The Challenges New Moms Face in the Beverage Industry

This post originally appeared in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of her favorite food and restaurant stories — both on and off Eater — each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.

This Monday and Tuesday I’ll be in Paris for the P(our) Symposium, speaking about the challenges new moms face in the beverage industry. To prepare, I’ve been chatting with a lot of female bartenders and brand ambassadors over the last month to get a sense of their struggles.

The issues surrounding a lack of paid leave in the United States are fairly commonplace (as I learned covering the restaurant industry side of it last year). The majority of mothers in the hospitality industry barely qualify for unpaid leave, and few get leave that’s paid. Pregnancy can be more of a struggle when you’re working on your feet and living shift to shift. And then there’s the stigma of being pregnant and working around alcohol. Customers made inappropriate comments to bartenders, sommeliers, even wait staff that I spoke with, implying they were irresponsible mothers because of their profession.

I had already suspected all of that. What I hadn’t thought much about was how hard it is to arrange childcare while working nighttime hours and operating on a different schedule from your child. With some exceptions, daycares don’t operate at night. One-on-one care is almost twice as expensive and can become exorbitant if you’re trying to find someone willing to work unusual hours (nannies often have families of their own to take care of, after all). On top of that, kids wake up really early. Every. Day. They don’t care if you just got home from a long shift at 3 a.m.

There are upsides, though. The bar world is flexible; you can organize your days to spend more time with your children than a typical 9-5 worker can. And there seems to be a real sense of community in that sphere.

Anyway, wish me luck. I’ll send around a link to the video of the talk once it’s live.

Kelly Puleio

On Eater

• Intel: José Andrés is opening a Jaleo in Disney World next year; a Dallas location of The Palm is closing after 30 years, blaming crime in the neighborhood; a bro-y bar in Chicago called Bottled Blonde is getting a LOT of pushback for its controversial dress code; DC icon Ben’s Chili Bowl removed Bill Cosby from its mural; Dominique Ansel is shilling for Oreo again; SF’s Tartine is opening a coffee manufactury; an all-pink restaurant with a no-photo policy opened in Williamsburg; Portland’s Salt & Straw is making ice cream with food waste; Alvin Cailan, the chef behind LA’s Eggslut, will open a restaurant in New York this fall; Blue Hill at Stone Barns settled a wage lawsuit for $2 million; LA has a new tiki bar; Roy Choi says Locol might eventually go non-profit; and Jean-Georges opened a restaurant in Beverly Hills.
• Detroit’s new dining destination is Wyandotte.
• Everything you need to know about Blue Apron’s IPO filing (spoiler: it loses tens of millions every year).
• Every Summer 2017 cookbook you should know about.
• I very badly want to go to Puerto Rico after reading Bill Addison’s review of Jose Enrique (also: you should subscribe to his newsletter).
• Meredith Kurtzman is the crotchety, incredible, game-changing gelato wizard you’ve probably never heard of, and she’s retiring.
• Newly on my to-do list: eat a roe blini from this very cool Russian chain Teremok.

Off Eater

• All those sweet, delicious Slack keyboard shortcuts. [The Verge]
• Roy Choi wants to feed children in every inner city in America. [Recode]
• Five Mexican American families that came to America to harvest grapes and ended up owning wineries. [Washington Post]
• I love all of these outtakes from Atlanta Magazine’s interview with chef Anne Quatrano. [Atlanta]
• Apparently Americans made 433 million fewer trips to restaurants for lunch last year. [WSJ]