More on what to expect from the revamped Empellon Cocina, plus some future expansion plans.
Yesterday the news broke that Empellon Cocina is currently closed, with a dining room renovation and lengthy tasting menu in the works. Chef/owner/taco whisperer Alex Stupak told Grub Street that his East Village Mexican restaurant will reopen April 28, with a new look, a refreshed menu, and an 18-course tasting that he'll serve to just one table a night. But a few details, like the price of the tasting, and the extent of the renovations, were left unknown. So Eater spoke to Stupak to help fill in some of those gaps.
The exact cost of the tasting menu, which will be somewhere between 18 and 20 courses, hasn't yet been decided, but Stupak says he wants to keep it "as reasonable as possible." It will likely be around $150, though that's by no means set in stone. He says he'll likely serve it to a table of four, though that could go as high as six or as low as two. He's knocked down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, and the tasting table will essentially be in the kitchen, so space is limited. "I want people to feel comfortable," he says, so if "stuffing six people in there" makes it uncomfortable, he'll cut it down. He also wants to serve ever person himself, which limits how many people he can host.
Why go the tasting route now, especially after once deciding that format wouldn't work at Cocina? "I have chefs in all three restaurants who are doing a great job," Stupak tells Eater, so "I'm building a place for me to stand. I want Cocina to be the place where we can tinker and develop our own version of what modern Mexican cuisine means." Plus, "I have lists and lists of stuff I want to do that would be weird on an a la carte menu. If you're ordering an app or a main, you're committing to a couple things. You're not going to order a blood sausage entree, but you'd eat a couple bites of blood sausage, unless you really hate it."
Even besides getting a new open kitchen, the dining room "should look drastically different." Stupak wants to make it lighter, because the first time around "we screwed up the lighting," and diners can't really see their food. It will also have way fewer seats – down to 45 from 75 (not counting the bar). That's a risk from a money perspective, but Empellon Taqueria has always been the restaurant that consistently packs them in, more so than Cocina – "It's impossible to serve weird Mexican food and kill it," as Stupak puts it. He's suggested as much before, too. Back when he was opening his casual taco bar, Al Pastor, in September, he suggested that it's proximity to Cocina would force Cocina in a new direction. So he's decided to serve fewer people and take more risks there.
The a la carte menu, meanwhile, will keep a lot of the old dishes, but get a handful of new ones. These will include some Tex-Mex-inspired dishes, which will surely please the city's growing ranks of queso fiends. Stupak explains that he used to think Tex-Mex was just "a bastardization of Mexican food with too much cumin in it," but recently learned that a lot of it is influenced by the cuisine of the Canary Islands, which piqued his interest.
Though Cocina reopens on April 28 (give or take a few days, depending on construction), it won't start taking reservations for the tasting menu until May 5, at which point they'll go live on the restaurant's website.
Those are all the concrete plans for now, and it remains to be seen whether Stupak will eventually start serving the tasting menu in the rest of the dining room, or just keep it small. But the chef does reveal a couple more major possibilities for the future: for one, he says he hopes to open an Empellon Taqueria outside of New York City by 2016. And eventually, joining the growing contingent of chefs with fast-casual chains, he hopes to create a "proper fast food version" of his casual taco bar, Al Pastor.
There will be an abbreviated menu, but Jimmy Carbone promises to serve all of the favorites.
Tonight, two weeks and a day after the deadly explosion on 2nd Avenue that destroyed Pommes Frites and forced the shutter of numerous businesses, Jimmy Carbone is reopening his bar and longtime food world hangout Jimmy's No. 43. While Carbone needed to wait for his gas to be turned back on and sign-offs from city agencies like the DOH and the department of buildings (both of which gave their final sign off this afternoon), he told Leonard Lopate last week that he was grateful for the electricity remaining on. It saved the kegs of beer he keeps stored at the bar, some of which he'll serve tonight.
The menu options will be abbreviated while Carbone gets things back up and running, but he promises favorites like beef sliders, shishito peppers, cheese plates, and fries will all be available. Carbone is still selling gift certificates to the bar, as he did during Hurricane Sandy, to help rebuild the capitol lost over the shutter. For those planning to go tonight or this weekend, know that wifi and the phone are still offline, which means it's cash only.
A small outpost of Smorgasburg is landing on the boardwalk for the summer.
Smorgasburg, Brooklyn's premier source of hip food vendors, is opening an outpost on Coney Island this summer. This will be a much smaller Smorgasburg than the ones found in Williamsburg or Brooklyn Bridge Park, with just 12 vendors as opposed to 100. But those vendors will each be stationed in their own shipping container, all lined up along the boardwalk adjacent to 1320 Bowery Street, where the real estate developer Thor Equities is installing 20 or so walls of street art. All of this, as Thor tells the Observer, will come together into some sort of "pop-up summer village."
If anything, this sounds a bit like the SmorgasBar that founder Jonathan Butler and Eric Demby brought to Jones Beach last year, although potentially without the beer garden. No word on who the vendors will be yet.
Meanwhile, lets not forget that Thor is also responsible for bringing a massive outpost of Paul, Donnie, and Mark Wahlberg's burger chain, Wahlburgers, to Coney Island in June. That will be right around the corner from the new Smorg
Last night, some longtime residents of Avenue B projected the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight against a building on East Third Street... and people stopped to watch...
... a lot of people. Including some local firefighters...
A ceremony takes place in the courtyard of the Put Jaw Chinese Temple during the annual Vegetarian Festival in Phuket, Thailand. A wonderful moment, writes Your Shot member Kampol Jindaprom, who visited the temple to pay homage during the nine-day event. It stems from ... belief and faith.
This photo was submitted to Your Shot, our storytelling community where members can take part in photo assignments, get expert feedback, be published, and more. Join now
If you've always wanted to live in something that looks like a contemporary museum with a 7-car garage, keep reading. But first, since you're no fool, we imagine you don't want things you can't have, so you do have $40 million, right? That's how much this dream of yours is going to cost. Take out a second mortgage on your Hamptons pied-à-terre and go for broke! [ more › ]
think i need to go back here to check out the new place
Two months in, here's how things are going at Dirt Candy.
New York's reigning vegetable queen Amanda Cohen packed up her tiny vegetable palace Dirt Candy last August to prepare for a move into a space nearly five times the size on Allen Street. "Big Candy," as Cohen calls it, opened in February, and despite the lead time, Cohen said all of the moving happened last minute, mostly via Uber cars.
Cohen and her team revamped the menu for the move, adding dishes like carrot waffles with mole and jerk style carrots, and large format Brussels sprout tacos. At the new space, Cohen also made the radical decision to do away with tipping, asking her guests to pay a 20 percent service charge instead so she can pay her waiters a consistent salary. Now, a couple months in, Cohen talks with Eater about all that, plus getting reviewed, keeping a sense of humor, and her role in the veggie canon.
How were the first few weeks at Big Candy?
Amanda Cohen: It's a whole new world here. It was a "work-mare," like a nightmare, but all centered around work. When you're a chef I think you have these constantly, where you're in your nightmare, and you're at a job, and you sort of know the job, and you don't understand the job, and the tickets keep coming, and you're being asked to make things that you don't know how to make. You think: but this is the restaurant I work at, what happened? I just came into work today, and there's just more and more people, and more and more tickets. It's a little crazy. It's been really fun.
We moved in really fast, even though we've been talking about moving in for a while. We didn't get gas until the Friday right before we started doing friends and family....we were still cooking at little Dirt Candy and bringing everything over right before service. We thought we were gonna have to do it for the first week. We must have spent like a billion dollars on Uber cars and taxis.
And then finally, one day, we actually just had to move, but instead of being really organized, we basically just brought everything over and shoved it into our basement. And we've been sorta digging ourselves out of that for the last couple weeks. So, on top of opening the restaurant and being busy, we've been just trying to find things. Like, "Do you remember where we put that blender? Did we ever bring that over?"
Did it feel a little bit like when you opened the original Dirt Candy?
It felt exactly like that. All of a sudden, you're like "I don't know how to do my job."
How are things now? Still work-mare-ish?
They're settling down a bit, we've been over for a little over two months, and we're still learning lots of new things everyday. We thankfully now have shelves and a clean basement.
There have been one or two times where I've said: "We've got the hang of it," and then something comes out of the woodwork and kicks you in the ass. We're insanely busy. The whole whole idea was not to have a wait list and now have one that's two months long.
What's the biggest thing that you learned from little Dirt Candy that you're hoping to bring here?
The number one complaint about little Dirt Candy was always that it was the most uncomfortable, awful, tiny restaurant, and you were sitting on your neighbor's lap. So here, we've really built a restaurant for comfort. I want guests to come in and feel like they're taken care of, and that, yes it's filled with people, but you're not sitting on top of your neighbor. I could probably fit in six to eight more tables. but that's not the night out I want to give my customers. I want to give them an adult night out. People are spending their money with us, and I want them to feel like they got their money's worth.
One of the biggest changes here is the new tipping policy. How is that going?
It's been one of the biggest surprises about this place. We sat down with all the servers and were like, "People are gonna be angry, they're gonna be confrontational. These are the lines we want you to say to them, and be honest about you wanting to work here, and that we're not forcing anybody to work here." And it's kinda been a disappointment, almost. Nobody has said anything about the tipping at all. Every day we're like, "Okay, I think this is actually working."
Did you experience any pushback from staff when you told them about the policy?
Nope. Everybody who we talked to was like, "Yeah. Actually, that's really exciting. If I can make my $100 a night consistently, five nights a week, then great." Everybody was very excited about it, which was surprising to me, I thought we'd have a much harder time finding servers, but they were all in. For the most part, everybody who serves here are seasoned servers. They don't feel the need to have the high of a really big tip one night. They're coming into work and they're getting paid, and if we had a blizzard, they'd still get paid. So they seem pretty happy with it.
Is it working out financially in terms of what you wanted to be able to pay your servers? Will it ultimately cover health insurance?
Servers have a higher pay rate than they would, because they're not getting paid $5/hour, which is what you pay servers when you get the tip credit. Our servers are paid a very high living hourly wage, as are my cooks. We're trying to balance it out so it becomes even more equal over time. It doesn't cover health insurance yet, hopefully one day it will. We're not successful enough to do that yet, but that is a goal.
I wanted to do it so I could pay everybody a living wage. It's something that they could depend on, and not have to feel like they had to come in and hustle. My cooks are getting paid really decently. My dishwashers walk in at $15/hour.
Do you feel like it only works in a particular type of restaurant? Could it work everywhere in New York?
I think it could work everywhere. I had this discussion with somebody the other day, and they were like "It would never work in my restaurant." And I'm like, "Why?" People tip at your restaurant. As long as there's tipping, and most people tip anywhere between 18 percent and 22 percent, why wouldn't it work? The only place it might not work is counter service. But any other restaurant in this city, absolutely.
I hope that people take us as an example, and then I hope what I get to do is roll what we're calling the "admin fee" into the prices. We all agree that our food needs to cost more. Every restaurant in this city basically keeps prices artificially low because they get the tip credit. They're expecting their customers to pay the restaurant's employees' wages, or the servers' wages. But if we were more honest, we would all roll that into the cost of the food, and admit that this is how much it costs to run a restaurant, and just go for it.
Going out to eat should be fun, it shouldn't be serious.
What role does humor play in your food, in your approach to running a restaurant, or even with dealing with your staff?
Life should be fun! Going out to eat should be fun, it shouldn't be serious. Like, if you're sitting at a table and talking in hushed tones and you're not laughing, then I'm pretty sure you might be missing out on an experience, and no matter how good I think the food at Dirt Candy is, the most important thing I want somebody to walk away with is "Wow, I had a really good time!" The food is just sort of an adjunct to the good time you're having. We do like to have fun here, because what's the point of being serious, you know? It's a job, if I can't make this fun for everybody, then I don't even want to come to work.
You focus on vegetables more intensely than almost anyone in New York, but you don't fetishize them. Your menus don't say "such and such variety of carrot from such and such farm." What are your thoughts on doing that?
I mean, that's up to every individual restaurant. For me in particular, I think it's actually really intimidating, and I don't want people to be scared of the food when they come, I want them to have fun with it. It's more fun to get a dish that says "carrot," and have this carrot waffle, and pulled carrots in a mole sauce, than something that has this really exotic name and be like, "Oh well, that's just a roasted carrot." Carrot tastes like a carrot, doesn't matter what you call it. And so I guess I feel like I'm being a little bit more honest.
What are your thoughts on local food?
I so admire the restaurants that really work hard at being local. That is tough, and it takes a lot of time, a lot of time to work with all the different farmers and figuring out the menus to go along with it. That's not my goal here. This restaurant's really just about serving vegetables. I still stand behind the fact that all our produce comes in boxes from somewhere, and it all tastes good.
How has the approach to vegetable-focused cuisine and vegetarian cuisine changed in New York since you opened in 2008?
When I opened, vegetables definitely were not trendy, and it was hard for most people to wrap their head around the idea that we were opening a vegetable restaurant, not a vegetarian restaurant. Over the course of the last seven years, what's happened is more and more restaurants, are saying, "Hey, vegetables are something that we want to have fun with, that we want to play with. Let's experiment with it, we're tired of bacon." And you have seen this shift. Seven years ago, all these restaurants that are vegetable-focused couldn't have opened.
I think most people don't think of us as a vegetarian restaurant, they think of us as just a restaurant. A good or a bad restaurant, we're just a restaurant that happens to only serve vegetables. And seven years ago, the mainstream eating crowd, I don't think they felt that. "Oh, that's a vegetarian restaurant, you know? And I'll go with my vegetarian friends." And now most of our customers aren't vegetarians.
Right now, I can barely put my pants on in the morning I'm so tired.
Because there are more places focused on vegetables, how do you feel you have situated yourself in this new canon?
It's been good and bad. All of a sudden, I have all this competition, but that's good, because that keeps us on our toes, right? You sort of have this moment when you notice all these other restaurants getting attention for having vegetable-focused menus where you're like "[gasp] Am I good enough? Can I compete with all these great chefs?" Seven years ago, I probably would have crumpled up and cried. But we've been doing this for long enough that we know we make unique food, and we have a unique idea about food, and how we like to present it, and there's definitely enough room for all of us here.
Is there a particular vegetable dish that's flying out of the kitchen?
Yeah, the Brussels sprout tacos. We really wanted to make shared dishes, that would be substantial enough. It's not like a small-plate shared dish, but a large-format shared dish, and it took us a while to figure out how we could do this. We have a sizzling stone, and it comes to the table, and it's hot, and the whole room starts to smell like the sizzling brussels sprouts, and there's something about it that's kind of magical.
Will the menu will change with the seasons?
Yeah, I'm hoping to change it. Right now, I can barely put my pants on in the morning I'm so tired. So... [laughs]....when we thought we were gonna open this restaurant in November, we thought we'd have at least four to five months with this menu that we could just get settled in with before we start changing things. And now all of a sudden, spring is here.
When Pete Wells originally came to the old Dirt Candy, you had no idea that he was in the restaurant whatsoever. What are your thoughts on the reviewing process and on being re-reviewed?
When Pete Wells came into Dirt Candy, I wasn't expecting it at all. We had already been opened for about four years, so I figured we were off the radar for all reviewers. We sort of caught him at the very, very end of his dessert on the last night that he came in. And I was like, "Ohh..."
You want to have an honest discussion with the reviewer. Really. Getting reviewed isn't about getting the most stars possible.
It was actually one of the best things that happened to us at little Dirt Candy....having him give us such a gracious, lovely review, and not knowing he was there...I think we all felt like, "Wow, we're just doing our job, and we did it well enough." As opposed to, "Oh my god, we know a critic's here, let's all try really hard and make the most perfect plate of food, and that's the plate of food he's gonna get, and nobody else is gonna get that perfect plate of food." He just got the food that we served.
Here, it's very different. It was a much bigger opening than I thought it was gonna be, and we are now terrified we are going to get reviewed. I hope I'll be relaxed. I'll probably be crying, bawling behind the stove going, "We can't do this, let's just shut down! Set the place on fire! Let's close down for the night!" I hope we'll be relaxed enough. It is what it is.
You want to have an honest discussion with the reviewer. Getting reviewed isn't about getting the most stars possible, I really don't think so. I think it is a conversation that you have where you're like, "Oh, this is what we did really good, this is some other things maybe we could do even better, let's keep trying."
One of the best things I think that could happen in cities is if restaurants got re-reviewed more often. So you had a chance to keep proving yourself, and not have one review that stands forever.
When things do calm down, what's the next project you are dreaming of?
I think the goal is maybe to take this concept somewhere else. Not do it again in New York City, but to have smaller or different versions of this in other places, maybe warm. Warm places that I go to for the winter.
Movie theater popcorn seems ripe for collaboration with legendary snack-aisle items. Think about how fantastic a Cool Ranch-flavored popcorn would taste—and then remember how much better it’d make the experience of actually going to the movies. Creativity on that level…
And here is some of the official news release on the mural via wall curators Goldman Properties:
Jessica Goldman Srebnick, CEO of Goldman Properties, creators of the international outdoor street art museum, the Wynwood Walls, in Miami, has announced that Ron English will be the next artist whose work will adorn their famed Houston Bowery Wall in lower Manhattan. English joins an elite group of artists Goldman Properties has personally curated to paint one of the most sought after mural walls in the United States.
Describing his work as “Popaganda” – a mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, from superhero mythology to totems of art history and his own original characters, English has enjoyed a successful career as a street artist as well as a fine artist. He will begin working on the Wall on Friday April 17 and the mural, entitled All American Temper Tot, is expected to be completed by Wednesday, April 22.
… and here's a photo from late yesterday afternoon via EVG contributor James Maher…
In many professional jobs, expectations that one be an “ideal worker”—fully devoted to and available for the job, with no personal responsibilities or interests that interfere with this commitment to work—are widespread. We often think of problems with these expectations as women’s problems. But men too may struggle with them: my research at a top strategy consulting firm, first published in Organization Science, revealed that many men experienced these expectations as difficult to fulfill or even distasteful. To be sure, some men seemed to happily comply with the firm’s expectations, working long hours and traveling constantly, but a majority were dissatisfied. They complained to me of children crying when they missed their soccer games, of poor health and substance addictions caused by how they worked, and of a general sense of feeling “overworked and underfamilied.”
Many of these men acted on their feelings, finding different ways to resist the firm’s expectations that they be ideal workers. How they resisted shaped their futures at the firm in important ways: some men made small, under-the-radar changes to their work that allowed them to pull back, while still “passing” as the work-devoted superheroes the firm valued. Others were more transparent about their difficulties, and asked the firm for help in pulling back. Their efforts resulted in harsh penalties and marginalization.
Superman Doesn’t Get Time Off
I studied a global strategy consulting firm with a strong U.S. presence. Like many such firms, the firm I studied offered advisory services in multiple areas of expertise, and relied on small teams to complete client projects over a period of weeks to months. As is common in the industry, consultants were expected to be available for overnight travel to client sites, and to work evenings and weekends on short notice. I gathered interviews with more than 100 people at this firm, as well as performance data and internal HR documents.
At this firm, people believed that success indeed required ideal-worker-like devotion. Many reported 60- to 80-hour weeks, with little control over when those hours were worked and whether they might have to travel. Work was expected to come ahead of other life responsibilities. For example, a Partner told me:
I will sometimes have to get calls on Sunday nights. Sometimes, I have to do calls on Saturday mornings. So the weekend is not sacrosanct. If the client needs me, I will generally take [the call]. And you know when the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there. In the consulting—in the professional services industry, generally—you don’t really have the latitude of saying “I can’t really be there.” And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my—my son had a Cub Scout meeting.
Junior consultants also felt they were expected to devote themselves to work in this way. For example, a Junior Manager told me:
Our email program has a time client built into it. So you can actually see in your email box who’s online and who’s not. And there’s an implicit culture [here] that if you don’t see somebody on at the same time at a certain hour of the night, you’re wondering what the heck they are doing.
Those who succeeded in this environment were lauded by colleagues as “stars” and “superheroes.” For instance, in describing his colleagues, one Partner told me, “It’s just the thing about consultancy — I mean you run into bankers and consultants at the business school — I’m always reminded of that REM song — Superman — right, that’s what we all are.”
While women, particularly mothers, were expected to have trouble with these expectations, and the firm offered women many types of formal accommodations such as part-time work or internal roles, generally, the firm expected that men were willing and able to comply with its demands that they be ideal workers.
Two Strategies for Cutting Back
My research revealed that men were just as likely as women to have trouble with these “always on” expectations. However, men often coped with these demands in ways that differed strikingly. Women who had trouble with the work hours tended to simply to take formal accommodations, reducing their work hours, but also revealing their inability to be true ideal workers, and they were consequently marginalized within the firm. In contrast, many men found unobtrusive, under-the-radar ways to alter the structure of their work (such as cultivating mostly local clients, or building alliances with other colleagues), such that they could work predictable schedules in the 50 to 60 hour range. In doing so, they were able to work far less than those who fully devoted themselves to work, and had greater control over when and where those hours were worked, yet were able to “pass” as ideal workers, evading penalties for their noncompliance.
One man who passed was Lloyd (a pseudonym), a Senior Manager. Lloyd was deeply skeptical about the necessity of being an ideal worker, and was unwilling to fully comply with this expectation. He described to me how, by using local clients, telecommuting, and controlling information about his whereabouts, he found ways to work and travel less, without being found out. He told me: “I skied five days last week. I took calls in the morning and in the evening but I was able to be there for my son when he needed me to be, and I was able to ski five days in a row.” He clarified that these were work days, not vacation days: “No, no one knows where I am…. Those boundaries are only practical with my local client base.… Especially because we’re mobile, there are no boundaries.” Despite his deviance from the ideal worker expectation, however, senior colleagues viewed him as a star; indeed, one Partner described him to me as a “rising star,” who worked “much harder than” he himself did. This assessment—in combination with Lloyd’s top performance rating and his promotion to Partner that year—suggests he had successfully passed in the eyes of senior members of the firm as an ideal worker.
While Lloyd’s ability to pass was rooted in the type of client projects he took on, other people’s abilities to pass were rooted in close personal relationships with colleagues. In these relationships, people felt able to share their unwillingness to devote themselves to work and collaborated to find ways to avoid overwork. Indeed, one whole team that I interviewed seemed to mostly reveal their unwillingness to work constantly to each other, yet passed to the broader community of the firm. They traveled little, worked reasonable days (e.g., 9-5) and often worked from home, without apparent penalty. One Partner within this team told me:
We kind of have a shared agreement as to what work–life balance is on our team. We basically work really closely with each other to make sure that we can all do that. A lot of us have young kids, and we’ve designed it so we can do that. We’ve really designed the whole business [unit] around having intellectual freedom, making a lot of money, [and] having work–life balance. It’s pretty rare. And we don’t get pushback from above because we are squaring that circle—from the managing partners— ’cause we are one of the most successful parts of the company. Most of the partners have no idea our hours are that light.
But not all men who resisted the firm’s mode of working did so in ways that permitted passing: some men asked for the firm’s help in reducing their work hours, including requesting access to the same accommodations typically proffered to women. These men were treated very differently from the men who managed to pass: they were marginalized and penalized, in the same ways that women who reveal work-family conflict have long been. For example, Doug, a Junior Manager, told me how, following an assignment that involved several months overseas, he had formally requested a U.S.-based project in order to be close to his family, which included two young children:
I told the firm, you know I don’t think I can go back to [country] again. And if that means I’m going to have to look for something else, I’m going to look for something else. And, that was kind of what resulted in the non-promotion, because they said, “Well, you’ll probably get it if you stay out there.”
Doug’s story later arose during an interview I conducted with Barry, a Senior Manager who had worked on the same assignment. Barry told me, “Doug’s wife didn’t want him to [work overseas] but he did it anyway and that was a much different experience for him.… He stayed for about five months and then came back, and refused to go back again.” Barry identified his own choice to work overseas as an opportunity that had signaled his personal commitment to the firm and had played an important role in setting him up for a promotion. Thus, the man who happily went overseas was promoted; the man who publicly cut his stay short because of his family was denied a promotion.
Indeed, for men, revealing that one was unwilling to devote oneself wholly to work could be very costly. Michael, a Junior Manager with young children, told me:
When my daughter was born, one of the things I wanted to do was take off three months and do the full FMLA and be a stay-at-home Dad.… I felt like this was the only time in my career I would be able to do this.… But the original reaction I actually got inside of the firm was “oh no, you can’t take three months off.”
Faced with intense resistance within the firm, Michael settled for just six weeks of unpaid leave. When he returned to the office following this leave, he also returned to the expected mode of working: he worked very long hours, travelling weekly, for the rest of the year. Yet, he found that “people still talked like I was out three months.” At his annual review he was told that the firm could not properly evaluate him because the six weeks he had taken off meant he “had this big donut hole in [his] year.” He consequently did not receive a hoped-for promotion, and his performance rating fell from what it had been the year before. In a subsequent conversation, Michael reflected to me, “no one questioned my commitment until I had a family.”
Intriguingly, the pushback men received for asking for time away from work seemed limited to time for family: one man who had since left the firm told me that, when his daughter was born he had been harassed for taking two weeks of paternity leave, despite spending some of that leave working. But when, later that year, he and his family took a three-week vacation to an exotic locale, the vacation was permitted, and his team encouraged him to “unplug” and take a real vacation. This disparity in treatment seems, at one level, ridiculous, but at another level, entirely consistent with the firm’s expectation that men be ideal workers: taking on mundane responsibilities in one’s family life can threaten one’s devotion to work, while affording an expensive vacation may be instead contingent upon devotion to and success at work.
Implications for How We Organize Our Work
Thus, like women, many men in professional jobs also experience difficulties with demands that they be ideal workers, and like women, men who express these challenges and seek the firm’s help to redress them face resistance and penalties. What seems to differ is that many men are able to stray while passing as fully devoted.
For people in demanding professional jobs, passing may seem like a tempting strategy. After all, passing allows one to avoid long, often unnecessary work hours, without eliciting any penalty. Career-wise, it is certainly less costly than transparency. Yet passing may not be possible for everyone. Passing effectively requires both strong relationships within the firm and the networks necessary to find local clients, and not everyone has equally strong relationships or networks. In addition, women’s work time may be under greater scrutiny than men’s: people at this firm seemed to assume that women who left the office around five went home to their children, while men who left around the same time could be, in the words of one administrative assistant “on the way to a client’s.” Thus, it may be more difficult for women to find ways to slip under the radar than men.
More importantly, however, passing is not a good strategy for the organization as a whole: not only does it involve an element of deception between colleagues, bosses, and subordinates, it also perpetuates the myth that those who are successful are also all wholly devoted to work. Yet, a critical implication of this research is that working long hours is not necessary for high quality work. The experiences of those men who passed show clearly that, even in a client service setting, it is possible to reorganize work such that it is more predictable and consumes fewer hours.
Leaders of organizations, however, who are already invested in how things work, and who themselves likely made many personal sacrifices to advance, may have trouble accepting the possibility that there might be another way to work. Indeed, when I reported my findings to the organization I studied, I was met with two responses: (1) a response that “these men”—those who revealed their lack of desire to be always available for and primarily committed to their work—were not the sort of men they really wanted anyway; and (2) a request to figure out how they might teach women to pass. The broader implication—that the organization itself might alter its expectations—was lost.
Editor’s note: Names and some identifying details in this piece have been changed.
Get ready, because Canal Street by the bridge will likely become its own bus depot in due course. Two of the largest curbside operators in the game – both problem companies in their own right – have laid claim to the northern fork of the boulevard (between Bowery and Chrystie). Fung Wah and Lucky Star […]
His mugshot is taped to seemingly every surface from the Battery to the Bowery and all points north. Dan Perino seriously wants a girlfriend, and the ambitious flyer push has forever seared his face on the collective memory of the city. We caught up with the 51-year-old aspiring actor early yesterday morning during one of […]
The perennially delayed 2nd Avenue subway project has always been a chimerical creature, disappearing and reappearing in New Yorkers' collective consciousness for generations. But now it appears as if the dream is finally becoming a reality, at least in part—MTA chairman Tom Prendergast says that unless Governor Cuomo can close the MTA's $15 billion capital program chasm, the much-anticipated 2nd Avenue line won't extend from 96th Street to 125th Street in Harlem. [ more › ]
If poetry is good enough for the likes of Bill Murray and Anthony Weiner, it's certainly good enough for us. This week, the MTA Arts & Design and the Poetry Society of America set up poetry booths for the public at the MTA’s Fulton Center for Poetry in Motion: The Poet Is In. In celebration of National Poetry Month, over 20 poets (accompanied by musicians from the MTA’s Music Under New York program) assembled with typewriters on Thursday to write poems on the spot for anyone who wanted one. [ more › ]
Photograph by Gordon Tait, National Geographic Your Shot
This is what happens when you leave a GoPro out on the sea ice, writes Your Shot member Gordon Tait, who captured a series of time-lapses with the HD camera system while running an ocean acidification experiment near Casey Station, Antarctica. We often get groups of Adlie penguins coming to see what were doing, and this one was trying to peck the camera.
This photo was submitted to Your Shot, our storytelling community where members can take part in photo assignments, get expert feedback, be published, and more. Join now »
i really want to go for his dessert tasting menu here
The menu and the new Cocina debut April 28.
Empellon Cocina, the least casual of Alex Stupak's three Manhattan Mexican restaurants, is closed right now, and East Village passersby will note that the windows are papered over. But this, Grub Street reports, is only temporary. Stupak is currently sprucing up the three-year-old restaurant in ways he doesn't specify, but promises will make the space " feel a lot lighter, warmer, and friendlier."
For the next couple weeks, while that sprucing up is under way, the former wd~50 pastry chef turned Mexican food nerd will also be developing a brand new tasting menu, which he'll debut when Cocina reopens on April 28. It promises to clock in at around 18 courses, most of which, Stupak says, will be "eaten with the hands." Those courses will include things like trout skin flautas, and masa waffles topped with smoked maple syrup, chicken liver butter, and cured, grated chicken live. No word on how much it will cost, but Eater is on the case. In all likelihood, it won't be cheap.
Stupak has been serving a dessert tasting menu at the restaurant for about a year now, and over the years has served the occasional tasting menu through Push Project, his series of collaborative dinners with chefs like Grant Achatz. But this will be the first time he's offered a regular tasting menu at any of his restaurants. In fact, Stupak once told Eater's own Ryan Sutton that, though he had toyed with the idea of doing a tasting menu at Cocina early on, he had nixed the idea because "A real fine dining concept would have been wrong here. Service would be poor and overtaxed and costs would be repellent. I wanted this to be a place that the neighborhood would embrace."
Clearly, he's had something of a change of heart. But he will still serve an a la carte menu (which is also being revamped), and he plans to start the tasting menu off really slow, serving it to just one table a night. Only if things go well will he consider offering it to more.
[UPDATE BELOW] Now that the 7 train has made its triumphant return to nearly regular service, the L train is ready to start playing games with your weekend subway travel. Do you live in North Brooklyn? Do you like North Brooklyn? You better like it, because you're stuck there until mid-May. They fixed up that McCarren Park hipster swamp just in time. [ more › ]
i'll never understand anything about Japanese pop culture
Every year, the town of Kawasaki, Japan hosts Kanamara Matsuri, or the Festival of the Steel Phallus. It’s a Shinto fertility festival that takes place on the first Sunday in April every year. According to Notes of Nomads, legend states…
A lawyer and a blonde are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The lawyer leans over to her and asks if she would like to play a fun game. The blonde just wants to take a nap, so she politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks.
The lawyer persists and explains that the game is really easy and a lot of fun. He explains "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5, and visa-versa." Again, she politely declines and tries to get some sleep.
The lawyer, now somewhat agitated, says, "Okay, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I will pay you $50!" figuring that since she is a blonde that he will easily win the match. This catches the blonde's attention and, figuring that there will be no end to this torment unless she plays, agrees to the game.
The lawyer asks the first question. "What's the distance from the earth to the moon?" The blonde doesn't say a word, reaches in to her purse, pulls out a five-dollar bill and hands it to the lawyer.
Now, it's the blonde's turn. She asks the lawyer: "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down with four?" The lawyer looks at her with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the Net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends E-mails to all his coworkers and friends he knows. All to no avail. After over an hour, he wakes the blonde and hands her $50. The blonde politely takes the $50 and turns away to get back to sleep.
The lawyer, who is more than a little miffed, wakes the blonde and asks, "Well, so what is the answer!?" Without a word, the blonde reaches into her purse, hands the lawyer $5, and goes back to sleep.
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If you've always wanted to live in something that looks like a contemporary museum with a 7-car garage, keep reading. But first, since you're no fool, we imagine you don't want things you can't have, so you do have $40 million, right? That's how much this dream of yours is going to cost. Take out a second mortgage on your Hamptons pied-à-terre and go for broke! [ 
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If poetry is good enough for the likes of 
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![[UPDATE] L Train Will Go Poof For 5 Weekends Starting NEXT FRIDAY](http://gothamist.com/attachments/nyc_arts_john/022814subway_restrict_width_110.jpg)
[UPDATE BELOW] Now that the 7 train has 
