The spillthedish Story

In October 2017, Brett Anderson at NOLA.com broke the story about sexual harassment in John Besh's restaurants, including by John Besh himself. I had been in New Orleans the previous year, and had considered eating at one of his restaurants, and now I was glad I hadn't. But how could I have known that, a year before the story broke? There was no way for me to know.

A few months later, after a wave of new restaurant scandals (Mario Batali, Ken Friedman, Charlie Hallowell), Pete Wells of the NY Times wrote about the slow, unscalable model of journalists breaking restaurant scandals:

... if the restaurant industry is having a reckoning, it is an excruciatingly slow one. So far there seems to be only one way to depose a serial harasser who runs a restaurant: a long investigation by reporters who have the time to gather a convincing number of corroborated accounts. Each of these articles takes weeks or months. To justify that commitment, publications generally choose well-known targets.

In other words, checking out all 620,000 or so restaurants in the United States is going to take a while if we leave it up to journalists.

But who else can clean up the industry? Probably not customers, who have no equivalent to the #deleteuber movement a year ago, no quick and potent way to vote with their money.

What we needed was a way for customers to vote with our money. Something more scalable than journalists investigating restaurants one at a time.

I also remembered how, a couple of years earlier, I had stopped eating at Farina when I read about their shady dealings to avoid paying their employees. The problems in the restaurant industry are rampant, and run far beyond sexual harassment.

All this led to the creation of spillthedish. Its origin was to allow workers to let consumers know what is going on behind the kitchen doors, and thus put pressure on the establishment to clean up its act, but it will also let workers know which restaurants would be good to work at and which to avoid.

And finally, a shout-out to Chef Erin Wade, whose Washington Post opinion piece on how to handle harassment from customers showed that there are restaurateurs who care about fixing these problems and that drawing attention to it could be a positive force, rather than a negative one, for these restaurateurs (I also borrowed from her color-coding theme). I hope the creation of spillthedish will help restaurateurs like her by bringing diners and workers alike to their doors.