This story is part of How We’ll Win in 2019, a year-long exploration of workplace gender equality. Read more stories here.
Prune, the 30-seat restaurant in lower Manhattan, is most famous for its cozy yet playful brunches, featuring dishes like a “youth hostel breakfast” and 11 variations on the Bloody Mary. Just as inventive, if less well-known, is the code of behavior that aims to make Prune’s restaurant culture unlike any other.
Since four-time James Beard award winner Gabrielle Hamilton opened Prune’s doors in 1999, she, along with her co-chef Ashley Merriman, have established a set of principles that help guide employees at the restaurant. According to Hamilton and Merriman, the code has a kind of transformative power. It’s helped the kitchen avoid becoming a hierarchical, top-down fiefdom—a concentration of power that innumerable chefs have abused in the past. It can turn obnoxious, entitled patrons into polite diners who are delighted to have a seat at the table. And it’s created the kind of environment where Hamilton and Merriman, along with their staff, want to spend much of their day.
Recently, those principles were put to the test. In June 2018, Hamilton and Merriman agreed to take over the Spotted Pig, another famed New York eatery at the center of MeToo controversies. Its longtime proprietor, Ken Friedman, was removed from its daily operations after 10 former employees accused him of sexual harassment; the New York Times reported that abuse was so rampant that a room on the restaurant’s third floor, reserved for VIPs, had become known as the “rape room.”
Hamilton and Merriman said their goal was to change the restaurant’s culture and set an example for the industry. Though their decision to work with an accused sexual harasser was controversial in the food world, ultimately, the partnership didn’t last long. Hamilton and Merriman quit the Spotted Pig in September, citing difficulties in working with Friedman. “We felt we needed to be the actual owners and final decision makers of the day-to-day decisions of the restaurant, and we couldn’t make our case persuasively enough for Ken to agree to that,” Hamilton wrote in a Sept. 6 email to Spotted Pig employees, according to the New York Times.
After exiting the Pig, Hamilton and Merriman returned to Prune with the reminder that you can’t make an ethical workplace overnight. But their principles, they knew, had applications far beyond the walls of Prune, and even beyond the culinary world. As Hamilton says, “That’s the joke of Prune, that we just pretend to be a restaurant. But we’re actually an institute for living.” Quartz sat down with them recently at Prune to learn more about how to create the kind of culture that makes workers, as well as patrons, want to keep coming back.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Quartz: Tell me a little about these principles. What are they?
Gabrielle Hamilton: The five core values of the restaurant? The first one, in no particular order: to be thorough and excellent in everything that you do, even when no one is looking. Even in the dark. You pull the chair out and you clean the corner, even if no one is going to notice.
Second one is to be smart and funny. Because it always helps if you can get a little humor in there and be kind of smart.
Third one is to be disarmingly honest. We have chosen that combination of words very carefully. It’s not brutally honest, not ferociously honest, not earnestly, heart-wrenchingly honest. It’s disarmingly honest. That really helps out to tell the truth exactly as it is unfolding in front of you, whatever it is. Look, we’re talking about running a restaurant, we’re not talking about curing cancer. It means saying, “Hi, customer, I’m actually quite in the weeds and I’m so sorry. And I will be with you in two and a half minutes.”
The fourth one is to work without division of any kind. Between the office staff and the closing bartender, between the boss-a-roony and the ‘I sweep the floor’-a-roony. It’s a real work in progress, not a blue ribbon done deal, but the thing we’ve strived to do for 19 years was to cut out that awful divisive bullshit. When I was a waitress, I was afraid to go talk to the chef, or I’ve been in kitchens where the cooks are very derisive to the front of the house, that kind of thing. So when you get to open your own restaurant, you get to run it the way you want it.
The one we’ve been most uplifted by and driven by is this idea of servant leadership. It’s not ours, it’s a style of business management that is essentially, to serve is to lead. You, the servant, have led everyone involved to a better experience, whatever it is.
Again, not to get too highfalutin, we’re talking restaurant. The guy who comes in for brunch and doesn’t make eye contact and just holds up two fingers to the girl at the door. Not even a hello, not a good morning. Now, I have to serve that person. I have to get them what they want, they came for brunch. And I’m just a hostess. I’m a $15-an-hour, hourly employee. But I get to lead him. I get to say, “Good morning, how are you doing?” I get to make eye contact. I get to lead him to where I think the exchange will be better for both of us, so I’m not slamming the menus down on the table and jerking his chair back in a huff. And he also isn’t left to go through the world in perpetuity doing this, just holding up two fingers every time he walks into a restaurant and totally disregarding the girl who is standing in front of him.
That’s the joke of Prune, that we just pretend to be a restaurant. But we’re actually an institute for living. We hide behind the fried eggs, and we hide behind the marrow bones, but really what we’re doing here is trying to change the whole goddamn world, one lamb chop at a time. It’s slow going, but I think we’re getting there.
QZ: How do you make sure that the people you bring into this organization are on board with this? Is this a question in the interview?
GH: We teach it constantly, chronically. What do you see in the interview? You see if there’s a light on in the human. But a lot of people do need to be quite re-oriented. It’s unusual for a new employee to get quite as much respect, attention, education, and care as they get here. I’m sure they get their hair blown back a little bit, too. Like, wait: What do you mean you’re going to know my first and last name in seven days? What do you mean I don’t have to start at the bottom and pick parsley for the first nine months before I’m ever allowed to get near the stove? Again, it’s sort of funny to speak in these tiny gestures, the tasks of a restaurant. But this is where it all plays out.
Ashley Merriman: In an interview or in a tryout, you have to want to get in the room with someone for 10 to 12 hours a day. That’s in some ways step number one. They obviously have to have some experience if we’ve invited them for a trial. And then the handbook comes, and that’s a huge part of the training process. It’s an introduction to the core values of Prune—who we are and what we’re trying to do here.
GH: I do believe that the values kind of glitter. People are attracted to them already. It’s intangible, but something you can feel when you enter the building as an employee here. Many people have spoken of it over the years and it’s not a reversal of the pyramid, of the hierarchy. In fact, I love me a hierarchy, it’s very relaxing for everybody. But it’s a complete re-envisioning of the attitude towards members of the hierarchy. It’s not like force-feeding or insisting or teaching—people are drawn to the values on contact. The general manager comes in and brews the pot of coffee for the porter. To make sure that he has what he needs, he had to get up at 4 o’clock, he had to come in from the Bronx, he took the number 6 train which is notoriously slow, what have you.
AM: It’s not so we can say, “Oh, our GM makes the porter the coffee.” It’s a way of being, it’s a philosophy.
GH: Right, because then the porter is already then catching on, they’re like, “Hey, I have a minute, do you want me to run down and get some parsley for you? Because I see that you’re in the weeds.” It’s contagious, it doesn’t need to be forced. There are people, of course, who come and are like “I don’t like it here, I just want to make my money and get out” or something. And that’s totally fine. We’re not the right place for you.
QZ: How would you start to change the power structure in restaurants that are more traditionally hierarchical?
AM: There’s a hundred ways. Step number one is how you enter the building. Who do you say hello to, how do you say hello to them, how do you check in. Step number two is really, in order to make any of these core values or these servant leadership quality work, you have to help everyone understand that this process is not in service to me or to the betterment of me, or my wallet, or my status. It’s in service to the group.
GH: You implement the values by living them, by not allowing yourself any hypocrisy. If you do what you say you’re going to do, you hold yourself as accountable as you hold your employees, you make your expectations and standards explicit and documented and easily accessed for all people. You don’t hide the values and let people wonder whether they’re doing okay or not. You just live it, for one thing. When we go to a food and wine festival, we never swan around or go to the golf course or to the meet and greet. The first thing we do is get in the kitchen of the hotel who is our host, and we find the usually the lead sous chef who is on duty to receive you, you find the dishwasher, we put our own stuff away in the walk in. We shake hands, we meet everyone. We do our own prep, we don’t swan in after all the cooking student interns who are there for free have picked all your parsley.
Restaurant work is so tangible. It’s nothing but, as we say, chopping wood and hauling water. But you chop wood and haul water in a lot of different ways. And the way we do it, I think, we lead by example. We model what we want.
QZ: I’m interested in how this worked at the Spotted Pig. Going into a system that allowed for abuses of power, how do you possibly start to fix it?
GH: Well, you just keep showing up and doing it. It’s not only gestural and tiny and minute. But it takes a while. People have to be de-programmed, they have to see that you’re real, and they also have to see it in motion.
When I first got there, I was on the third floor of the Spotted Pig, and there was a smell. There was some, Ugh, what the fuck is up here, something smells bad. One person came in and sort of looked in a drawer of a refrigerator, just picked up some shit in there and threw it in a garbage can. But then the smell persisted, and I thought, maybe it’s because it’s still in the garbage can. So I bagged up the trash, I took it out, and I came back upstairs. It’s still here. All I have to say is, maybe 10 or 12 people passed in and out of that room that afternoon, and that smell had been there for several weeks. And I got down on my hands and knees and found it. I was like, “What the fuck is that smell?” And of course I had to clean out all the bins, all the shelves. It was a bottle of fish sauce that had tipped over and spilled all over everything. It smells exactly like what you think it smells like—dog breath at low tide. The porter saw me, the general manager saw me, the waiters saw me, the back waiters saw me, on my knees, finding the goddamn smell.
Now, that de-programming takes a long time.
It would have taken time. It’s quite a big operation there, there are like 100 people in the building, and also 100 people who have been ungoverned for a long time. When we got in there, we were like, Whoa, there is no Mom or Dad in this house. They were like, “We’re making our money, we’re just doing it the way we want to do it.” We were like, “Okay, we know what to do, and we can put this in place a lot faster.” But not overnight, for sure.
QZ: It also sounds like so much emotional labor. Just remembering things about everybody’s life, running it like a family almost—does it burn you out?
AM: I think that I am wary of that term “emotional labor” and how it gets assigned to women all the time. Again, for me, it’s not makeup at all. I actually do spend a huge portion of my life in the building. It’s not labor. It’s a sincere and total pleasure for me to see and know these humans. Everyone’s winning, everyone feels better, everyone is more invested in the institution, and everyone is more invested in the building and what we’re trying to do here.
GH: I understand, it does sound emotional. And of course it is, it’s very psychological. I think though, at the end of the day, it’s a lot easier and more pleasant for me to put my case of limes into the plastic container in a good mood rather than grinding my fucking molars and slamming the fucking limes into the new container because I’m pissed at everyone, or there’s a lot of swimming, inchoate, unspoken, unarticulated “meh” emotion in the room. In that sense, it doesn’t feel like emotional labor at all, it just feels like you’re working without all the emotional hum that you’re used to in those other awful kitchens that I was.
Everywhere I worked before I got here, as I’ve often said, I felt I was doing a double shift by the end of my shift because I not only had the work in front of me to do, but I had all this, What the fuck is going on here, am I allowed to smile, should I be friendly, should I be ladylike, should I be strong, weak, giggly, harsh? Do I know what is expected of me? No. Has anyone said anything nice? Fuck if that’s not emotionally exhausting, I would say.
I understand what you’re saying, that it sounds like quite an emotional workload. But for me, it’s just sort of an upfront, front-loaded effort, and then I have an almost effortless workday.
QZ: What can people in other industries learn from this, especially if they’re not in positions of power?
GH: Let’s return the idea that you’re the waiter and you have to get this possibly low-blood-sugar, maybe racist, maybe sexist man his breakfast. You’re not the boss, so I’ve given you these five tools to use. You can be disarmingly honest, you can be smart and funny, you can be thorough and excellent, you can aim to practice servant leadership so that by the end of whatever exchange you have with this dude, you both feel elevated. We have discovered that these five never leave you short. You always have some tool at your disposal. Because otherwise you’re gonna solve every problem over and over again in some unique way, and it doesn’t need to be. I already gave you five tools, and I think there’s not a single problem in the building or in the world that can’t be fixed with these five instruments.
This story is part of How We’ll Win in 2019, a year-long exploration of workplace gender equality. Read more stories here.