It’s Tuesday afternoon and Paloma Gonzales, a single mom, has spent the day taking care of her four-year-old daughter.
And in America—where the social safety net is famously flimsy, where fundamentals like health insurance and childcare are considered luxuries instead of rights, and where work and school schedules are built around an idealized, largely mythical two-parent, one-income home—it’s hard for restaurant workers to stay afloat. This affects our food culture: who gets hired and who moves up the ladder; who can dictate their own schedule and who will drop out.
I was told, ‘Long hours, little pay. It’s all about the passion.’ But when you strip that away, it’s kind of inequitable, determining who has more passion than others. And then there are the professional losses. In Kim’s experience, women are far more likely to leave the field. “Women make up 54 percent of culinary schools,” she recites from memory. “But that number becomes 6 or 7 percent in executive chef positions.”
Rojas often brought her own children to the restaurant while she worked. “My dad couldn’t stand it,” she said. But having her kids close by mattered more than his grumbling. These days she’s semiretired and regularly babysits two of her 12 grandchildren while their adult parents run El Tepeyac Cafe.Rojas acknowledges that the dynastic model isn’t for everyone. There are a lot of restaurants she knows “where the kids grow up and don’t want to be there.
If nine-to-fivers have it rough on the childcare front, restaurant workers occupy a special hell. It makes sense, then, that some solutions to the persistent problems of the industry originate within the industry too. Back in Chicago, Beverly Kim is likewise eager to ease the path of women in the industry, particularly women of color and single moms. Last October, as the pandemic surged, she and Clark established the, a nonprofit organization that provides professional mentorship and meal relief to mothers in the restaurant industry. One reason moms are forced out of jobs, Kim notes, “is because the quality of family time is so little and horrible.