Last June, Gabrielle Hamilton and Ashley Merriman, the chef-owners of the revered New York restaurant Prune, announced that they were partnering with the restaurateur Ken Friedman to take over his West Village gastropub the Spotted Pig. In a disarmingly candid profile in this week’s “Women’s Power” issue of New York, Hamilton and Merriman explain, for the first time, why that arrangement, which ended in September, so quickly fell apart. It wasn’t because of their distaste for the restaurant’s history as a viper’s nest of sexual misconduct, or because of the enormous public backlash to their planned involvement, or because of creative disagreements over the menu or the décor. It was because Friedman, the restaurant’s majority owner, who was the subject of a blistering investigation in the Times last December, wouldn’t give up his monthly paycheck. Though he has not been on site at the Pig for months, Friedman was pulling in a regular income for “overseeing the restaurant,” in an amount large enough to materially undermine the beleaguered restaurant’s already precarious bottom line. Hamilton told New York that she wasn’t able—“ethically, financially”—to operate with Friedman on the payroll, but he had refused to budge. So she and Merriman, unable to proceed in the manner they wished, peaced the hell out.
When Hamilton first announced that she and Merriman, her wife and business partner, were pursuing a partnership with Friedman and the Spotted Pig—a person and place that have been linked to some of the most grotesque examples of restaurant-industry harassment that have come to light in the past year (Friedman has denied the claims against him)—she framed herself and Merriman as white knights, good actors with the confidence and know-how to turn a toxic workplace into a model of integrity. In a statement, Hamilton seemed to be trying to preëmpt the accusations of complicity, betrayal, and hubris that, almost instantaneously, swelled to meet the news: “We can tell you assuredly and confidently that we are not coming to partner with Ken to be his ‘fence,’ ” she said. “We see ourselves helping the Spotted Pig, helping the industry at large, helping April”—April Bloomfield, Friedman’s former business partner, and the chef who earned the Spotted Pig a Michelin star—“helping our longtime friend Ken, and helping ourselves.” Merriman, in an interview with Eater, reiterated the idea that they would be challenging Friedman, involving him in the work, but not protecting him. “It’s not my job to clean up Ken’s mess,” she said.
But cleaning up messes seems to be, for many women, an inevitable burden. The first phase of the #MeToo reckoning in the restaurant world was focussed on removing the chefs and restaurateurs accused of abuse. We watched them retreat from public affiliation with their businesses, one after another, taking a sort of self-imposed shame-leave in the hope that the stories about them would fade from public consciousness. Most of these men adopted a strategy that was equal parts performative gesture and survival tactic: throw a woman out in front of the business. The restaurant groups run (or formerly run) by Mario Batali, John Besh, and Charlie Hallowell (all of whom have denied aspects of the allegations against them) have announced new, female leaders, who must undertake the daunting work of rebuilding employee loyalty, customer trust, and media goodwill. In the meantime, the men who got the companies into these messes in the first place do, well, whatever it is that they’re doing when they take “time away” from work—while, in many cases, retaining significant financial involvement and reward.
Shannon White, a former operations manager, has taken over as the C.E.O. of what used to be known as the Besh Group, and has spent the past year overhauling the thousand-employee company. Donna Insalaco, who is newly installed as the managing partner of Hallowell’s four-restaurant Oakland empire, has been tasked with implementing an ambitious twelve-point plan to reform the restaurants’ culture. Nancy Silverton and Lidia Bastianich, both legendary chefs in their own right, were elevated to vague “leadership roles” in Batali’s former company, the B&B Hospitality Group, a change that was announced in the same press release that stated that Batali would no longer be involved in operations. Silverton and Bastianich are better known as culinary titans than as workplace-inclusion experts, yet dismantling the company’s culture of harassment has fallen explicitly to them. “They are intent on making sure that no one experiences sexual or any form of harassment,” the release read. In April, the Times reported that one of Batali’s ideas for his post-scandal life was to launch “a new company led by a powerful woman chief executive,” as if that alone were a rehabilitative business plan.
Insalaco’s promotion at Hallowell’s restaurants was announced last week, by way of a fifteen-hundred-word email sent to a list of thousands. Despite Insalaco’s new role as the de-facto head of the company, with an ownership stake and control over Hallowell’s salary, the message was written by Hallowell, and focussed on his own decision to reënter daily business operations after what he has deemed a sufficient amount of time away. Hallowell states explicitly that he elevated Insalaco because of her gender, “in order to ensure that women are at the forefront of making decisions about the business and empowered to create a safe space for other women.” (He also boasts about having an “all-female board of advisers” and general managers who are women.) In an apt metaphor for Insalaco’s role as his apparent human shield, the sender of the message was “Charlie Hallowell,” yet the actual e-mail address was hers—any responses, complaints, or criticisms will land in her inbox, not his.
Watching all this unfold, it’s hard not to feel a mixture of hope and disappointment. The restaurant industry, despite modest gender parity among the rank-and-file, is sorely, urgently in need of more women leaders, and it is good to see a few stepping into high-profile positions. But, coming in the wake of scandal, too many of these promotions feel like cynical twists on a narrative of empowerment and progress. As Hamilton explained in her June statement, part of the appeal of joining forces with Friedman was the opportunity to pair meaningful action with recognition and remuneration: to be “women in the business of increasing power and to get paid for our impeccable work.” It’s an admirable goal. And yet, as Hamilton and Merriman found—and as other women charged with rehabilitating damaged businesses may learn as well—the gender of the person nominally at the top of the org chart matters little if the underlying structures (and systems of financial reward) remain unchanged.
In the end, installing women to fix broken companies excuses men from engaging directly with problems they have created. It also fallaciously assumes (or, perhaps, maliciously asserts) that women are well-equipped to lead healthy workplaces simply by virtue of their femininity. The Spotted Pig is proof that this is not always the case. For fourteen years, April Bloomfield was Ken Friedman’s partner at the restaurant, and at nearly a dozen other properties. For much of their affiliation, which lasted until June of this year, she was ostensibly an equal partner in their business. Yet, in the Friedman exposé in the Times, many former employees claimed that Bloomfield was aware of her partner’s persistent predatory behavior, and did nothing to stop it. (In a statement, Bloomfield apologized and said, “I feel we have let down our employees.”)
In the ten months since that story was published, Bloomfield has largely remained out of the public eye. On Tuesday, in an interview in the Times, she addressed her partnership with Friedman, and claimed, among other things, that she had confronted him with complaints more often than she has been given credit for. Friedman, through a spokesperson, agreed, but made a point of adding that those discussions also addressed “Ms. Bloomfield’s erratic behavior and verbal abuse.” (See, again, how our attention is directed away from the accused man and toward the choices of the woman associated with him?) Bloomfield, in the Times, described her dynamic with Friedman in ways that evoke an abusive relationship; she described enduring Friedman’s verbal harassment, manipulative tactics for isolating her, and threats to revoke his sponsorship of her work visa. “I felt like I was in a position where he held all the cards,” she said. “He had so much control, and he was so dominant and powerful, that I didn’t feel like if I stepped away that I would survive.”
A similar intractability seems to have characterized Friedman’s behavior during his failed negotiations with Hamilton. But, perhaps because their power was more symmetrical than Friedman’s with Bloomfield, or because of the brevity of their partnership, or because she was the agent of her own departure, Hamilton seems more angry at Friedman than scarred by him. She seems resentful, in particular, of his inability to see the grandness of what she and Merriman offered him: faith, based on friendship, that the two women could help bring the disgraced man back into the light. Instead, Friedman dug in his heels. He didn’t want to make the sacrifices that real change would have required—and why would he? That’s what he brought the women in to do.
Sourse: newyorker.com
