Restaurant staff take pay cuts as the power lunch falls victim to Hollywood actors’ and writers’ guild strikes. Coffee meet-ups are all that’s left for film industry figures
- ‘There’s no lunch that is worth me going against my union,’ says one actor, while long-time guests ask restaurants for seats in the back so as not to be seen
- As film industry figures share coffees instead of power lunches, Los Angeles restaurants have seen business fall sharply. Some have cut staff salaries
Since it opened last year, Mother Wolf, chef Evan Funke’s homage to Roman cooking, has been one of the toughest restaurant reservations to get in Los Angeles.
Hollywood power brokers tasked their assistants with logging on to the booking app Resy a week in advance to try to score coveted dinner seats that quickly disappeared.
But suddenly anyone can secure a prime-time table, even at less than a day’s notice.
The strikes are definitely really hurting restaurants in LA; everyone is feeling it
But now, with television and film production all but grinding to a halt, talent agents, entertainment lawyers and other industry players are cutting back on making deals over reimbursed meals.
Publicists are telling celebrities not to go out so they will not be seen splurging in the Californian city when so many in the business are out of work.
Some long-time guests are asking for tables where they can hide in the back.
Restaurateurs, some of whom decline to be identified, say they have seen steep drops in business as the work stoppages have dragged on.
Jesse Duron, general manager at power lunch stalwart Hamasaku on the west side of Los Angeles, says that while his lunch sales saw only a slight decline after the 11,500-member writers’ guild went on strike in May, they dropped around 30 per cent after the 160,000-strong Screen Actors Guild joined them in July.
Overall, the number of seated diners in Los Angeles restaurants has fallen by 7 per cent since last year, according to data from online restaurant-reservation service OpenTable, more than twice the decline in Washington and San Francisco.
“Dining out for work has gone down a lot,” says talent manager Henry Huang, a partner at Heroes and Villains Entertainment, a film and television management and production company. He notes that industry friends have had their dining budgets suspended, so people are meeting over coffee instead.
Guild members are not allowed to conduct business with the studios they are striking against.
“There’s no lunch that is worth me going against my union,” says Jonathan Sadowski, an actor who has appeared in films such as Live Free or Die Hard and Friday the 13th.
A spokesman for Craft LA, Tom Colicchio’s restaurant just a short walk from top talent firm Creative Artists Agency, reports “that some annual events that would typically book at Craft LA around this time are not booking due to the strike”.
“The strikes are definitely really hurting restaurants in LA; everyone is feeling it,” says Suzanne Goin, chef and co-owner of the Lucques Group, which includes the popular wine bar A.O.C. “I would say we are 35-40 per cent down from normal business.”
Top Chef alum Shirley Chung, whose modern Chinese-American restaurant Ms Chi Cafe is steps from Amazon and Apple offices in Culver City, California, says she has been forced to cut some employees’ salaries.
Restaurant suppliers are equally pinched. Patti Röckenwagner, co-owner of the namesake European bakery that counts over 300 restaurants around the city as clients, says her business has fallen and staff are bracing for worse as the strikes linger.
“Internally, we have started calling [autumn] the new Game of Thrones winter,” she says.
