Restaurants finding workers among the disadvantaged

It takes just a few minutes with him to understand why Keith Corbin was appointed corporate kitchen manager at Locol, helping the company open its new Oakland restaurant a month ago.

Corbin can give orders to his kitchen crew and leave them smiling, segue into earnest oratory when explaining his restaurant’s mission, then interrupt the second he spots a camera crew nearing the front door. He is a natural manager — but six months ago, the only work he could find was on the streets.

Talents like Corbin may be the answer to the labor shortage that plagues Bay Area restaurants. The problem has left kitchens understaffed and dining rooms in constant churn. Rising minimum wages around the region — even wages well above the minimum — can barely cover a room in a shared apartment in San Francisco or Berkeley.

A small group of Bay Area restaurateurs argue that this shortage is an illusion, that anyone who claims he or she can’t find staff is standing in a field of ripe tomatoes complaining of hunger. Locol, as well as Cala, Home of Chicken and Waffles and a cluster of nonprofit job-training programs, find reserves of talent in places many don’t look: East Oakland, Richmond, probation departments and re-entry houses.

The restaurant industry in the Bay Area is one of the most robust in the nation, with the potential to bring thousands of people into the workforce. Restaurants offer people the opportunity to gain skills that will keep them employed, and employable, for decades.

Rethinking required

At the same time, bringing people like Corbin, long denied meaningful work, into the restaurant industry requires rethinking how restaurants find and train staff. It means restaurants have to reconsider how they support workers — and how they give them paths to rise.

As Cala general manager Emma Rosenbush said, “I’m so in awe of the hypocrisy of how much we care where our vegetables are grown and how they’re treated, and yet we seem to have no regard to the people serving it, cooking it and cleaning it.”

At Locol’s new Uptown Oakland restaurant, line cooks grill barbecue-turkey burgers and ladle out chili bowls at prices closer to Burger King than Umami Burger.

The restaurant’s West Oakland commissary kitchen, though, is where the complex cooking behind the dishes becomes evident: It’s fast food as redrawn by owners Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi, two of California’s best-known chefs (Patterson for the two-Michelin-star Coi in San Francisco, Choi for Kogi taco trucks in Los Angeles).

One cook pulls racks of buns out of the oven, their loft and sweetness bolstered by cultured rice. Another stirs a giant stockpot of tofu and barley seasoned with fish sauce and white soy, which will be added to ground beef to form Locol’s burger patties, topped with a tomato-and-fermented-chile sauce. A $90 tasting menu in San Francisco might trumpet each of these improbable elements. Locol just calls the dish a $5 “cheeseburg.”

Locol’s first location opened in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in January, greeted by long lines of neighbors, as well as journalists eager to write about a celebrity-chef fast-food joint in a neighborhood whose last sit-down restaurant opened 50 years ago.

Choosing Watts, where 48 percent of households earn less than $20,000 a year, required the experienced restaurateurs to engage with the neighborhood in ways they never anticipated. Over the course of a year, they spoke in front of community boards and civic groups, as well as on the street and in homes.

Choi and Patterson didn’t hire in the conventional manner, either. Locol posted flyers on telephone poles and handed them out on the street. They told people that they cared about character and not work experience, prison records or even literacy. Choi brought on a shaman to lead therapy sessions with the new staff. Four hundred people applied for 60 jobs.

Corbin was one of Locol’s early hires. Another was Eddie Corril.

The two grew up on different sides of Watts: different turf, different races — Corbin African American, Corril Latino — and warring gangs. But their lives weren’t all that different. In the absence of employment, legally earning a living in Watts meant scrimping together enough money to open a small storefront and recruiting family into the work. On the streets, where both Corbin and Corril survived, getting by meant selling drugs, stealing when you needed to, and shuttling in and out of prison.

Corbin applied for a job at Locol after watching its construction with a mix of wariness and curiosity. Businesses didn’t open in Watts, he thought, and if they did, they brought in workers from outside.

Corril, who lived across town, happened across Locol when he drove a friend to a nearby laundromat. There he encountered a woman who offered him some fruit, then handed him a job application. Perplexed, he filled it out.

Finding hope

It wasn’t until the orientation, when Choi and Patterson explained their mission — to bring healthy, affordable food, good jobs and even healing to Watts — that the two new employees felt hope about their new chance.

“It’s either succeed or die here. That’s what Locol is for us, a job opportunity,” Corbin said. “There’s no way back. There’s nothing behind us but water. There’s no job down the street.”

Locol isn’t the first to rethink how to bring people normally shut out of the job market into the restaurant industry.

Episcopal Community Services’ 19-year-old Chefs program in the South of Market area, for instance, offers a seven-month training program to people at risk of homelessness. The program, which takes on a new class every three months, doesn’t pay participants. But it leads them through classroom instruction, kitchen training, and then a three-month culinary internship, all bolstered by help with social services and job placement.

Youth Uprising, which works with young people in East Oakland, runs a social enterprise called Corners Cafe out of its headquarters. Jobs are almost as scarce in East Oakland as in Watts, and even fast-food restaurants are rare there. The cafe, which serves breakfast and lunch, hires 18-to-24-year-olds from the neighborhood.

The purpose isn’t to provide just employment, says director of social enterprise Hunter Tanous, but mentoring on how to be employed. “Young people (in East Oakland) don’t have a network of people around them that show them, hey, this is what it means to be on time, this is what it means to connect with customers,” he said.

Other Bay Area restaurants have responded to the scarcity of jobs for people getting out of prison. As of 2013, 5,456 Oakland residents were on probation or parole after spending time behind bars, according to Richard de Jauregui of the Oakland Private Industry Council. “Less than 5 percent of persons being released to the Oakland community are offered permanent full-time employment at a living wage right out of the gate,” de Jauregui said in an email.

Derreck Johnson, owner of the Home of Chicken and Waffles in Jack London Square, is well known among re-entry organizations for hiring people with prison records. So is Gabriela Camara, the owner of Cala, a 9-month-old Mexican seafood restaurant in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley.

Before Cala opened, Camara and general manager Emma Rosenbush got word to activists, social services agencies and even defense attorneys that they were hiring ex-offenders. Whereas most new restaurants struggle to find applicants, Cala received a glut of resumes. Camara and Rosenbush started wine and service training in a spare office in San Francisco’s Adult Probation Department.

Cala is among those restaurants where diners expect upper-middle-class polish. It took months after opening day before its staff could properly clear silverware and pronounce German wine varietals.

Some of its workers have left for higher-paying trades, but Cala’s proportion of recently incarcerated workers is still about 40 percent. Rosenbush prizes the loyalty and pride she sees in those who have stayed. “When it does work, it’s so much more delicious than anything else,” she said.

Soon after Locol opened in Los Angeles, the soft-spoken Corril found he preferred cooking in the commissary, where the food was prepped, to the clamor of the main dining room. He loved learning about new flavors and cooking techniques. Locol became his sanctuary. “Every time I step outside Locol, I’m back in Watts,” he said. “Soon as I step back in, I’m somewhere else, where I can do what everybody taught me. I wanted to stay there.”

In many ways, restaurants are an ideal point of entry into employment. It is a realm where people with doctorates and recent immigrants with little formal education all learn skills on the job, repeating tasks over and over again. At their best, restaurants, and especially their kitchens, are environments in which workers are judged by performance and teamwork.

Gaining sense of control

Cooking, said Chefs program manager Phoebe Sanders, “is an opportunity to take something that comes from the earth and use your skills and experience to transform it. To have that feel of control, when you have so little control over everything else in your life, is super-transformative.”

Yet kitchens are also high-stress work environments. At the height of the dinner rush, when order tickets spit out of the machine rapid-fire and there aren’t enough burners on the stove to keep up, shouting can erupt and rational thought shut down. It’s a brutal high.

“The great thing about restaurants is that adrenaline — and the bad thing’s the adrenaline,” said Mimi Silbert, CEO of the Delancey Street Project. One of the country’s best-known prison re-entry programs, it has operated an eponymous South of Market restaurant for more than 40 years. “My adrenaline goes to joy and excitement. If it’s already in you to feel stupid and like a failure, if that has been in your past and this is now going on, anger rises up.”

Adding to the pressure of restaurant work is the structure of many professional kitchens, which are based on a militaristic Northern European brigade system. “If you don’t create an environment where people aren’t comfortable, then you can’t train them,” Patterson said. “Conversely, it’s actually not that hard. If you just see people as human, you create an environment where people are allowed to be who they are. And if your means of interaction is more diverse, then so is your workforce.”

At Locol, that management approach means that a shout of “Close the oven door quickly!” is followed up by quietly explaining to the cook how much heat gets lost when the oven door is open. It means looking over 25 pounds of tofu that have been cubed three sizes too large and asking the cook to cut each cube in quarters, without recriminations.

Industry prejudices

There are other challenges that the restaurant industry as a whole must confront.

“The restaurant industry is low-paying, very hard work,” said Youth Uprising’s Tanous. “But in a lot of cases, it’s a good way to get in (the job market), and a lot of these youth don’t have a way.” Because of tips, servers typically make more than cooks in San Francisco. Yet Cala’s Rosenbush said that although her once-incarcerated servers earn well above minimum wage, many still have to live far outside the city.

Entry into the workforce doesn’t guarantee success. There are the widespread, subtle prejudices in the restaurant world that tend to promote white faces and fluent English speakers to the highest positions, and can silently deny cooks of color mentoring and opportunities.

A study released by the Restaurant Opportunities Center in June found that white restaurant workers made an average of $6.12 more than workers of color, and are disproportionately represented in high-paying service positions.

So it isn’t enough to offer a job, many advocates say. You have to offer workers paths to advancement. It can be as simple as Delancey Street’s mantra of “Each one teach one,” which Silbert says gives each worker a sense of purpose beyond whatever he or she is dealing with.

Promise of a new city

Locol’s rapid expansion — San Francisco’s Tenderloin is next, followed by Crenshaw Avenue in Los Angeles — is giving a number of Watts employees a path up, including Corbin, who was quickly promoted to head cook. Impressed by his charisma and palate, Choi and Patterson then brought him on to the corporate team to help open new restaurants. He moved to Oakland a few months ago, where Patterson and former Coi chef Andrew Miller are mentoring him.

Last month, Corril also took a promotion, moving north to become Oakland’s commissary manager. There he shares an apartment with Corbin, former rival and now fast friend.

Corril was finally ready to leave Watts, he said, for the promise of a new city. “Here you walk out and see everybody’s minding their own business, and you’re not even noticed. You could be yourself. You’re free.”