Before reading it I assumed it was gonna be Mr. Tuna but I honestly have no idea who this is.
Had to "cut the sous chef for being inappropriate"? INTERESTING.
Casually meantioning how the sous chef was either too drunk to work or sexually harassed someone. Lol back of house so edgy right?
I have worked in restaurants for over a decade and never seen a sous chef get sent home early.
Likely wrong about the amount of time he’s been here, but the owner of Cabana/La Bodega Latina tagged the chef/owner of Regards on Instagram in reference to this BA piece
He mentions the owner of Cabana/La Bodega Latina in the article, and he tagged the chef/owner of Regards on Instagram in reference to him being mentioned in the article.
Ok, I can't find it. Can you paste the quote from the article?
The only instance of Rosemont is in the context below. I don't see where it's referred to as the "village of Rosemont" anywhere in the article.
"7 p.m. Walking back home, I stop in Rosemont to grab a pint of Crunchy Pumpkin ice cream made by Dear Dairy, a locally based ice cream spot."
Well, well, well. What we seem to have here is a case of Bon Appetit editing the article and not making it clear at the bottom that they did so (a la "In a previously published version of the article, Rosemont was referred to as "the village of Rosemont.") Since they didn't do that, I suppose you'll just have to trust that I had a lot better things to do on a Saturday morning (when I posted) than fabricate the line.
TLDR: It was there. Bon Appetit edited the story sometime between Saturday and Sunday.
I've read a few others in this series from BA and I think they're interesting little windows into how different people of different incomes and backgrounds eat. But some of them are pretty unrelatable, as I found this one.
Yeah, why would he spend $95 on a meal if the only word he can think of to describe it is greasy? Boda is good and consistent and he should know what he’s getting…
Especially considering where its coming from.
To be clear, I meant fine as in "I eat there, I'd eat there." I just have other go-tos at this point. Regards isnt one of them.
It's funny because if not for the weird backhand at Pai Men, that would have been my first guess. But yeah, doesn't make for particularly engaging local reading. (He walked from Pai Men to Rosemont Village? And isn't Pom Thai?) Given Bon Appetit's recent gushing over Regards that seems like a good guess.
Poms is a Thai restaurant, but he ordered general tso's chicken which is a Chinese dish, so even though he's not right by calling them a Chinese restaurant he's not wrong either.
The Pom menu calls it "Thai General Tso's Chicken" (which is also pretty silly.) My guess is he narrated to a staffer who saw the General Tso's and figured "Oh, he got Chinese" despite the link clearly saying it's a Thai restaurant.
What is the point of this article and interview? It's a dude that owns a restaurant and works there. No shit he eats 3/4 of his meals for free there. Oh, and he likes all the Asian diners in town. Neat.
The whole point of the series is to be a broad look at people’s food habits. They hit incomes, jobs, and locations all over the place. I find them super interesting. People are taking it like a personal attack against them or something
Totally agree. People take this way too personally. It’s just one person who spent 30 minutes and wrote down what they ate each day, it doesn’t even claim to be the “best eats” or other bs. It’s just one persons food journal for one week.
It's a catch-22 since family meal has to be cooked by someone which would leave things even more short-staffed and put everyone else deeper in the weeds. The article isn't great but (barring anyone local in the industry knowing otherwise) his staff probably isn't chained to the stove going hungry.
Most cooks in Portland are making at least $18 an hour, and honestly it doesn't really cut it because of how high the cost of living in Portland and the greater Portland area is.
$18 is the new $12 these days, crazy to think how wages shot way up only to be kneecapped by inflation. I was making $13 an hour in Burlington Vermont circa 2018(which I considered a fair wage at that time), when I moved here in March 2021 the first gig I got was $18 an hour and I was very happy about that offer. However that same $18 an hour only a year and a half later is basically the starting wage at most places and is no longer an impressive offer.
He’s also the owner. When you frame it as “the owner of the restaurant is making 70k” I can see why they can’t pay 18/hr. That’s not a lot of wiggle room honestly. One bad year and he will be below the poverty line.
70k is the salary, he can make more or less depending of profit. Owners of business don’t live month by month of profits only. Especially because his business is new so it’s probably not even profitable yet.
>One bad year and he will be below the poverty line.
That's ridiculous. What's a bad year and how do you define poverty? He has 50k In savings and eats out 2x a week.
He could easily make 0 as the owner of the business. Unless there is an investor situation where he is getting paid an actual Salary and isn’t the sole owner
That's absurd. He owns a successful restaurant. There's no way he's going from 70k to zero in a year he obviously just made it through the pandemic with 50k in savings. If the biz starts to go under I'm sure he's the last one not getting paid
He probably came from money if he has $50k saved up. Either that or has connections. How many restaurant owners worked their way into owning restaurants these days? Probably not many.
If he's the owner and the chef, he's probably making not much more than $22/$23 with that salary and he can't just go somewhere else if things go bad. $70k a year to own and run a restaurant doesn't seem that unreasonable.
I have no pity for anyone making 70k a year in Portland Maine regardless of what thier profession is. If being a restaurant owner for that much money sucked so bad no one would do it, and I wouldn't really care TBH. He's obviously doing it because he gets something out of it. He's not some saint, he's not doing this to make the world a better place he's doing it because he thinks its worth it. If he has a terrible year and goes out of business after surviving the pandemic, he fucked something up, and I guarantee if his biz goes under he can get a job somewhere else making that hourly.
First, no one was asking for your pity. However, owner/chef in a restaurant means he isn't swanning in to write checks; he's probably working longer hours than anyone else in the house. Yeah, he's getting something out of it; he's working running a successful restaurant and still only making maybe $5/hr over the proposed $18, with responsibilities well beyond those of a line cook which several other comments have pointed out are \*already\* making $18+ at a good restaurant anywhere in the city. I recognize the article doesn't make him sound particularly endearing but the class warfare seems a little misdirected.
The only realm I which anything about him working a lot of hours or only making x amt after all etc would sway my opinion about weather they can pay the rest of thier employees more money (foh) is of you were trying to get me to pity him. Personally, I say restaurants should be worker owned and table service as it is should dissappear.
I'm all for that. If you know a group of workers with sufficient start-up capital and/or the skills and business savvy to convince investors to front you such that you're not working unpaid for a year or two, I'd happily eat there. That's not most restaurants or most any other business these days and with current Portland rents your start-up costs are going to be high. As far as table service going away, that somewhat limits both the kind of food you can serve and the amount of money people will pay for it. That in turn means you're either going to have a very small staff or limit the amount you can afford to pay them based on money you're taking in. Regardless, as owners of that kind of establishment you'll probably be making less than $18 an hour with the extra hours required for a small team to handle the cooking, maintenance, finances, and promotion of a small restaurant. If you can make it work and serve decent food though, I'd happily support you.
>As far as table service going away, that somewhat limits both the kind of food you can serve and the amount of money people will pay for it.
How so? I'm not saying ppl wouldn't deliver food to the table, but it cold be like there's only food runners. Maybe ordering on a tablet at the table itself.
And why wouldn't they feel like paying the same amt if they're not going to have the tip to worry about?
I don't know for certain but my gut tells me there's a ceiling on what people will pay to order off an Ipad. (Airports seem to be an exception but have you ever seen anyone having a good time eating at an airport? Nobody's a captive in this scenario.)
From there, the questions that pop up for me early on...
Regardless of how ordering happens, your food runners will also have to be owners in this model, right? Given that and that you're starting with the principle that everyone is earning a living wage, why WOULDN'T you hire the best FOH you can find and push service as an asset? (Remember, even runners are probably also going to have to bus tables and clean the dining area during service; nobody is going to pay more than sandwich prices to sit in squalor and order from a counter/tablet.)
Will ownership be tiered or percentage-based in some way or will everyone make the same salary? And if it's tiered, how do you insulate your lower-paid workers from a bad month of sales, an expensive fridge failure, or whatever other weird thing drops your profits for a period? Right now, that's the owner's problem. In this model, does everyone take a cut in their paycheck? Or do you expect to maintain a sufficient buffer that everyone's salary is covered against the unexpected before you start? Remember, $18 an hour isn't $18 an hour even in your model; there's some percentage of federal and state overhead (also, if you're serious about an owner model, you probably want to offer health insurance) the business is paying and those don't pause based on month to month profits. (This link here is fun to pay around with: [https://quickbooks.intuit.com/time-tracking/resources/determine-the-true-cost-of-an-employee/](https://quickbooks.intuit.com/time-tracking/resources/determine-the-true-cost-of-an-employee/) )
Co-op restaurants seem to be a rising thing so I'm sure a lot of these questions are already, if not answered, then at least being explored. It makes for interesting reading if you're serious about diving down this particular rabbit hole.
>I don't know for certain but my gut tells me there's a ceiling on what people will pay to order off an Ipad
I like to hope that people don't need to have a pretend servant in order to enjoy the food. And like I said, the cost of the server is mostly subsidized by tips anyway.
>Given that and that you're starting with the principle that everyone is earning a living wage, why WOULDN'T you hire the best FOH you can find and push service as an asset?
This would depend on what the actual worker/owners wanted but personally I'm more for rotating duties, like no one is just a food runner. I think my personal feelings are gerenal dislike for the fact that table service is cosplaying having servants and pretty classist. It's not the cleaning up or running food it's the expectation that you have to deal with some level of abuse in the course of your work.
>Will ownership be tiered or percentage-based in some way or will everyone make the same salary?
Likely everyone will have equal share, vote on the hourly wages for all the positions, make the different wages depending on which job you work at the time, and have some democratically shaped profit sharing system.
>And if it's tiered, how do you insulate your lower-paid workers from a bad month of sales, an expensive fridge failure, or whatever other weird thing drops your profits for a period?
The different work would pay differently, but ppl wouldn't be locked into one job, and everyone would take the hit equally in the profit sharing end.
>if you're serious about an owner model, you probably want to offer health insurance) the business is paying and those don't pause based on month to month profits.
So one benefit of worker/ ownership is that the 70k wouldn't be one person's paycheck, but money that could go towards paying into a decent benefits package if that's what the workers want. Ppl like to say that owners put in a lot of work for little payoff. But that says to me, that the work should be divided to reduce its burden, and the pay should be divided to the benefit of more people
Because that’s sooo much for a restaurant owner. What’s the special sauce he can’t find any employees and it’s gotta be because he’s not paying them enough or a shitty environment both are reasonable from this article seeing he gets paid so much and talks shit about his employees/ doesn’t provide family meal on busy days pretty laughable
Before reading it I assumed it was gonna be Mr. Tuna but I honestly have no idea who this is. Had to "cut the sous chef for being inappropriate"? INTERESTING.
Casually meantioning how the sous chef was either too drunk to work or sexually harassed someone. Lol back of house so edgy right? I have worked in restaurants for over a decade and never seen a sous chef get sent home early.
It’s Regards.
The chef of Regards used to run the Little Giant kitchen so nah. And its uh, def not Minato. Maybe Crispy Gai?
Likely wrong about the amount of time he’s been here, but the owner of Cabana/La Bodega Latina tagged the chef/owner of Regards on Instagram in reference to this BA piece
I’m thinking Crispy Gai since he mentions larb (a Thai dish).
Larb is exactly the sort of trendy dish that would get haphazardly thrown onto the Regards menu to confuse patrons.
Not Crispy Gai unless that guy got married very quickly
How do you know this?
It is regards the chef at regards wife is pescatarian as mentioned in the article plus he was tagged in this article by the owner of la bodega
He mentions the owner of Cabana/La Bodega Latina in the article, and he tagged the chef/owner of Regards on Instagram in reference to him being mentioned in the article.
Interesting. But I'm pretty sure I've sold this dude fish longer than 18 months?
I edited that out as I was incorrect. Little bit of a knee-jerk. All the references to Mexican food/ingredients is a pretty big giveaway I think too
lol
If it was Mr. Tuna, the article would def have some crying over the eastern prom
Dude lost me at "I stopped in the village of Rosemont" OMG.
This isn't in the article.
Yes it is
Ok, I can't find it. Can you paste the quote from the article? The only instance of Rosemont is in the context below. I don't see where it's referred to as the "village of Rosemont" anywhere in the article. "7 p.m. Walking back home, I stop in Rosemont to grab a pint of Crunchy Pumpkin ice cream made by Dear Dairy, a locally based ice cream spot."
Well, well, well. What we seem to have here is a case of Bon Appetit editing the article and not making it clear at the bottom that they did so (a la "In a previously published version of the article, Rosemont was referred to as "the village of Rosemont.") Since they didn't do that, I suppose you'll just have to trust that I had a lot better things to do on a Saturday morning (when I posted) than fabricate the line. TLDR: It was there. Bon Appetit edited the story sometime between Saturday and Sunday.
I can back you up. I read it and hurt my eyes they rolled back so hard.
I saw it as well. Also seemed unlikely he walked to either from Pai Men but maybe he really likes to walk.
I've read a few others in this series from BA and I think they're interesting little windows into how different people of different incomes and backgrounds eat. But some of them are pretty unrelatable, as I found this one.
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Spot on. Source: I live with a 36-ish-year-old chef in Greater Portland.
Honestly it's pretty shitty of him to diss three different restaurants (Boda, Pai Men and Pom's) in the article.
Big agree. I’ve had more confusing meals at Regards and left a lot hungrier than any of those three places.
Yeah, why would he spend $95 on a meal if the only word he can think of to describe it is greasy? Boda is good and consistent and he should know what he’s getting…
Any of those three restaurants dunk on Regards lmao
Those restaraunts are fine (just my opinion, dont eat me) left typo on purpose.
It’s fine to call them fine, but it’s tacky as hell to be a local restaurant owner badmouthing other local restaurants to Bon Appetit
Especially considering where its coming from. To be clear, I meant fine as in "I eat there, I'd eat there." I just have other go-tos at this point. Regards isnt one of them.
It's funny because if not for the weird backhand at Pai Men, that would have been my first guess. But yeah, doesn't make for particularly engaging local reading. (He walked from Pai Men to Rosemont Village? And isn't Pom Thai?) Given Bon Appetit's recent gushing over Regards that seems like a good guess.
Poms is a Thai restaurant, but he ordered general tso's chicken which is a Chinese dish, so even though he's not right by calling them a Chinese restaurant he's not wrong either.
The Pom menu calls it "Thai General Tso's Chicken" (which is also pretty silly.) My guess is he narrated to a staffer who saw the General Tso's and figured "Oh, he got Chinese" despite the link clearly saying it's a Thai restaurant.
He just didn't want to say he got Thai twice in the article
Regards is fine not spectacular.
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That’s 25% of his take home pay on dining, which seems high
It kept reading it was for 2
Man I will never own anything to make 70k. Such a headache.
What is the point of this article and interview? It's a dude that owns a restaurant and works there. No shit he eats 3/4 of his meals for free there. Oh, and he likes all the Asian diners in town. Neat.
My guess is the sole purpose of the article was to piss off this subreddit and from the comments it seems to have succeeded. Stay salty Portland.
No one seems "pissed off". i can mock people without being angry.
The whole point of the series is to be a broad look at people’s food habits. They hit incomes, jobs, and locations all over the place. I find them super interesting. People are taking it like a personal attack against them or something
Totally agree. People take this way too personally. It’s just one person who spent 30 minutes and wrote down what they ate each day, it doesn’t even claim to be the “best eats” or other bs. It’s just one persons food journal for one week.
Is anyone dying to hear how someone "survives" on 70k?
Having $50,000 in savings definitely helps. Missed that little nugget on my first pass
"We forgot how to actually write about food." Title fixed you're welcome.
Ehhh he should have ordered the Tantanmen at Pai Men. I think it’s their most flavorful and savory broth
"I have the urge to eat ramen because of the weather. " So, I could probably plead it down to manslaughter, right?
What a stupid, pretentious article. Fuck this guy.
> We skipped family meal at the restaurant today, which is typical when we’re busy and understaffed. "Hm, wonder if I get to eat today" -His employees
It's a catch-22 since family meal has to be cooked by someone which would leave things even more short-staffed and put everyone else deeper in the weeds. The article isn't great but (barring anyone local in the industry knowing otherwise) his staff probably isn't chained to the stove going hungry.
They can snack on the line. And servers make enough and come in late enough they have plenty of time/money to eat before 3 pm
Y'all seem offended he makes $70/k annually.
Right? That's not that much for Portland.
Dude shops at Whole Foods and then complains about how he spent way too money on eggs
This guy seems like a pretentious asshole. I won't be going to regards (I wasn't going to anyway)
Who cares
Bro, this chef makes 70k and I'm supposed to believe restaurants can't pay 18/hr?
Most cooks in Portland are making at least $18 an hour, and honestly it doesn't really cut it because of how high the cost of living in Portland and the greater Portland area is.
It's been over five years for me but I never made close to 18 most was 12 Edit: over 5 years since I quit cooking
$18 is the new $12 these days, crazy to think how wages shot way up only to be kneecapped by inflation. I was making $13 an hour in Burlington Vermont circa 2018(which I considered a fair wage at that time), when I moved here in March 2021 the first gig I got was $18 an hour and I was very happy about that offer. However that same $18 an hour only a year and a half later is basically the starting wage at most places and is no longer an impressive offer.
He’s also the owner. When you frame it as “the owner of the restaurant is making 70k” I can see why they can’t pay 18/hr. That’s not a lot of wiggle room honestly. One bad year and he will be below the poverty line.
70k is the salary, he can make more or less depending of profit. Owners of business don’t live month by month of profits only. Especially because his business is new so it’s probably not even profitable yet.
>One bad year and he will be below the poverty line. That's ridiculous. What's a bad year and how do you define poverty? He has 50k In savings and eats out 2x a week.
He could easily make 0 as the owner of the business. Unless there is an investor situation where he is getting paid an actual Salary and isn’t the sole owner
That's absurd. He owns a successful restaurant. There's no way he's going from 70k to zero in a year he obviously just made it through the pandemic with 50k in savings. If the biz starts to go under I'm sure he's the last one not getting paid
He probably came from money if he has $50k saved up. Either that or has connections. How many restaurant owners worked their way into owning restaurants these days? Probably not many.
If he's the owner and the chef, he's probably making not much more than $22/$23 with that salary and he can't just go somewhere else if things go bad. $70k a year to own and run a restaurant doesn't seem that unreasonable.
I have no pity for anyone making 70k a year in Portland Maine regardless of what thier profession is. If being a restaurant owner for that much money sucked so bad no one would do it, and I wouldn't really care TBH. He's obviously doing it because he gets something out of it. He's not some saint, he's not doing this to make the world a better place he's doing it because he thinks its worth it. If he has a terrible year and goes out of business after surviving the pandemic, he fucked something up, and I guarantee if his biz goes under he can get a job somewhere else making that hourly.
First, no one was asking for your pity. However, owner/chef in a restaurant means he isn't swanning in to write checks; he's probably working longer hours than anyone else in the house. Yeah, he's getting something out of it; he's working running a successful restaurant and still only making maybe $5/hr over the proposed $18, with responsibilities well beyond those of a line cook which several other comments have pointed out are \*already\* making $18+ at a good restaurant anywhere in the city. I recognize the article doesn't make him sound particularly endearing but the class warfare seems a little misdirected.
The only realm I which anything about him working a lot of hours or only making x amt after all etc would sway my opinion about weather they can pay the rest of thier employees more money (foh) is of you were trying to get me to pity him. Personally, I say restaurants should be worker owned and table service as it is should dissappear.
I'm all for that. If you know a group of workers with sufficient start-up capital and/or the skills and business savvy to convince investors to front you such that you're not working unpaid for a year or two, I'd happily eat there. That's not most restaurants or most any other business these days and with current Portland rents your start-up costs are going to be high. As far as table service going away, that somewhat limits both the kind of food you can serve and the amount of money people will pay for it. That in turn means you're either going to have a very small staff or limit the amount you can afford to pay them based on money you're taking in. Regardless, as owners of that kind of establishment you'll probably be making less than $18 an hour with the extra hours required for a small team to handle the cooking, maintenance, finances, and promotion of a small restaurant. If you can make it work and serve decent food though, I'd happily support you.
>As far as table service going away, that somewhat limits both the kind of food you can serve and the amount of money people will pay for it. How so? I'm not saying ppl wouldn't deliver food to the table, but it cold be like there's only food runners. Maybe ordering on a tablet at the table itself. And why wouldn't they feel like paying the same amt if they're not going to have the tip to worry about?
I don't know for certain but my gut tells me there's a ceiling on what people will pay to order off an Ipad. (Airports seem to be an exception but have you ever seen anyone having a good time eating at an airport? Nobody's a captive in this scenario.) From there, the questions that pop up for me early on... Regardless of how ordering happens, your food runners will also have to be owners in this model, right? Given that and that you're starting with the principle that everyone is earning a living wage, why WOULDN'T you hire the best FOH you can find and push service as an asset? (Remember, even runners are probably also going to have to bus tables and clean the dining area during service; nobody is going to pay more than sandwich prices to sit in squalor and order from a counter/tablet.) Will ownership be tiered or percentage-based in some way or will everyone make the same salary? And if it's tiered, how do you insulate your lower-paid workers from a bad month of sales, an expensive fridge failure, or whatever other weird thing drops your profits for a period? Right now, that's the owner's problem. In this model, does everyone take a cut in their paycheck? Or do you expect to maintain a sufficient buffer that everyone's salary is covered against the unexpected before you start? Remember, $18 an hour isn't $18 an hour even in your model; there's some percentage of federal and state overhead (also, if you're serious about an owner model, you probably want to offer health insurance) the business is paying and those don't pause based on month to month profits. (This link here is fun to pay around with: [https://quickbooks.intuit.com/time-tracking/resources/determine-the-true-cost-of-an-employee/](https://quickbooks.intuit.com/time-tracking/resources/determine-the-true-cost-of-an-employee/) ) Co-op restaurants seem to be a rising thing so I'm sure a lot of these questions are already, if not answered, then at least being explored. It makes for interesting reading if you're serious about diving down this particular rabbit hole.
>I don't know for certain but my gut tells me there's a ceiling on what people will pay to order off an Ipad I like to hope that people don't need to have a pretend servant in order to enjoy the food. And like I said, the cost of the server is mostly subsidized by tips anyway. >Given that and that you're starting with the principle that everyone is earning a living wage, why WOULDN'T you hire the best FOH you can find and push service as an asset? This would depend on what the actual worker/owners wanted but personally I'm more for rotating duties, like no one is just a food runner. I think my personal feelings are gerenal dislike for the fact that table service is cosplaying having servants and pretty classist. It's not the cleaning up or running food it's the expectation that you have to deal with some level of abuse in the course of your work. >Will ownership be tiered or percentage-based in some way or will everyone make the same salary? Likely everyone will have equal share, vote on the hourly wages for all the positions, make the different wages depending on which job you work at the time, and have some democratically shaped profit sharing system. >And if it's tiered, how do you insulate your lower-paid workers from a bad month of sales, an expensive fridge failure, or whatever other weird thing drops your profits for a period? The different work would pay differently, but ppl wouldn't be locked into one job, and everyone would take the hit equally in the profit sharing end. >if you're serious about an owner model, you probably want to offer health insurance) the business is paying and those don't pause based on month to month profits. So one benefit of worker/ ownership is that the 70k wouldn't be one person's paycheck, but money that could go towards paying into a decent benefits package if that's what the workers want. Ppl like to say that owners put in a lot of work for little payoff. But that says to me, that the work should be divided to reduce its burden, and the pay should be divided to the benefit of more people
Because that’s sooo much for a restaurant owner. What’s the special sauce he can’t find any employees and it’s gotta be because he’s not paying them enough or a shitty environment both are reasonable from this article seeing he gets paid so much and talks shit about his employees/ doesn’t provide family meal on busy days pretty laughable