Solidarity Has a Receipt: Why Calling Restaurants a “Scam” Costs Workers

As I try to write this, I keep coming back to gratitude—plain, unsexy gratitude—for hospitality. Not just for the job, but for what the job forces you to practice.

Hospitality is the last place in my life where I don’t get to opt out of other people.

On the floor, you can’t curate your feed. You can’t mute a guest. You can’t algorithm your way around someone’s bad day. You extend care to strangers anyway. You take responsibility for your team anyway. You move through conflict, fatigue, and generosity in real time—hot hands, tired feet, eye contact, the whole human thing.

And honestly? I’m not sure I’d be doing as well if I spent my days behind a screen, absorbing the weight of the world without the counterbalance of service—touch, timing, the small repair of making someone feel held.

Los Angeles, meanwhile, is in a phase where we treat everything like content and then act surprised when the city starts to feel less like a community. Especially when immigrant communities are being asked to live, work, and move through the city under pressure and fear. When being visible starts to feel like being at risk, public life shrinks. People stay home. Neighborhoods go quiet. The city gets a little colder without anyone naming it.

Restaurants are where you can see that contraction immediately.

Restaurants are also where the “everything is content” era gets its sharpest teeth. A room becomes a “hack.” A dish becomes a “scam.” A business becomes a backdrop. And the dining experience becomes moral theater: who’s problematic, who’s pure, who deserves to be punished this week.

The language is always so confident, so bloodless—like there aren’t people inside those walls whose rent depends on whether strangers decide the vibe is cringe.

That cost isn’t theoretical. It shows up as missed shifts, empty dining rooms, smaller tip pools, and the constant calculation of whether it’s safe to be seen. It shows up as staff schedules rearranged around volatility. It shows up as a room that used to hum now sitting half-lit on a Friday, trying not to panic.

And I want to give us all credit: most of us are stretched. Groceries are up, rent is up, everything feels like it costs more and gives less. It makes sense to be price-sensitive. It makes sense to feel tired of getting played.

But a restaurant meal—especially the kind we call a “scene,” the kind we document—isn’t groceries. It’s not survival math. It’s an experience built out of human labor, thin margins, and time. So when our frustration turns into a public prosecution, when we treat the check like evidence, we end up aiming our anger at the wrong thing.

The cost of living is real. The cost of dinner out is a choice. And choices come with a responsibility to stay human about them.

I’ve worked in LA restaurants long enough to learn my craft in Spanish, long enough to know how many lives are braided into a single service. These places aren’t sets. They’re ecosystems.

Front of house, back of house, somewhere in between: you’re in constant contact. You see what it takes to keep the lights on. You see the math of time and bodies. You see how a room’s glow is produced, and who pays for it.

And here’s the deeper point people love to skip: even restaurants that were not founded by immigrants often wouldn’t exist without immigrant labor and leadership. Not in LA. Not at this scale. Not with this speed, this flavor, this expectation that dinner can feel like a small miracle on a random Tuesday.

This isn’t romantic. It’s structural.

So when we flatten an ecosystem into content, we do what extraction economies always do: we take value without taking responsibility.

We take the room’s glow, without carrying the cost of keeping the lights on.
We take someone’s culture, without protecting the people whose bodies keep that culture in motion.
We take the story, without paying for the labor that made it true.

That’s the contradiction I can’t shake: how easy it is to post solidarity for immigrants and workers while the ground under them keeps shifting—more enforcement, more fear, more risk—and how quickly we turn around and treat the very places powered by immigrant labor like disposable entertainment.

There’s a word for that. It’s not “critique.” It’s not “accountability.” It’s extraction—just dressed up as taste.

I’m less interested in diagnosing the internet than naming the moral math: when support is mostly performance, it costs the performer very little, and it asks the vulnerable to keep paying anyway. Restaurants make that distinction painfully clear, because a restaurant doesn’t run on declarations.

It runs on bodies.

The Guatemalan-born chef de cuisine holding the line on a slammed Friday.
The Oaxacan fry cook who knows the oil by sound.
The dishwasher who resets the room nightly so it can open again tomorrow.
The prep cook who slices and slices and slices until their hands move like time itself.
The server translating allergies, moods, jokes, grief—three languages before noon.

And while all this is happening—while the people who keep the city fed are moving through real risk—we’re online calling a restaurant a “scam” because the portion wasn’t big enough for the price. We’re filming workers without consent because we’ve decided the possibility of feeling “slighted” is more important than their privacy. We’re publishing verdicts like the room exists to prove our cleverness.

Meanwhile, enforcement isn’t a vibe. It’s not “the climate.” It’s not “the moment.” It’s policy made physical. It’s the government choosing enforcement as theater, and ICE agents choosing workplaces and neighborhoods as hunting grounds.  It’s devastating. It’s paperwork, uniforms, addresses. It’s a badge turning someone’s commute into a crisis.

When fear changes how communities move through the city, restaurants feel it first: fewer tables, fewer tips, more volatility, more pressure on already thin margins. The room becomes smaller—not physically, but socially. The city’s appetite turns into a ritual of caution.

And this is where platform culture supercharges the harm.

Food media has always had its problems, but the influencer economy rewards the exact qualities that do the most damage to real workplaces: certainty, speed, heat. A video can send hundreds of customers to a place overnight—or bury it under a wave of sneering commentary. The incentives don’t reward nuance. They reward being first, being loud, being sure.

But in restaurants, certainty, speed, and heat doesn’t stay online. It turns into hours, tips, and whether someone can make rent.

A viral “takedown” doesn’t just hurt an owner’s ego. It hits shifts. It hits tip pools. It hits the dishwasher who doesn’t control the menu price but still loses hours when the room empties out. It hits the cook who already has a wage ceiling and no cushion.

So yes—is all this food-critique obsession just a recession indicator? Probably. Restaurants are always the canary. But a true takedown? Most of the time it’s a big fat miss—because you’re trying to protect workers by tearing down the infrastructure that keeps them paid and dignified.

What’s being “taken down” is rarely power. It’s payroll.

And here’s where I want to say something that might make people uncomfortable: we shouldn’t be uncomfortable thinking about restaurants—especially immigrant-run restaurants—as global brands.

Mobility is not betrayal. Expansion is not selling out. A second location can be the first time a family gets healthcare that isn’t catastrophic. A brand deal can be legal fees, immigration fees, a buffer for slow season, a way to keep staff when the math stops mathing.

The quickest way to reveal who’s treating restaurants like content is how they talk about “selling out.” People with the luxury to keep their ethics pure love to demand that working people stay small. Stay charming. Stay legible. Stay grateful. Stay one location forever—like immobility is authenticity.

But immigrants didn’t come to LA to remain fixed. They came for movement. For a better wage. For a future that’s allowed to scale. If we’re truly pro-worker, we have to stop romanticizing struggle as the most “authentic” version of someone’s life.

If we’re truly anti-extraction, we have to stop harvesting restaurants for clout while pretending we’re doing social justice.

So what do we do instead?

We bring guest energy back. Not the fake-nice kind. The responsible kind. The kind that understands a restaurant is a room full of livelihoods.

Ask before you film. A dining room isn’t a set and workers aren’t background actors.
Tip like you understand margins. If you can afford the night out, you can afford the gratitude.
Return visits beat hot takes. A community anchor is built on repeat business, not one viral moment.
If you’re going to critique, be precise. Punch up at systems, not down at staff.
Don’t confuse your taste with someone’s dignity. Dislike isn’t a moral verdict.
Support mobility. Let restaurants grow. Let people get paid. Let success be success.
Solidarity has a receipt. It looks like showing up on a Tuesday, not just reposting when the timeline is on fire.
Learn a little language. “Gracias,” “con permiso,” “buenas”—small respect travels far in a room.

If Los Angeles is going to keep calling itself a sanctuary, a food capital, a city built on culture, then the baseline has to be this: we treat restaurants not as backdrops, but as living systems worth sustaining.

Not just when it’s politically resonant. Not just when it’s aesthetically pleasing. Not just when it makes us look like good people.

Consistently. Materially. With care.

Because every meal is a small civic act. Post accordingly.