Advocating for Mothers in Restaurant Jobs
The Abundance Setting nonprofit champions fairness and opportunity for women
The Abundance Setting: Advocate for Mothers in Restaurant Work
The James Beard Foundation on June 12 presented a panel discussion in Chicago about The Abundance Setting. Since late 2020, this local nonprofit organization has assisted and advocated for mothers facing challenges while working in the restaurant industry.
The discussion featured two restaurant chef/owners who are leaders of The Abundance Setting: Beverly Kim of Parachute and Wherewithall in Chicago and Sarah Stegner of Prairie Grass Cafe in suburban Northbrook. Also on the panel was Jason Hammel of Chicago’s Lula Cafe, who discussed how the challenges of balancing family and work life prompted his wife to retire from their flagship restaurant, and Claudette Zepeda of VAGA in Encinitas, California (near San Diego).
I’d heard little previously about The Abundance Setting, but the powerful stories told by the panel members prompted me to set up an interview with Seth Blumenthal, the organization’s founding chair, and board member and secretary Kimber Wattles. The following article is the result of that interview.
________________
“The Abundance Setting is about ‘Let's try to change things so that it's not just about getting by, so that women who become mothers, who have a family, can not only survive but thrive.” So said Seth Blumenthal, the organization’s founding chair, during a recent interview.
He said he and his wife got to know the married couple of Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark, co-founders of The Abundance Setting, as regulars at Parachute, their first restaurant in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood. (The interview with Seth and Kimber Wattles, a board member of The Abundance Setting, took place at Wherewithall, their nearby second location).
Seth said he was impressed with their quick pivot from fine dining to Korean-influenced carryout during the shutdowns in the early stages of the COVID pandemic. So when the couple played a leading role in starting The Abundance Setting in late 2020, Seth said, “I was inspired to get involved as an ally to the cause, because… I have had really positive experiences working with and for women in leadership positions.”
He also learned more about the challenges that women face in the culinary world when motherhood is an important factor in their work-life balance. “If you’re a mom, you often have to make a choice, like do I want to have an ambitious career in the restaurant industry, or do I want to just kind of settle? Or do I want to actually even leave the industry because the industry is making it so difficult for me as a woman, as a mother, to be able to take care of myself, take care of my kids, take care of my family,” he said.
Kimber said she was drawn to The Abundance Setting because she had worked with only three women who had the role of executive chef during her extensive career in the restaurant business. She also said she and her husband talked about having children, but continuously put it off because of the demands of her career in the industry, which included long hours working many nights and weekends.
Kimber observed that she knows women in culinary whose husbands who are engaged in child-raising, but adds, “No matter how amazing the man is in the partnership, Mom’s still the key role.” She said The Abundance Setting provides opportunities to ask women in this situation “what they need, ask them how our program can help them.”
The challenges can be even more brutal for women who feel compelled to do demanding restaurant work well into their pregnancies, both for financial reasons and for fear of falling behind in the kitchen hierarchy. “Beverly’s stories about what she had to face being pregnant on the line are shocking,” Kimber said. “And there’s even stories of women losing babies due to the stresses of being on the kitchen line.”
Women in the restaurant business, including mothers, could benefit, though, from cultural changes stemming from both the disruptions caused by the pandemic and revelations of abusive male chef behavior prompted by the #MeToo movement.
“At the end of the day, we need to have equal representation,” Kimber said. “How can we start to really have these conversations and turn it around?”
Seth added, “Women in this position have few female mentors, role models to look up to. In many cases, their mentors have to be men. The Abundance Setting was started by like-minded, experienced restaurateurs, owners, chefs, women who made it, despite all these obstacles.”
How The Abundance Setting Helps
Meal Relief was the first program that The Abundance Setting team created in late 2020, during the height of the pandemic. While it provided much appreciated assistance to aspiring culinary artists who had been displaced or hindered by the restaurant industry disruptions, it also provided training to enable them to improve their skills.
Initially, the three candidates selected for the first three-month cohort received fully prepared meals. This evolved into a teaching platform in which the participants also received ingredients — similar to a CSA box and many of them locally grown — intended for their families’ meals, and then prepared them under the watchful eyes of experienced chef-mentors. Before cycling out of the program, each got to work in the kitchens of restaurants that, with the ongoing ban on indoor dining, were doing only carryout.
Meal Relief “helps them spend more quality time with their families,” said Seth, “and also introduces both them and their families to different ingredients, they can learn about a different style of cuisine, different cooking techniques.”
The Abundance Setting also addresses a little-recognized conundrum for restaurant workers and their families: Many don’t have the financial resources, the time, or both to eat restaurant-quality food at home. Kimber said, “Especially if you had to do daycare, your kids were eating meals that had to be quickly made and affordable, probably because you don't have the energy after you just worked all day.” The nonprofit provided the participants with “all of the ingredients and instructions to help them, and then they got the exposure to all these different types of foods.”
The Abundance Setting has also produced a number of informational programs — all virtual during the early days of the organization with a mix of live and virtual since last year — featuring chefs and other experts discussing a range of relevant topics. Then there are real-life improvements that the organization has helped facilitate for mothers in the industry, such as connecting restaurants with Pumpspotting, which describes itself as a “community-driven breastfeeding and baby feeding platform.”
What’s Next
As The Abundance Setting matures, its leaders are broadening their horizons. For example, they are engaged with The James Beard Foundation on a research project on topics that Seth describes as follows:
“We're trying to answer questions like what do women and mothers need to not only survive but thrive in this industry? How can restaurant owner/operators, how can restaurants create work cultures where women and mothers are not seen as liabilities, where they are seen as assets to the business? Who are the owner/operators that have accomplished this and what have they done?”
He pointed to Beverly Kim, who is helping set a precedent by paying staff members a living wage — a move away from the tip-based system that penalizes workers when a restaurant is having a slow day — with health insurance for full-time employees and even paid time off.
Her restaurants include a service charge on each diner’s bill to help pay for these benefits. The organization recognizes, though, that it has work to do to in order to persuade many diners that a service charge is the right and fair thing to do. “How can we help sell this concept of you're not just coming to dinner, but you're actually supporting living wages, you're helping to change the culture in this country, that restaurant work is a real job?” Seth said.
The Abundance Setting team is also working on ways to provide continuous support to its program participants as they build their culinary careers; is mulling ways to expand its Meal Relief and culinary training programs, possibly in collaboration with partners such as food business incubators; and is exploring the possibility of eventually building out their own physical workspace.
“So, it's a combination of mentorship, continuing the connections, building alumni network, research, helpful resources, cracking the childcare code, and then ultimately trying to see how we can support a physical space of our own to carry on our mission,” Seth said. We’ll be reporting from time to time on their progress.