NYC Restaurants Survived COVID Only to Be Destroyed by Woke Complaints

The newest threat faced by New York City restaurants isn’t high rents or the pandemic. It’s employees who use credulous media to air beefs that chefs and owners aren’t being nice enough to them.

A handful of restaurants truly were cesspools of misconduct deserving to be shut down. {snip}

But the struggle has since shifted to the far murkier ground of “abusive language” and “toxic atmosphere.” Progressive-minded news organs and social media posts air grievances that seem petty, vague or disputable, sometimes shielding complainants with anonymity while affording no such courtesy to the accused. {snip}

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{snip} The latest target of concealed snipers is Buddakan, the jumbo pan-Asian Chelsea restaurant owned by Stephen Starr. Ever-vigilant Eater.com last week named a Starr Restaurants executive who, the site’s sources said, tolerated an environment where several black servers were assigned to “unfavorable shifts” to create a “culture of fear.”

{snip} But the owners and manager persuasively denied the claim.

The Buddakan “news” followed the blowup one week earlier of Outerspace, a Bushwick rooftop eatery whose three top chefs and general manager shockingly walked out the day after a glowing New York Times review.

They supposedly quit over garden-variety gripes: They said they were overworked and underpaid by inexperienced owners {snip}

But the quitters appeared to have an alternate agenda. One of the chefs, Chinchakriya Un, gave the game away in a widely reported Instagram post. She derisively trashed the owners as “white people” and “culture vultures” guilty of “white saviorism,” “colonial narration,” “exploitation” and “internalized misogyny.”

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A few owners are fighting back against the mutinous tide. A Midtown restaurateur friend of mine was able to dig up a months-old security-video clip that showed a disgruntled dishwasher collapse from drugs on the kitchen floor at precisely the time he claimed in a threatened lawsuit that bosses were hurling ethnic slurs against him inside an office. {snip}

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