Such hybrid restaurants are spreading to other high-cost cities, and they fit what analysts say is growing demand for more flexible dining options. But here, the extreme economics have rapidly made the model commonplace.
San Francisco’s tech riches have fed demand for restaurants — and some wealthy tech workers have decided they would also like to be partners in a restaurant, opening up more investment. But as those highly paid workers have also driven demand for scarce housing, the city has struggled to keep lower-wage workers afloat.
On July 1, the minimum wage in San Francisco will hit $15 an hour, following incremental raises from $10.74 in 2014. The city also requires employers with at least 20 workers to pay health care costs beyond the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, in addition to paid sick leave and parental leave.
Despite those benefits, many workers say they can’t afford to live here, or to stay in the industry. And partly as a result of those benefits, restaurateurs say they can’t afford the workers who remain. A dishwasher can now make $18 or $19 an hour. And because of California labor laws, even tipped workers like servers earn at least the full minimum wage, unlike their peers in most other states.
Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that when housing prices rise by 10 percent, the price of local services, including restaurants , rises by about 6 percent. (The median home price in San Francisco has doubled since 2012.)
So burgers get more expensive as houses do. But even wealthy tech workers will pay only so much to eat one. “If we were to pay what we need to pay people to make a living in San Francisco, a $10 hamburger would be a $20 hamburger, and it wouldn’t make sense anymore,” said Anjan Mitra, who owns two high-end Indian restaurants in the city, both named Dosa. “Something has to give.”
President Donald Trump on Monday attacked a rural Virginia restaurant that refused to serve his press secretary over the weekend by criticizing its supposed lack of cleanliness.
“The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” Trump tweeted Monday morning. “I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”
But perhaps those in glass restaurants shouldn’t throw stones. Compared to the Red Hen, some of Trump’s own restaurants seem like the bathroom of a dive bar the morning after a live show.
The Lexington, Virginia restaurant, which caused a Trumpworld uproar when it refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Friday, passed its most recent health inspection with flying colors. State authorities found no violations when they visited the restaurant in February and gave the Red Hen their best possible health-risk rating.
By contrast, the conditions of restaurants at Trump’s hotels and resorts have ranged from moderately unsanitary to outright revolting.
In April, Washington, D.C. inspectors visited the Trump International Hotel and found 10 health-code violations, including raw meat stored above ready-to-eat foods and containers of flour stored next to a hand sink that lacked a splash guard. Inspectors also found that the hotel was operating a number of on-site kitchens without city permits to do so.
The hotel was given a “moderate risk” rating based on that visit.
Inspectors conducted a follow-up visit in May and found that the Trump hotel had failed to comply with instructions to correct some of those violations, including the permitting issue. It maintained the “moderate risk” category.
BLT Prime, the steakhouse at Trump’s D.C. hotel, had many of the same issues. It was also given a “moderate risk” rating in April, when inspectors recorded the same raw-meat storage issues as the hotel and a lack of signage in the kitchen instructing employees to wash their hands.
Even as inspectors were present, employees showed some fairly unsanitary handling of cookware. “An employee dropped an empty pan on the floor and then put it inside a refrigerator,” inspectors noted. “The pan was removed for cleaning upon request.”
When inspectors followed up with BLT Prime in May, they noted that the restaurant was storing raw steaks above vegetables, in violation of the D.C. health code. The violation was corrected on-site.
And yet, Trump’s D.C. hotel actually compares favorably to others in the president’s portfolio with respect to health-code troubles. The president’s Mar-a-Lago resort has been faulted with 51 health-code violations since 2013. Health inspectors have also found an additional 30 at Mar-a-Lago’s beach club.
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Trump’s Doral golf club outside Miami has fared even worse: In its main kitchen, banquet hall, café, patio grill, and bungalows, inspectors have found 524 health-code violations since 2013, including a number that resulted in fines. Among inspectors’ findings were multiple spottings of live and dead cockroaches (they noted 20-25 live ones visibly present in the main kitchen during one 2015 visit), “slimy/mold-like build-up” in coolers and freezers, and holes in kitchen walls.
During that same time, Virginia health authorities have found just three violations at the Red Hen. Last year, they observed a number of jars containing pickles and jams that had not come from an approved food processor. The restaurant said they were simply decorative, but agreed to remove them. In 2014, inspectors noted that its grits were not properly dated, and that raw beef was being stored above ready-to-eat food. A follow-up visit showed that those violations had been corrected.
Several restaurants named the Red Hen said they were harassed over the weekend after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked on Friday to leave an unrelated Lexington, Virginia, eatery of the same name.
Stephanie Wilkinson, who owns the restaurant where Sanders tried to dine, told The Washington Post that she asked the press secretary to leave because several of her staffers are gay and were concerned about servingSanders, who has defended an administration that has supported anti-LGBTQ policies.
The incident has sparked backlash, and hundreds of people have contacted the restaurant or posted on its social media pages to express their feelings.
Though Sanders’ tweet about the incident specified that the restaurant she had visited is in Lexington, President Donald Trump added to the confusion on Monday when he slammed the Red Hen on Twitter without identifying which Red Hen restaurant he was referring to.
The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2018
Red Hen is not a chain restaurant, and at least four unaffiliated restaurants with the same name have been subject to critical comments on their social media and Yelp pages, as well as harassing calls.
Michael Friedman, a co-owner of the Red Hen in Washington, D.C., told The Washingtonian that his restaurant has received mistaken calls, emails, Yelp reviews and even death threats because of the confusion. He added that someone egged the restaurant over the weekend.
The D.C. restaurant posted on Facebook to clarify that Sanders did not try to eat at its establishment on Friday.
The Red Hen Restaurant in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, 525 miles from Lexington, was caught in the mix-up. It also issued a post on Facebook to deter people from calling about the Sanders incident. The restaurant’s answering machine said, “We are not affiliated with any other Red Hen restaurant.”
In Swedesboro, New Jersey, another restaurant that shares the name asked the public to “check your facts before you erroneously defame an innocent business.” The restaurant told HuffPost that it has received thousands of calls that have included cursing and death threats.
The confusion was not limited to the U.S. The Olde Red Hen restaurant in Ontario, Canada, has seen its Facebook page bombarded with furious comments and negative reviews. The owner, Diane Smith, told CTV News that she was initially confused about the flurry of activity.
“They were all Americans. We had to straighten it out,” Smith told the outlet.
Sanders is not the only Trump official whose dinner plans have been interrupted recently. Protesters confronted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant last week about her role in Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy. White House adviser Stephen Miller was reportedly heckled while dining at a D.C. Mexican restaurant last week too.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) predicted that public figures would continue to be criticized in public as long as they supported Trump’s policies.
Those who defend him are “not going to be able to go to a restaurant, stop at a gas station, shop at a department store,” she said. “The people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No ... this is wrong, this is unconscionable. We can’t keep doing this to children.’”
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