restaurant I was trying to book for a holiday party for social engagements would not accept the reservation due to competing holiday celebrations.  I would have to make a few calls, and in all the cases, I could get a hold of somebody to overcome the apprehension.  But with that process, I also received an explanation that ticked me off.  It’s a trend toward the negative that I have been pointing out to everyone over these last few years, coming out of all the dumb COVID protocols.  That globalist poison attacked our American workforce, and now, under four years of Joe Biden, the impact on the average American worker has destroyed them to such a degree that it was showing up in restaurants and how they staff and handle their employees regarding pressure.  In all 18 cases I mentioned, the general managers explained that they were having difficulty staffing their businesses, especially their kitchens, and were very concerned about overloading them because they were afraid they might quit. 

My idea of a great restaurant is Gordan Ramsey’s signature restaurant in Chelsea, England, just to the south of London along the river.  There are a few great places in the world that I also think about regarding top-tier food.  A steakhouse in Kobe, Japan that specializes in Kobe steak, which is fantastic on every bar you measure.  But that 3 Michelin Star Chef Ramsey place in London is, I think, about as good as it gets.  They know how to prepare food and treat a customer.  And it is hard to make a reservation there.  They purposely have a tiny dining room because they are concerned about the high food quality.  It is an excellent experience if you ever get a chance to go, and it’s costly but well worth the money.  When I was there, they toured me through the kitchen, and I could see how things work behind the scenes, and it was all top-notch.  The workforce was clean, engaged, organized, and efficient.  I can say that I’ve seen the best in the world and understand what it takes to be that way.  That was why I could call shenanigans to many of these local managers in the Cincinnati area when they tried to tell me that they were hesitant to book reservations for fear that their staff might be overworked and start delivering poor food quality.  That was the case in one particularly dumb explanation: a very nice restaurant on the Ohio River overlooking downtown Cincinnati was almost empty on the night that I wanted to entertain guests, yet they were concerned about booking my reservation for more than 20 because they had during that same hour a party of 15 and a party of 10.   

After further probing, I got to the heart of the matter: many people who work in restaurant kitchens doing fine food have become very sensitive to pressure under the Biden administration and the COVID protocols that never disappeared.  While high-quality restaurants were able to hire those kinds of people, their ability to handle stress is much lower than they were just a few years ago, and if pressured in an environment where the demands were intense, these employees were prone to walk off the job rather than fight through the pressure.  So managers of nice restaurants were doing their best to keep that pressure off their kitchens in a rock, paper, scissors game of at least keeping the food quality high, even if it meant a loss of sales at the door.  Cincinnati and areas around the city, especially up in West Chester and Liberty Township, have restaurants that are as good as anywhere in the world, so I understand wanting to keep those high food quality standards by taking the pressure off the kitchen staff.  But the kitchen staff shouldn’t be such crybabies, either.  This was a big problem in my eyes because it’s not just restaurants; this is a major domestic service problem that is the direct result of bad government management by introducing minimum wage increases that were not market-driven and creating workforce shortages with government talk of universal wages and work from home policies of virus management introduced by socialist health departments.  It had taken a few years to get there, but the Biden administration policies had shown up in the reservation systems of high-quality restaurants. The artificial constraint of employees had impacted their businesses to the point where they couldn’t plan to maximize their dining room seating to maximum effect because their staff had become soft and unable to manage high amounts of stress. 

Knowing all this and keeping the managers happy with their dilemma, my approach was to let everyone take two or three hours for dinner so that the kitchens didn’t get stressed out too much and to allow the food quality to be reduced.  My logic to the managers is that they’ll make more money letting their guests wait for the food and buying appetizers and drinks than in trying to pace everything to the artificial constraint of the kitchen staff that was trying to figure out if they’d work that night or call off to play Call of Duty.  If employees are getting paid anyway, why would they work harder?  That is what happens when you take away incentives from the American worker to do more and to do it faster.  Most of these restaurants in Cincinnati are built for speed and large crowds.  This is not like Chef Ramsey’s restaurant in England, which had a purposely small dining room.  The places I was going to were meant to fill every seat, and if they could fit in a reservation, they could book it and keep their dining rooms full.  They needed to push their kitchens to perform.  However, “push” became a bad name under the Biden administration.  Employees have become radicalized and are “pushing back” by saying that they need an emotional safety animal to manage stress so they don’t cry when the pressure becomes too great for them.  The way I think, this is a national security issue.  You don’t see this from workforces when I travel around Asia.  They work hard. In the West, workers don’t work hard anymore, a change from just a few years ago.  Like I said, I do this kind of thing every year.  This year was the first time that I had reservations turned down on nights when the dining rooms were mostly empty, but the managers were purposefully trying to keep the pressure off their kitchens because their employees had become emotionally soft after four years of the Biden administration, and globalism employment practices in general.  And it’s certainly something we need to address as a nation.

Rich Hoffman

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