Brunton runs Inver, on the west coast of Scotland, and was asked for her pet peeve about the restaurant industry. Her point is competitive as much as moral: restaurants that don't pay for the hours they use set prices the ones that do can't match. She says it is improving in places but still routine at the labour-heavy fine-dining end, where she trained.
shaky. Christ. What
the fuck is you off about the industry? We ask everyone. What are your plate peeves?
Oh, I think there's so much head in. And I think staff being overworked and underpaid, and therefore labour costs not being properly factored into business accounts, menus, prices. And it just skews the playing field for everybody. We're trying to acknowledge the amount of time that everybody works to make sure they're paid fairly for that. That they're, you know, if you actually do the sums on a salary, that the hourly pay is in fact decent at the very least over minimum wage. And I know if you're doing 70, 80, 90 hours in a kitchen on a 30-somethings, on a 30-something salary, you're absolutely not hitting minimum wage. And it's just, it's hidden. And it's, it's, I think in some instances, it's maybe improving, but I also know it still goes on in a lot of fine-dining restaurants, particularly, because that's the very intense, the intensely labor-heavy stuff. Yeah,
and it's fetishised slightly.
Yes, it is.
Certain bits of industry.