The Next Supper:

The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them, and What Comes After

(Public Affairs, 2021)

A searing expose of the restaurant industry, and a path to a better, safer, happier meal.

praise from LA Times restaurant critic Bill Addison:

“The restaurant industry, to put it as politely as I can, is ****ed up,” Corey Mintz writes in his book’s introduction, setting up the 300-plus pages of impassioned, thoroughly researched analysis to come in one candid summary. Mintz — a Winnipeg-based investigative reporter who worked previously as a professional cook and restaurant critic — began working on his polemic about the defects inherent in the modern restaurant business pre-pandemic. After March 2020 and the ensuing calamities, pivots for survival and bleak losses, his subject matter took on an even more charged urgency.

“The Next Supper” arrives at a muddy, critical moment. Out of the 2020 crisis arose long-simmering conversations about the flawed American restaurant culture: the lack of safety nets for the low-wage, often undocumented workers upon whose labor the industry runs; the failings of the soldierly brigade system on which restaurant hierarchies (and the abuses that come with them) have long been established and perpetuated; the deep problems with tipping, a wage system rooted in racism that also emboldens sexism and mistreatment.

And yet, craving “normalcy,” diners flocked back to restaurants in 2021, and very little seems to be shifting within the industry to directly address these issues. Mintz predicted as much. “I am worried that, as the pandemic recedes, we will revert to the trajectory we were on before — that in our relief, and as we have done after previous crises, we will snap back into supporting a restaurant industry that is fundamentally broken.”

In eight meaty chapters, he comes at the topic from all angles: the way delivery apps destroy the profitability of bricks-and-mortar restaurants; a call to end the cult of the “chef-driven restaurant”; how hip new dining destinations fuel gentrification; an examination of entrenched food-supply models (he deems supermarkets “the Amazon of the 1930s”); racial bias in menu pricing; and the part the food media play in all of it. You’ve perhaps read about these issues disparately (and increasingly over the last several years) but it’s potent to have them freshly examined right now in one tightly written volume.

And Mintz, in offering examples of chefs and owners working to reshape the system, makes the point again and again that consumers must be part of the change. As other writers, including Food & Wine’s Khushbu Shah, have asserted, it’s time to retire the trope that “the customer is always right” — Mintz outlines why. And if letting go of that notion makes you bristle, this book may have been written expressly for you.