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If you work BOH in restaurants you develop a distaste for servers. Not only do they make far more money but they do it in half the time. Time is money and money time. I've worked in the industry in SF and I can tell you there is no shortage of coke habits amongst them. They are also less skilled than the cooks and much more easily replaced, which gets to the point the author was making about the need for skill in cooks and the damaging mercenarial culture arising out of desperation. In a cook you want someone you can retain who will develop a deep understanding of the workings of a particular restaurant and its menu. It's far more of an investment than a waiter who can cram homework for a few days enough to sell a menu. But training to prep and cook that menu properly will easily take weeks if not months at a high end place. You don't want those people to bounce for a dollar more; that is a huge waste. You'd rather lose half your FOH staff than your lead line cook or heaven forbid sous chef. However the tip culture succubi aren't the perpetrators as regards the pie cutting of restaurant earnings; it's tip culture and diner expectations. But good luck changing that or getting the public to understand the changes. I see a lot of hard-nosed posts here about basic economics, supply and demand, and what about's regarding the "successful" places (you mean places hanging on another year). I understand a lot of you take pride in your ability to cut through the fat in that way. But you're glossing over perhaps the main point of the article which is that without skilled cooks restaurants slide more into the spectrum of dummy-proofed food processing and thus weak, boring menus. That goes for the yelp darlings as well who are likely hoping nobody notices drops in quality and absence of ingenuity. The average self proclaimed foodie or just frequent diner I doubt knows enough about cuisine to realize the hollowing out of the scene they're in. Restaurants continuing this decline will keep it hidden and the tech crowd won't notice the difference as their favorite haunts continue to provide what they really have always wanted anyway: a place to see and be seen. A major priority for restaurants will be maintaining image and hype in an increasingly superficial SF hellscape. Maybe diners, in an honest moment, will say "fuck it" and head to the nearest Burger King.

[leetcrew]

if BOH employees are much more costly to lose than FOH, why does FOH get paid more to begin with? is it just that minimum wage plus tips is already way more than the cook gets paid?

I don't disagree with your core claim that cooks are more valuable. anecdotally, when I worked at a takeout pizza place the main pizza guy got paid about twice what we made in the front, even including tips.