The Tale of the Rubber Band Sauce

This is about a particularly memorable experience I had while working in one of our local country clubs.  It still haunts me.

This wasn't your usual country club.  It was a country club for people who couldn't really afford to become a member of a real country club but still wanted to be able to say they belonged to a country club.  More specifically, they wanted to behave like they belonged to an actual country club and tell their friends about how they lived a life of privilege.  These people had heard the horror stories about how badly the members of some real country clubs treated the club staff and they were determined to treat the staff of their dollar store country club even worse just to make a point that they could "out 1%" the real 1%.  

In this particular club, the Executive Chef was a young guy who had landed his position right out of culinary school.  He didn't go to a prestigious culinary school.  He went to our local community college culinary school.  At first it might sound like I'm disparaging the school, but in reality the graduates of the culinary arts program had a pretty good knowledge of how to cook,  The program had made huge advances in their offerings and it was starting to show in the quality of their graduates.  This guy wasn't one of those.  His crowning achievement was to help a crappy local food critic put together a cookbook full of food photos that looked pretty good but tasted like something you'd find rooting around in a dumpster on a hot July afternoon.

Ok, so the stage is set.  We'll call this guy Ben, which is obviously not his real name.  There's also a guy we'll call Seth who will come later in the story.  I was working as a cook and my main responsibility was mostly doing banquets.  Now I'll tell you up front that I am pretty good at cooking for large parties.  I don't particularly like doing banquets, but I worked for a real French chef at one point and he made it very clear that those banquets were what paid the bills, so I was happy to do it and very appreciative of the wages I was paid for it.

So now we're actually going to get to the story I wanted to tell you.  On this particular night we had a party for about 200 people.  It was a buffet dinner of Italian food, which was totally in my wheelhouse since I had owned a couple of Italian restaurants and had cooked in them every day.  I spent most of the day getting food prepped and ready for the event and we were on schedule to have everything out on the buffet right on time.  Everything was going smoothly until we got to the fettucine alfredo.

If you've ever had real fettucine alfredo you know that it really should be made right at the moment of service.  It starts as a reduction of white wine, shallots, and a little fresh garlic. From there you add some heavy cream and reduce it a little, take it off the heat, add some good quality parmesan cheese, and then finish it with some soft whole butter.

Making alfredo sauce is not rocket science but it's more difficult than microwaving a cup of yesterday's coffee.  When you have to make it for 200 people buffet-style your only real option is to make an "alfredo" sauce beforehand.  This is generally a bechamel sauce with all the required seasonings and parmesan cheese that is ladled over a pan of noodles in a chafing dish and set out for the masses to ravage.  Not the real thing, but it's as close as you can possibly get if you have to serve 200 people in 15 minutes.  As a chef specializing in Italian food, I lose a little bit of my soul every time I have to make it that way.

I would have normally made the imitation alfredo sauce myself and given up a little more of my soul for the cause, but for some reason Ben wanted to make it himself on this day.  I don't know if Ben wanted to spare me the humiliation of making something as hideous as this was destined to be or whether he just wanted to try and make something that would actually pass as real alfredo.  To this day his real motive will remain a mystery unless he steps forward and confesses his true intent.

Anyway, I offered to make it several times throughout the afternoon but my offers were rebuffed each time.  When we got down to about an hour before the guests were to arrive there was still no alfredo sauce, either finished or in progress.  Everything else was ready to go.  After I offered again to make it, Ben decided that the tomato roses he was making for no particular purpose could wait and he gathered the ingredients and started the sauce.  On one hand this was good news to me, but on the other hand I was starting to worry about what culinary monstrosity would eventually be born of his efforts.

Normally we would thicken an imitation alfredo with a little roux to get it to the right consistency.  If you're not familiar with roux it's basically a starch cooked with a fat which results in a compound with thickening properties.  We usually use some clarified butter and flour to make roux.  It's a basic process that every cook learns early in their culinary journey.  For some reason Ben decided to use something other than roux to thicken his imitation alfredo.  

There are many thickening agents that can be used in cooking and they all have their particular uses.  One of the more obscure ones is something called xanthan gum.  You typically find it in processed, shelf-stable non-perishable foods but almost never in hot sauces.  There is a reason for this.  The reason is that xanthan gum thickens things by incorporating it into the food and then physically agitating it.  It can be hot or cold -- it doesn't matter.  Roux thickens by cooking it into a hot sauce or soup.  xanthan gum is different because you can mix it into a cold liquid and beat it for awhile with a whisk and the liquid will get thicker.  The more you beat it the thicker it will get.  While this may sound like a miracle, it really isn't because it's a different kind of thickness.  It's a rubbery thickness.  You don't want your sauces to have a rubbery texture because it's just fucking unnatural.

As you may have guessed by now, Ben chose xanthan gum as his thickening agent.  When all the ingredients were added to the sauce, he followed by adding about half a cup of xanthan gum.  Now if you have any experience using xanthan gum you probably know that a cup of xanthan gum can add body to about 10 gallons of sauce.  You can imagine what it did to 3 gallons of imitation alfredo.  Xanthan gum doesn't immediately thicken whatever you put it in.  You can put a shitload of it into something and as long as you don't agitate it then it won't thicken at all.  But Ben kept stirring his sauce with a big wire whisk, which activated the xanthan gum more and more.  The more he stirred it with the whisk the thicker and more like raw rubber it got.  I don't know if he was genuinely pleased with his sauce or whether he just didn't want to admit that his choice of thickeners was wrong, but he seemed really happy about the outcome.  

I offered several times to finish the sauce for him, but each time he declined.  By "finish the sauce" I actually meant emptying it into the dumpster and making it again.  Unfortunately he was either genuinely pleased with his sauce or too proud to admit that it was a complete disaster and start over.  To this day I don't know for sure.

Seth was the Food and Beverage Manager at the club.  He had a solid kitchen background and routinely checked on the food we were serving, offering input on everything.  As usual, he cruised through the kitchen before the buffet to make sure we were ready and get a feeling for my comfort level.  This guy was not stupid.  He knew that if I was concerned about our ability to serve quality food on time for a banquet then he needed to do something right away.  If I was comfortable then he could go and hit golf balls on the driving range for an hour and then go home afterwards.  On this occasion he sensed that I was not comfortable so he kept probing until he got to the alfredo sauce.  He looked at it and, without tasting or stirring it, he asked if I had made it.  I told him that I hadn't and he asked why it looked shiny.  

That's the other thing about xanthan gum.  Too much of it makes things look shiny.  I'm not talking about the magical sheen that you see with pan sauces finished with a little quality butter.  I'm talking about shiny like a car fender after a good waxing.  You could almost see your face in it.

Seth grabbed a tasting spoon and dipped it into the sauce.  Well, I should say that he tried to dip it into the sauce, but the alfredo just slid off the spoon.  He looked at me and told me he knew it wasn't my fault and then reached for a ladle.  He dipped the ladle into the sauce and, once it was full of Ben's creation, he started to lift it.  His intent was to lift about 8 ounces of sauce out of the pot and let it pour back so he could examine the texture.  He managed to get the ladle about 10 inches above the surface of the sauce before the sauce in the ladle snapped back into the pot like a piece of stretched rubber.  He looked at me again and said he would go talk to Ben about it.

While I was uncomfortable about the quality of Ben's sauce, you have to understand the paradox of the professional kitchen to truly know the dilemma I faced.  I could tell you about it here and I may have already published a post about it, but the bottom line is that the Executive Chef of a professional kitchen is god like.  Whatever he or she says is simply the way it is.  If the Executive Chef tells you to serve a steak he bought out of the back of a pickup truck at the mall for fifty cents a pound and call it Wagyu beef then you do it.  Seth understood this and, as a result, didn't think any less of me as a person or chef as a result of this unfortunate incident.  He knew I didn't have a choice.

So, after reading this far you may wonder what actually happened with the sauce.  We served it and it was so bad the customers didn't eat it because they couldn't get it out of the pan without it sliding off the serving utensils.  That's what happened.  I'm not proud of it, but that's what happened.  Later that night I saw the dishwasher who was unlucky enough to get the pot of leftover alfredo sauce reach into the pot and pull it out with both hands like ten pounds of bread dough.  It was a huge mass of stretchy white material that you would never be able to identify as a sauce.  I felt bad for him but I also wondered if the people who went through the buffet really thought that this was how the 1% liked their pasta.  I hope not, but in these times things that really don't make any sense are the new normal.

If I Could Build a Government With My Friends

Tonight Tanya and I were talking about politics and we both agreed that we could build a government with our friends in key cabinet positions that was far more functional and productive than what we have today.  We discussed it for awhile over a few drinks and decided that we should probably put together a list of our choices in case we are asked to provide one at some point after the upcoming election.  This is what we came up with:

President:                                                            Virginia Maron

Vice President:                                                    Tyler Chickinelli

Secretary of Agriculture:                                      Terra Hall

Secretary of Commerce:                                      Joe Johnson

Secretary of Defense:                                           Vincent Nicolas

Secretary of Education:                                        Angie Sada

Secretary of Energy:                                             Darian Stout

Secretary of Health and Human Services:            Melissa Misegadis

Secretary of Homeland Security:                           Mark Evans

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development:    Amada Zahm

Secretary of Labor:                                                Phillip McGuire

Secretary of the Interior:                                        Mike Newell

Secretary of State:                                                 Margaret Sweany and Adam Flohr

Secretary of Transportation:                                   Annie Penske

Secretary of Treasury:                                            Natasha LaPlante

Secretary of Veterans Affairs:                                C.J. George

Attorney General:                                                   Tara Spencer

We discussed it for quite some time and there are definitely reasons for each of our choices.  There was a lot of discussion and quite a few cocktails before we came up with the final list, but we are pleased to share the final product with you tonight.  After all, this is the first time that either of us has had the opportunity to forge the direction of an entire nation. 

Some of you may be surprised to find yourself on our list.  We sincerely hope that you will remain calm and embrace your new potential role in shaping the future of the United States.  We chose you because we think that it's time for a change and we feel that you would be a valuable contributor to getting our country back on track and heading in a direction where all people can prosper regardless of race, religion, or sexual preference.

Thanks,

Jeff and Tanya

What Will the Future of the Restaurant Industry Look Like?

The Coronavirus pandemic has made me wonder what the restaurant industry's "new normal" is going to look like.  If you've ever worked in a restaurant you probably know that even a successful restaurant can't survive forever with a reduced revenue stream.  A restaurant that is barely making it financially may not be able to survive for more than a few days.  They don't have unlimited cash reserves (if they even have any at all) and when things are tough financially many times the restaurant owner must inject some personal funds back into the business just to keep it going.  I was in the business for a long time and I know a lot of restaurant owners.  Only a couple of them were fortunate enough to make a lot of money from their restaurants and both of them didn't change their business models as the market changed over time, so they ended up putting all the money they had made back into the businesses to keep them afloat.  Both of those people ended up closing their restaurants and are still paying off a ton of the debt they incurred trying to keep their places open. 

As I've said in earlier posts, restaurants are not the cash machines that most people think they are.  The margin of a well-run restaurant is only about 4-7%.  To put that in perspective, a restaurant needs to sell about $1,000 worth of food and drink to make about $70 in profit.  Depending on what kind of menu items you're selling and your price range, that can mean serving 100 or more customers.  

Imagine having 100 people over to your house for and offering each of them a choice of 20 items for dinner.  Once they have eaten all your dinner rolls and let their screaming kids run through your house for half an hour, they let you know what they want and tell you exactly how they wanted it all cooked.  Now you have 15 minutes to get it all ready for them.  Oh, don't forget that it has to be perfect and just the way they imagined it would look and taste.  And by the way, because they watch the Food Channel, they are all culinary experts.  If they don't get exactly what they want, you will face the backlash on Yelp forever and no one will accept your future invitations to come over to your place for a nice, relaxing dinner ever again.  Would that be worth $70 to you?  I would probably be willing to give each of those people some cash if they would just go eat somewhere else or, better yet, go buy some groceries and put some of that Food Channel expertise to work by cooking their own dinner at their place.  Luckily, I have a small house so I guess I don't have to worry about it that much.

Ok, back the reason for my post.  Restaurants have either been closed or just doing takeout/delivery for over a month.  Our governor issued something called a "Directed Health Measure" that limited the number of people who can gather in one place at the same time to ten or less.  This effectively closed every restaurant's dining room.  Although this has been devastating to restaurant sales, I do applaud our governor for following the advice of epidemiologists and doing this.  As a side note, I work at a health care organization and I know that our governor has personally been on daily coronavirus briefings with our epidemiologists since this mess started.  He faithfully followed their advice until about 2 weeks ago when he finally caved in to pressure from the business community and the GOP and decided to allow businesses to start reopening while we are still on the upward side of our "coronavirus curve."  I think this was a bad idea since the number of new cases here is still increasing at an alarming rate every day and epidemiologists have advised him that it would probably lead to many more infections and deaths than waiting a little bit longer.

If you own and operate a restaurant, you know that you will lose your ass if you only allow 10 people in your dining room at a time.  Even with only one server, you still have a kitchen full of cooks that you have to pay just for showing up even if they only have to cook for a few people.  And you have to heat or air condition the whole place.  Plus, all that kitchen equipment costs a lot of money in gas and electric expenses.  You can't shut it off until you get an order because it take a long, long time to heat up this stuff until you can cook with it.  The equipment they have back there is not like what you have in your house.  You could run your kitchen stove for a year or more with the amount of natural gas these monsters consume in only a few hours.  It is simply too expensive to open your dining room if you can't serve your normal number of customers.

Many restaurants here have decided to do the responsible thing by ignoring the governor's order relaxing restrictions and just keeping their dining rooms closed for now.  One of the news channels here took a poll a few days ago asking regular restaurant customers if they would go to a restaurant and eat in it's dining room.  The result was that about 72% of the respondents plan to avoid dining rooms in the foreseeable future.  If I still owned a restaurant, I know that this number would be very important to me and I would be considering how I could restructure my business so that it could survive in the coming months or years. If you depend on dine-in customers to make money and 72% of them aren't coming in, you are not going to make money.  If this goes on for a long time, you stand to lose a lot of money.  It's that simple.  If 72% of your customers are afraid to come to your restaurant and you have no other way to serve them, then you are in trouble.

Luckily, customers have been fairly accepting of ordering takeout and delivery.  We all know that restaurant food is better when it's served right from the kitchen, but we're willing to adjust our expectations to get it delivered to our homes and avoid getting sick.  When I was a chef, we generally hated doing takeout orders.  If your kitchen is geared up to serve great food to people in your dining room, it's hard to change gears and provide the same quality product packed in to go containers.  With some menu items it simply can't be done.  For example, there's no way to serve a good classic Bananas Foster in styrofoam.  You can't serve a flaming ball of sugar, bananas, and ice cream in styrofoam.  Even without the fire it wouldn't be the same when the customer finally got it.  We used to occasionally get to go orders for creme brulee.  Part of that dessert is it's proper presentation.  Removing it from the baking dish and putting it in a to go container resulted in the customer receiving nothing more than what looked like a spoonful of Jello pudding for their $11.  As a side note, I would regularly just send the whole creme brulee in it's porcelain baking dish in the to go order with a request that the customer return the dish the next day.  In 2 years of doing this I would regularly find a bag containing the carefully washed baking dishes outside the back door of the restaurant when I arrived at work the next morning.  I think we only ever lost one dish doing this.

Consumers are scared to death of contracting coronavirus and they should be.  After all, who wants to spend two weeks in a hospital intensive care unit isolated from loved ones drowning in their own mucus until they eventually die?  There's no way to spin that into a positive situation.  While we have some really stupid people in this country, most people are not stupid enough to believe that a governor's order to reopen public places is going to put an end to the coronavirus.  Even if infection rates eventually drop, we are going to be scared of this for a long time and it is going to affect our willingness to be in public places with other people around.  

What I'm trying to say with all this is that now is the time for restaurants to evaluate how they're going to operate in the future because things aren't going to be the same.  Customers are scared to go to restaurants but they still want restaurant food and they're willing to make some adjustments to their expectations in order to get it.  I think restaurants should adjust their business models toward takeout/delivery instead of dine-in business.  This means changing menus to offer food that works well for takeout as well as partnering with some of the emerging delivery services that we have been regularly using during this pandemic.  Adjust staffing to levels and skill sets that make takeout/delivery easier and more profitable.  Some restaurants will see this as a great challenge, but others will see it as a new opportunity and will start to make adjustments that will enable them to survive.

Embracing Ignorance

I want to write to you about something that has been bothering me for some time now.  That something is the fact that now a lot of Americans think it is stylish to be uneducated, unaware, and generally obnoxious.  If you fall into this category of Americans, you need to decide whether to read on or go polish the mud flaps on your pickup truck instead.  If you are one of these people and are easily offended, I'd recommend working on the mud flaps instead of reading on.

Over about the last ten years it seems like I've been encountering more and more of these people.  When I was much younger we were taught to be inquisitive, embrace learning opportunities, and value knowledge.  Even knowledge we knew we'd most likely never use.  When we found that we really didn't know something that we should have known, we did a pretty good job of not letting anyone know that we didn't have that particular pearl of knowledge and then we went and learned it on the sly so we'd have it available for next time.

Today things are different.  More and more often I hear things like "I don't know nothing about that" and "Who cares as long as I have a big screen TV" and "I have a constitutional  right to...blah...blah...blah."  The whole "constitutional right" thing is a subject for another post so I'm not going to get started on it here, but just suffice it to say that's the one that makes me livid every time.  A chance encounter with an individual of this mentality during a  visit to the grocery store yesterday was what compelled me to make this particular post.  

In case you happen to be reading this at some future date, most of the world is currently being impacted to some degree by a coronavirus pandemic.  A lot of people have died from it, a lot of people are sick, and most of us are scared shitless over the whole thing.  Omaha, the city where I live, has restrictions in place that have closed restaurants, bars, and most any business where people congregate and generally just hang out near each other for any amount of time.  Financially it has been very hard on many residents and local businesses and it has been an inconvenience for most of us in some way.  

Grocery stores are impacted by the pandemic to some degree, but they are not closed.  Customers who typically shop for small amounts of groceries several times each week are trying to limit their possible exposure to the virus by going as infrequently as possible and buying enough stuff that they don't have to go back in a day or two.  We frequent several different grocery stores, but I chose this one yesterday because I had a prescription ready at the pharmacy, so I decided to just shop for groceries while I was there.  I will say that this grocery store is not my favorite because they are much more expensive and I think the company is kind of shifty. Most grocery stores lowered prices when the pandemic hit in order to help their financially-strapped customers, but these guys raised them instead hoping no one would really take notice.  In retrospect, I should have just picked up my medication and driven the six blocks to another grocery store, but I guess then I wouldn't have been compelled to get this off my chest and share it with you.

This particular grocery store had decided for some reason that the best way to combat coronavirus was to make their aisles one way.  To get to an item in a particular aisle you have to be moving the correct direction or the grocery police will immediately come to you and let you know that you are a violator.  If you happen to pass an item that you intended to buy, you can't just turn around and go back for it.  You have to continue to the end of the aisle, go up an adjacent aisle, and then make another pass though the aisle where your item is located, hopefully remembering to grab it this time.  If you think this can be confusing, you're right.  It's like when a pilot is trying to land an airliner and realizes that he's coming in too high so instead of landing anyway he gives the plane some gas, pulls up, and circles around to try it again.

Ok, back to my story.  I was going down the aisle with baking supplies and spices in order to get to the end and turn up an adjacent aisle where the item I wanted was located and I ran into a guy and his daughter coming toward me the wrong way.  He was pushing the cart down the center of the aisle with his rotund body swaying side to side in what best could be described as an over-confident swagger.  She was running behind him trying to get him to put on a medical mask and shouting about coronavirus.  He had the usual shorts that went to his ankles, untied high top basketball shoes, a sleeveless t-shirt that read "Protected by Smith and Wesson," some scraggly facial hair, and what may have been a MAGA hat but I'm not sure because he was wearing it backwards.  The grocery police were nowhere to be seen.  I would have expected them to be all over this flagrant violation of their new grocery store traffic rules.

What triggered me to actually sit down and write this post was when I heard his reply to his daughter's pleas for him to wear a mask.  He said to his young daughter "I don't need no fucking mask!  Ain't no goddamned fucking coronavirus gonna get me so shut the fuck up."  Of course this all came out at a volume level sufficient to be heard for three aisles in either direction.  As we passed each other he looked me in the eye and said "What??" with a mildly disturbing level of animosity.  My immediate urge was to grab a Pyrex baking dish off the shelf and beat him to death with it before continuing with my shopping, but I decided not to engage.  I figured he would probably remove himself from the gene pool eventually anyway, maybe by following our genius president's recent advice to drink a bunch of Lysol.  Throughout all this I did not see the grocery police even once.

To get back to the original purpose of my post, I can tell you that I see more and more of this behavior all the time.  And the thing is, people acting like this are actually proud of the fact that they aren't really even aware of what's going on around them and they have no desire to become so.  Our "stable genius" president has encouraged this type of living thoughtlessly, in complete ignorance, and without any consideration of others so now it's ok for them to act this way right out in the open instead of trying to conceal it somehow. I'm having a really hard time figuring this out.  Maybe you have the answer, but I sure don't.  The only thing I can think of right now is to just keep heavy objects away from easy reach  while at the grocery store and hope for the best.

Is it Time for Restaurant Employees to Return to Work?

This is a question every restaurant employee in Nebraska has been struggling with this weekend.  On Friday our Governor, Pete Ricketts, issued an order that allows restaurants to reopen on May 4.  I want to discuss it here, so if you're not from Nebraska or you really don't care about Nebraska restaurants or their employees, then this post isn't for you and you should move on to something more engaging like my post about pet bobcats.   

Before I start telling you what I think about this decision, I want to be honest and let you know that I currently do not work in the restaurant industry.  I did, however, spend many (30+) years in the industry as a chef and restaurant owner/operator.  I retired from it several years ago because I am older and no longer able to perform at my best in that environment.  I'm lucky enough to have another career path which has now landed me in the healthcare industry at the largest healthcare provider in Nebraska, which also happens to be one of the top organizations in the world for COVID-19 research and treatment.  My wife is still in the restaurant industry and she has been impacted by COVID-19.  I should also let you know that, although I generally don't agree with anything our Governor does, I think he has done a great job of leading our state through the COVID-19 pandemic up to this point.  Just so you know, those are the things that influence my perspective on this situation.

Nebraska restaurants have been closed by executive order for several weeks in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19 and to "flatten the curve."  (I'm not going to tell you what "flatten the curve" means because it has been explained in the news for weeks and if you don't know you can just Google it.)  This was, and still is, the guidance provided by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).  As of this morning, the CDC is still recommending that restaurants remain closed for dine-in business.  The Governor's order directly contradicts the guidance of the CDC and Nebraska's healthcare experts.

About a week ago the White House issued some guidance for reopening sectors of the economy using a phased approach.  The first phase required a two week downward trend in the number of new COVID-19 cases, sufficient available hospital capacity, and a target percentage of available ventilators on hand.  In Nebraska we have met some of these conditions, but our number of cases are still increasing.  We have still not reached our peak so we have not yet met the White House's decreasing cases criteria for Phase One reopening.  The numbers reported by the state do not match the actual numbers of diagnosed and treated COVID-19 cases, so we should regard the State of Nebraska's numbers with some doubt.

Restaurant closures due to COVID-19 have been devastating to Nebraska restaurants and their employees.  Some restaurants have responded by pivoting their business models to favor take-out and delivery, but this is no substitute for having paying customers actually in the restaurants spending money.  Many restaurants will not recover from this and it's unrealistic to say that they will.  If you are in the industry, you probably already know that most restaurants don't have the reserves to weather this event if it goes on for very long.  Believe me, I felt the pain of managing daily cash flow in my restaurants and I understand how hard this is.  I understand the impact of losing even one day's sales so what I say here is not just something I say lightly.

Governor Ricketts relaxed the requirements for filing unemployment claims so that restaurant employees impacted by the closure of their workplaces due to COVID-19 became a valid reason for receiving unemployment benefits.  This has been a great help to restaurant employees, especially when combined with federal COVID-19 assistance.  It is the difference between making ends meet and living on the street for many of them.  

If you're familiar with how unemployment insurance works from the employer's perspective, you know that the number of paid claims is one of the determining factors in a restaurant's cost of unemployment insurance.  More paid claims means a higher cost of insurance to the employer.  Governor Ricketts, through an executive order, exempted COVID-19 claims from this.  If a restaurant closes due to COVID-19 and all of that restaurant's employees file unemployment and collect it, then it doesn't affect the restaurant's insurance rates.  I applaud our Governor for his insightful decision in this regard.  This will be really important later in the post, so make a mental bookmark here.

One of the requirements for reopening would be for employees to wear masks, but there is no requirement for customers to do the same.  Obviously you can't require a customer to wear a mask when dining unless he/she is somehow able to consume food and drink through another bodily orifice, but that is a subject for a future post.  The bottom line here is that having restaurant employees wear masks protects customers from contracting COVID-19 from employees, but employees are not protected from contracting it from customers due to the nature of how this virus spreads.

In weekly COVID-19 status calls in our organization, our experts are saying that reopening businesses prematurely would likely result in an increase in COVID-19 cases and epidemiologists are advising that we don't do it yet.  It is simply not time, yet we are about to do it anyway.  Governor Ricketts has listened to these experts up to this point, so why is this the time to stop?  I'll let you form your own opinions, but I think this decision places a higher value on money and politics than on safety.  You can decide for yourself if you think money is more important than human lives.

I told you earlier to make a mental bookmark so I want to talk about that now.  The picture isn't pretty, but here it is.  Within an hour of the Governor's order to allow restaurants to reopen Friday, some restaurant employees received texts and emails from their employers  saying that their restaurants would be reopening by May 4 and if the employees didn't agree to show up for work and agree to a variable schedule they would be terminated for "job abandonment."  For unemployment claims this would effectively terminate any benefits being paid.  The employee could either return to work with a reduced schedule and lose any unemployment benefits or they would lose all benefits because they "abandoned" their jobs.  If these employers left their employees in a status of "laid off due to COVID-19" the employees would still be able to collect unemployment benefits with no financial impact to the employer.  If they change the employee's status to "job abandonment" it would have no financial advantage to the employer and would serve no purpose.  It would just be spiteful and the threat to do so would be nothing short of coercion.

Think about this for a minute.  These employers are effectively coercing their employees to return to a potentially deadly work environment or risk losing any financial safety nets the government is offering in response to COVID-19.  They are being told that returning to a work environment that could make them sick or kill them and their family is their only option.  I know what I think about this, but hopefully you can figure out that these employers are not only ethically challenged, but morally bankrupt.  

I'd like to say that these are inexperienced restaurateurs and they don't know better, but they are not.  One of the ones I know of that has done this has been around for 40 years and is proud to tell you that.  They should know better by now and if they don't then they certainly have deeper problems than how to reopen after COVID-19.

That should just about wrap up this post.  If you had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to say here, then I can sum it up by saying that it's not time to reopen restaurants in Omaha yet because our health experts tell us that.  Our Governor knows this, yet he's willing to put lives at risk doing so. Restaurants who think they can coerce their employees into coming back to an unsafe environment should be ashamed of themselves and deserve to remain closed indefinitely.

Letter to Governor Ricketts and the Press

April 25, 2020

I am writing to express my concern over Governor Ricketts’ decision yesterday to lift restrictions on restaurants and also to express my outrage at the immediate response by some restaurant owners in the Omaha area.

Governor Ricketts’ decision clearly goes against CDC guidance for opening restaurants during this pandemic.  As of this morning, the CDC web site says “In states with evidence of community transmission, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”  In addition, Nebraska Medicine epidemiologists are saying that now is not the time to relax restrictions.  It is the time to double down on our efforts to reduce the spread of coronavirus through our community.  Governor Ricketts has listened to advice from these experts throughout the pandemic and now is not the time to stop listening.

Even more disappointing than the Governor’s order was the response by some restaurants.  Within hours of the Governor’s order, some restaurant employees who were laid off as a result of COVID-19 received texts and emails form their employers stating that the restaurant would begin the process of reopening and that the employee must commit to returning to work by Monday or the employer would contest the unemployment benefits the employee has been receiving.

As a former restaurant owner/operator, I understand the financial impact a large number of unemployment claims can have on the restaurant’s unemployment insurance rates.  Governor Ricketts has already stated, however, that unemployment claims related to COVID-19 would not be included in the determination of a business’s insurance rates.  In other words, a large number of COVID-19 related claims would have no financial impact on the business. 

The bottom line here is that some restaurant owners are using Governor Ricketts’ order yesterday as leverage to coerce their employees to return to an unsafe work environment.  
These unethical operators are threatening employees with loss of benefits unless the employee returns to work before experts say it is safe to do so.  In addition, I don’t think they’ve given much thought to their own liability if an employee is coerced into returning to work in an unsafe environment and then gets sick and dies.  As a relative of a restaurant worker, if this happened to my loved one I would certainly sue that restaurant out of existence so it could never happen again.

I fully understand the impact this pandemic is having on the restaurant industry, but I think the unethical actions of some restaurant owners are putting their employees and customers at risk in favor of cash flow and we need to call them out on it.  Prioritizing money over human lives is simply unethical and morally wrong.

Sincerely,

Jeff Camp