E is for Excess
2024 spread out
A glutton of restaurants in 2024. Across a handful of cities, countries, and continents. When I look back across my list for the year, the feelings are mixed. A heady feeling of greed, a light pride, but mostly a continued joy for restaurants.
Working in restaurants, eating in restaurants, walking past restaurants and feeling the reverberation of jubilation coming from inside. I just love restaurants. 2024 was not an easy year for the hospitality industry, the ripple effect from Covid is still being felt financially and psychologically amongst staff, owners, and clients. Yet, the people are persevering. More restaurants are opening than ever, the guttural desire from chefs and restaurateurs to succeed in an industry with a very large failure rate is still present and powerful. It is becoming more and more expensive to run a restaurant with interest rates and energy bills and many other factors that go over my head and yet in many other senses, the “food” sector is booming.
Chefs are moving out of kitchens and onto screens, from tickets to TikTok, making the demand for line cooks higher than ever. The population of people that want to start working in food but not in food is growing with such rapidity that it is impossible to keep up with the Substacks (yours truly included), the Foodstagrams, and everything that goes with this digital service.
Cheffing has never been a glamorous profession, that is a known sentiment, yet the digitalisation of the work, through film (We Live in Time, Burnt, The Bear) has given a new lease of life and a sexier view of the Back of House.
Chefs are learning their value in this modernisation of the trade and realising that restaurants (certainly independently run restaurants) cannot function if they pay their staff well. It is a frustrating back and forth on the inside, a constant battle of wanting financial stability and equally keeping integrity within the business. I hide behind words on Substack to avoid starting a video welcoming people to a day in the life as a chef in Paris, despite knowing full well that that’s where the money lies. It feels vulgar to romanticise my job for the internet’s sake, so in full honesty mode, I’ve had a few months off restaurant work and I am not 100% convinced that I want to put myself back through it. As much as I love the job, cooking everyday, having access to a secret world of produce, the hasty choreography of a service, it is nonetheless all-consuming. A Narnian entryway into an intimate world, a secret club of those privileged and stupid enough to ask for entry. Therefore, my current predicament is whether to give up my membership, to stop paying the subscription fees and carve another path for myself that allows part-time access, a one foot in one foot out agreement.
Whilst I endeavour to figure out this head-spinner, I’ll continue to eat in restaurants and be thoroughly inspired by those who are managing to stick in the game. Perhaps in the weeks to come there will be a meal that screams for me to rejoin the brigades, to hear the siren call of the ticket machine. In the meantime, my list of 2024 restaurants is ready for consumption. To access the whole list, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Alphabet Soup!