Opinion
According to Baba’s Place co-founder Alex Kelly, the hospitality industry’s focus on solutions like lower wages is doing more harm than good to both businesses and workers.
Alex Kelly
Lately, the hospitality industry appears to be buckling under its own contradictory weight. Owner-operators feel like it’s never been harder to run a venue built on models that are becoming outdated by the week; record closures will continue to happen to those who deserve better.
Meanwhile, both established hospitality groups and emerging ones are hoovering up what’s left of a shrinking talent pool. Despite so many closures, restaurants are also opening at a rapid rate. (And that’s without mentioning any business either expanding or pivoting to chicken shops, the great recession resister.)
If there is a desire to break this cycle, it will be found through a focus on the coordination of a better future for broader society. Otherwise, entrepreneurial opportunity and creative diversity will continue to erode, as access to capital becomes more inequitable while the oppressive attention economy of our time revels in all the drama.
Pop-culture machines are attractively portraying this impasse for those of us lower down the hospitality supply chain. Disney’s The Bear captures the creative output of talented individuals in a death spiral of testing, abuse, openings, impending closure, and so on.
Following the transition from clumsy neighbourhood eatery to a fine dining restaurant, The Bear’s four-season journey is possessed by an unpayable traumatic debt that pushes all those within to pursue individual and collective success at the expense of their own happiness.
There’s abundant positivity and healing, but the show internally represents the impossibility of financial stability for small to medium businesses. It confirms the emergence of systemic shortcomings as today’s real surplus value.
It’s a reminder that all this is spectacle, in service to the great attention glass ceiling that breaks over and over again – and that’s the point. Media coverage of “hospitality” is committed to the same old story; an often brilliant but fractional, monopolised mess folding to the very real stresses of inflation and an exploitative system, fighting over what’s left of future profit.
Things may feel different on the surface as a result of our virtual now, but they haven’t fundamentally changed. Life in 2025 is plagued by a reduction of that which is genuinely “new”, with writers such as Mark Fisher contending that 21st-century living is simply to have “20th century culture on high definition screens”. (That is, all the Lion King and Star Wars reboots you’re definitely watching.)
Hospitality as cultural production is not distinct from this stagnation. Yes, there have been cuisine and technological innovations; lest we forget the obsession with those gastronomic, steampunk techniques of bubbles and smoke.
Plate it Forward and similar social enterprises demonstrate new ways of structuring our organisations. However, our broader failure to imagine and adopt these new models will be what causes the most harm.
There appears to be a reluctance to conceive of secure strategies that forgo profit as legitimisation, or echo-chamber entrepreneurialism with expansion and franchising on the business vision board. But the importance of pursuing alternative models cannot be understated. Failure to do so ensures that success within the sector will continue to outpace the financial, virtual and legal capacities of a middle, working and precarious class.
So how can we build something “new”? Before we have a series of panel talks about whether the industry should be nationalised, maybe we could re-engage with the United Workers Union via the support of our younger, inspirational and more activist-prone generations.
Chefs and restaurant owners could expand their roles as good-practice agricultural brand ambassadors to conversation agitators around resisting the impact of industrialised farming on a more national scale.
A stronger, more proactive stance would be to work with the Australian Restaurant and Cafe Association to shift their lobbying efforts. Instead of focusing on lower wages and abolishing penalty rates, they could demand the government provide subsidies for green energy transitions and incentivise comprehensive waste management strategies.
It could be all, none or some of these things and more. What I’m sure it must be is a “solidarity without similarity”. By bringing together both workers and owners, we can forge a path to success for everyone in our industry.
With action of this sort comes the realisation that the product at stake, hospitality, is the perfect Trojan horse for a better world of ecological preservation, workers’ protections, a vibrant inventive economy, and genuine racial harmony.
Alex Kelly is the co-owner of Baba’s Place and Corner 75 restaurants in Sydney.
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