#26 | Horses for Discourses

And some good links

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Dan Price

The biggest story in restaurant media this week is in Los Angeles, at Horses, where co-founders Liz Johnson and Will Aghajanian have filed allegations of domestic and animal abuse against each other. The Hollywood Reporter story on the allegations, and the consequences for the restaurant which opened in October 2021, contains the filings.

The disturbing scope of the allegations has left people struggling to find a vocabulary for them, even when many of them are publicly visible online. The reticence to directly address them has led to inadequate comparison; before the stories came out, as rumours bristled, gossip about what happened at Horses apparently “makes the Spotted Pig stuff look like child’s play.” This is not a turn of phrase most people would adopt for persistent sexual assault at a restaurant whose premises contained a space that became known as “the rape room.”

The impulse to respond to grotesque, unthinkable events from the safe distance of irony or jokes is a natural and understandable one. In the wake of the news about Horses, it has run into another impulse; the impulse to participate in discourse and spectacle. The impulse to make one’s own ironies and jokes, even to visit the restaurant, to be in the room where it happened — an impulse acclerated by the fact that before the stories, Horses was hot and impossible to visit; now it is hot, possible to visit, and also the nexus of allegations of domestic and animal abuse.

This has led to numerous “on the ground” stories from the restaurant, in which diners, largely, are aware of the situation but don’t feel compelled to take a view on its impact on the restaurant, bar the fact that it enabled them to get a table. There is a curiosity to the restaurant. But what, exactly, is that curiosity about?

Across Los Angeles, another hospitality business is reeling from interpersonal events, as Vanderpump Rules cast member, “worm with moustache,” and cover band artiste Tom Sandoval has been revealed to have conducted an affair with fellow cast member Raquel (Rachel) Leviss, behind the back of fellow cast member, but more importantly, partner of nine years, Ariana Madix. One of Sandoval’s first public responses was to urge fans of the show not to take his actions out on the workers at his bar businesses, Tom Tom and Schwartz and Sandy’s, which had been hit by boycotts and numerous one-star reviews. Quite the opposite to the sudden influx of diners into Horses.

The core of all this isn’t really about gossip, even though it began as such, and moralising gossip out of existence would be a very bad thing to do indeed. It is more about asking whether reporting on bad actors in, and close proximity to restaurants — not just doing it, but its material consequences — has reached a point where it is secure enough to joke about, and secure enough that a restaurant in such a scenario can become a site of curiosity in a way that isn’t entirely morbid. The impulse to be at the centre of it all feels uncomfortably close to Gabrielle Hamilton’s desire to “walk into the man-made storm” at the Spotted Pig, comparing a for-profit takeover to natural disaster relief.

One of the challenges of taking account of investigations into workplace culture is bridging the gap between appositely acknowledging harm done to people by chefs, restaurants, and kitchen culture, without presenting each expose as somehow exceptional or extraordinary, as not part of a larger superstructure. The very natural emotional reactions to those exposes — scandal! intrigue! horror! — inevitably make bridging that gap harder, because details are more scandalous than systems theory, but they also show that they still land, and that feels like the tension at the heart of the response to Horses. It’s probable that my view on this is coloured by the libel laws of the U.K., which make producing stories about abuse and harassment (even) harder than in the U.S., making gossip and “unofficial” reports between workers (even) more critical. Let’s see how the story evolves.

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