A Checklist for Being OK

Dear Pros,

You've got Kat this week, still aglow from a standout meal at chef Harold Moore's Cafe Commerce, which opened on Manhattan's Upper East Side back in January. As I expressed to my husband between bites of Moore's signature sprinkle-decked layer cake, there's a canonical list of now-shuttered restaurants — Chanterelle, Gotham, Drover's Tap Room, Indigo, Angel's Share, Beacon, Artisanal, Aureole, and others — that occupies a particular chamber of my heart. They're the ones that made me fall in love with New York City dining in the late '90s into the '00s as a young transplant who finally had more than a couple of nickels in my pocket, access to the Chowhound message boards, and free print copies of the Village Voice that I grabbed from newspaper boxes along the street. (You can read about the Food & Wine's collective nostalgia trip through the past quarter-century in food at The F&W 25: The Moments That Defined Food and Drink for the Past 25 Years.)

Before it closed over a decade ago, Moore's Commerce always felt to me as if it existed outside of time, fads, and fashion. Stepping through the door, I was entering a cocoon spun of pure hospitality and pleasure, and I might as well nestle in because nothing in the world outside mattered in the moment. (It probably also helped that camera phones and social media had yet to puncture the fabric and allow a gazillion strangers to witness our every bite.)

Last night when the server, Raymond Umrigar, said he'd worked with Moore at various restaurants, that instantly made sense to me. It wasn't just the cake slice, 20-herb salad, or roast chicken that had been ported over from the original Commerce location (which closed over a decade ago) — it was a distinctive feeling of care. The thing I have come to learn about serial restaurateurs whose places I am predisposed to love is that they tend to spin connective threads between their businesses. The core fiber of that is often achieved by hiring and re-hiring pros who share their priorities, and treating them as full human beings who deserve to have their needs met every bit as much as their clientele.

To help restaurateurs craft that more holistic culture, restaurant veteran and MAJC co-founder Matthew Jennings has created an F&W Pro checklist for hospitality workers and managers who want to take better care of themselves and their teams and keep healthy for the long haul. His mise en place for a smooth and sustainable service includes items like proper hydration with lightly salted water, keeping a cold towel in a quart container in the lowboy, and full body stretches that the whole team participates in as the bar manager is juicing citrus. "Yes, it’s goofy," he says. "No, you won’t forget it."

Jennings' recipe also includes the "Are you good?" pass, where a manager checks in with their crew "not to catch errors, but to ensure a humanizing moment" and stepping in where they can to help. "It's a thumbs-up, an extra water bottle filled, a 'Switch with me for two seconds,'" he writes. "That lap does more to save service than any pre-meal speech."

And it saves lives. Southern Smoke Foundation (SSF) co-founder Chris Shepherd explained recently on the Tinfoil Swans podcast that he relies on that question — You good? — in all facets of his life to offer an easy way for people who may not be used to showing their seams to do so without shame. "It opens the door for people to have a conversation," he said. "If they start to say, 'Man, I really got this issue, you know,' I might not be qualified to hear what they're about to tell me, but I can give them access to people who are.'"

Shepherd, his co-founder Lindsey Brown, and the rest of the team at SSF provide resources for hospitality workers in crisis through their Emergency Relief Fund, and their Behind You program, which offers no-cost mental health care. Those services are funded in large part by the proceeds of events like last week's Southern Smoke Festival, which brought together talent like F&W Best New Chef alumni Caroline Glover (2019), Damarr Brown (2022), and Jamie Bissonnette (2011), as well as the 2025 class of BNCs, along with plenty other pros from around the country to serve their dishes to very appreciative Houston diners. They raised $1.7 million in the process. Food & Wine is proud to have SSF as our charity partner and you can buy merch or donate here to support the cause.

Work like theirs ensures the survival of the industry, weaving and reinforcing a safety net for the people who devote their lives to creating magical moments like I had last night. The excellent desserts are just the icing on the cake.

Be well,
Kat Kinsman