Natasha Pickowicz - Pandemic Update
August 25, 2020
Over the years, this interview project has helped me understand the myriad ways in which work defines a life, shaping it for the better and sometimes for the worse. A job can be a lifeline. It can be a dream stretched long and taut into a career. It can be a set of constraints. It can energize, demoralize, exhaust, and empower, sometimes all at once. When the coronavirus began to upend life in the United States in early March, work as we know it was disrupted. People abruptly lost their jobs, employees were told to turn their apartments into offices, and whole industries went dormant. Other previously overlooked workers became “essential,” though their low pay did not suddenly grow to reflect their new importance. In this period of crisis, I wanted to speak with some of the women featured in past Conversations to find out how the pandemic has affected their daily lives and identities.
The protests against police brutality and racial injustice that swept the US this summer also forced me to consider the ways I have failed to address race and racism both in private conversations and through this project. These updates offered a chance to ask better questions and rectify past omissions. I’m grateful for the opportunity and thankful to the women who shared their time and thoughts with me. This series has often felt like an exercise in map-making. When so many things feel uncertain, these real-time updates have helped me imagine new paths we might chart forward.
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Natasha and I first caught up in May, when COVID-19 cases were at a record high in New York City. She had been furloughed from her job as pastry chef in March when most restaurants were forced to shutter or pivot to take-out only menus. She was spending most of her time alone, watching the food world shrink dramatically. In June protests against racial injustice and inequality sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and other Black Americans began to spread across the country and around the world. The public reckoning over anti-Blackness and white supremacy in the U.S. forced me to contend with my own failures to directly engage race and racism in this project. A Conversations update that didn’t address the uprisings felt wrong. Natasha and I spoke again in July and August. We discussed her experience as a biracial Asian American in an industry and culture that centers whiteness and toxic masculinity. I am grateful to Natasha for the vulnerability, grace, and honesty she brought to our ongoing dialogue.
This interview took place via email; it has been edited and condensed. I photographed Natasha at the garden rooftop of the Vice offices in early August when she was preparing for the final installment of her Never Ending Taste pop-up at Superiority Burger. Proceeds from each event were donated to charities that work at the intersection of food and racial justice.
May 2020
Georgia Hilmer: I know that you have been out of work since early March when Matter House, the restaurant group you worked for, had to close all of its restaurants due to the pandemic. Can you talk a little bit about the day that you found out you would no longer be able to do your job? What was that first week of forced time-off like?
Natasha Pickowicz: The time leading up to NYC's restaurants shuttering on March 16 feel almost dreamlike to me now. The last month or so I've settled into a rhythm that is much more stable but back then every single day was so different. The protocol was changing at such a fast pace and the volume of news I was taking in was crushing me. The fear was very overwhelming and physical. So many people I knew around me were getting sick.
The last day I worked, which was Saturday March 14, I had worked fourteen days in a row. Mentally I was feeling very tapped. But it was a pace that I was used to, that we are all used to, so I don't even think I recognized that state of being as exhaustion — it was the norm for me. In fact, the morale and spirits in the kitchen on my last day were really, really high. Everyone was extra kind and gentle with each other. The last day I worked, the kitchen made spaghetti and meatballs for family meal. You could really taste how much love had been put into it. Those were the moments that kept me going.
Two days later I received an email saying I was put on furlough. I knew it was coming but it still felt shocking. That whole week was really hard. I was trying to process my own feelings and also attempt to make room for everybody else's. Most of my friends in the city also work in hospitality so it felt like everyone I knew became unemployed on the same day. A lot of sleepless nights that first week. I was going on walks but not wearing masks, which of course is impossible for me to imagine now.
How has the shuttering of Flora and Café Altro Paradiso affected your sense of identity as a chef and a leader? Much of our first conversation for this project emphasized community and the ways you prioritize the well-being of your team of pastry cooks. How have those people been affected by the shut down? Has the pandemic changed the way you think about your work community or about the restaurant community on a broader scale?
I think being as transparent as I can be about my own experience is important for stabilizing and authenticating new forms of community and leadership. I have always tried to be frank about traumas I have witnessed in this industry and I take my role as a leader/mentor to others really seriously. Now the pandemic is freshly reminding everyone of the many weaknesses and flaws of how this industry fundamentally operates and protects its staff. I mean this is the same industry that paid me $11 an hour as a pastry cook when I was in my late 20s, the same industry that forces young women to take trains home at 1 AM, the same industry that still feeds off of toxic masculinity and lame chef-worship tropes. It's really absurd when you think about it, how hard people have to work to not just survive but also grow in this industry, but then ultimately how little power and control they really have when everything crumbles and is taken away from them. I don't have any answers but I think that adapting to this new moment will be crucial for moving forward. Watching new forms of leadership emerge during this time that are more intimate, vulnerable, and community-centric has been very motivating for me personally.
I've had a group text for my pastry team going for a few years now and despite the pandemic we've happily stayed in touch. The group text morphed from a pragmatic schedule/recipe/forecast back-and-forth to a more gentle and friendly thread. We share photos of what we're baking with each other or send recommendations for TV shows and podcasts. Even though I'm not anyone's chef right now, I think it's important that we check in with each other and at least strive for a little connection and normalcy.
The pandemic has definitely made me reexamine the efficacy of larger restaurant structures. I find the pastry community here in NYC very supportive and nurturing and I have always felt so grateful for that. I have close friends in major restaurant groups like Stephen Starr and Made Nice and USHG — hearing their struggles really reminds me that this is truly happening to everyone in our industry. It's staggering. It's hard to comprehend, to be honest.
Pre-coronavirus, you ate most of your meals at the restaurants where you worked or at friends’ establishments. What is it like to cook every meal for yourself in your home-kitchen? What are you eating lately?
Before we went into quarantine, if I had a day off I would usually have a day of epic back-to-back eating and drinking. Like Russ & Daughters then Scarr's then Fanelli then People's and then Leo. Or King and then Raoul’s and then Ear Inn and then Odeon. Or Bemelman's and then Flora and then Donahues or JG Melon. A week before quarantine I had lunch at Gramercy Tavern, walked to MoMa, had a martini at The Grill, and then dinner at Achilles Heel. It is a little outrageous when I see it written out like that, but god do I love going out and a little revelry. It was how I liked to spend a day off — there was always so much to eat and drink with great company.
So yes, cooking for myself is definitely getting a little tedious! There's not a lot of decadence in my home cooking so I miss restaurant gluttony for sure. It's all very clean. At home I do a lot of batch cooking. I'll make big batches of steamed rice, legumes, quick pickles, cured fish, salsas, jams, iced tea, farro salads, granola and stocks. I bought 10 pounds of carrots and processed them all into sticks for snacking. I buy lots of vegetables and fruit from Natoora, Martin, Bodhitree, and Norwich. I almost completely cut out meat and seafood and alcohol, and I went from tasting sugar all day long to maybe just one treat at night.
I have had very little delivery food, so I could tell you, in great detail, every meal I've eaten that was not cooked by me in the last seven weeks: pepperoni pizza and avocado toast and cold brew from Leo; cheeseburgers and sushi from Hillstone; Baja style burritos and maybe the best margarita I've ever had from Achilles Heel. All of these moments were separated by literal weeks of healthy cooking and crappy coffee made at home. When I taste restaurant food now I feel like my palate goes OFF from the salt and the fat and grease. It just tastes so so so so delicious to me. It's fireworks. Same with wine. Wine is so great! I savor every sip!
The future seems more impossible to predict than ever. Still, lots of journalists and industry veterans and politicians are weighing in on the question of what the restaurant industry might look like once the pandemic subsides. Do you have any new ideas about what comes next for NY restaurants? Has the shutdown illuminated particular problems for you or offered unexpected solutions? On a personal level, how do you envision your return to the kitchen? Is it a forgone conclusion — business as usual — or a role reimagined?
I am very, very, very blessed that this quarantine has given me the gift of time to reflect and re-strategize. I have tried to reroute energy to new personal projects like writing and painting and recipe testing. In the past I used my work schedule as an excuse not to pursue any side projects or hobbies. I felt like Cinderella sometimes, the errands and special events and deadlines and meetings just kept piling on and on and on. Then at the end of the day I would barely have enough energy to brush my teeth, let alone work on anything extra. I say this with no resentment; I feel like you kind of buy into that kind of commitment and intensity when you start cooking in NYC. Like so many New Yorkers, my apartment was just an expensive little hole where I would sleep and gear up to go back out into the world. I have no fancy kitchen equipment, no computer, no TV, no wifi, no outdoor space, no car. When I had the city to keep me entertained, I wanted my home environment to be as serene and removed of stimuli as possible. Now that my studio is my whole world, I definitely wish I had more of the creature comforts and facilities to help me work!
Like everyone else, I don't really know what the future for NYC restaurants will look like but I do know that our jobs, as they existed before, no longer exist. Whenever my return to restaurants happens, my job and responsibilities will be changed and transformed by the pandemic. I totally accept that and I'm ready to look toward the future. The ways that we worked before are no longer appropriate. The systems and expectations and foundation of everything will have to adapt. I think it is really great that restaurants have become so responsive to serving their community in other ways, like donating meals to hospitals and food banks. I'm definitely inspired by the tenacity of the independent restaurant community, despite the staggering obstacles and challenges ahead.
How are you thinking of power in the wake of the pandemic-caused industry-flattening? Who are you looking to for leadership and community action?
Oh, thinking about power — who wields it, how, and why — is probably my main source of anxiety and stress. It is a topic I have always been obsessed with, turning it over and over in my mind and examining it from as many angles as possible. Possessing power, subconsciously or not, and holding yourself accountable are giant responsibilities and require tons of sensitivity and empathy.
I have been so, so lucky to feel (mostly) safe and secure during this pandemic. I am not working but I will someday. I can go outside and at most feel medium levels of stress when it starts to get dark out. I have access to fresh food and internet and laundry. I can pay rent, I can order delivery as a treat, I don't have to take public transportation. There are so many New Yorkers who don't have these privileges and are powerless. These systems of oppression, racism, and fear flourish in our society and also in the service industry. Everyone is so sentimental for restaurants right now, but can we also admit that it was sometimes toxic and brutal, too? We have said goodbye to so many class and power-oriented tics in restaurant culture: a printed VIP status on a ticket, waves of comped dishes (free food for notables or influencers), $200 tasting menus, an appalling lack of racial and gender diversity on lists written by "arbiters" like Michelin or San Pellegrino. All of these are tools used to reinforce status and power and a cis white male-dominated narrative.
I see writers like Hannah Goldfield from the New Yorker pivoting her coverage to highlight minority-owned businesses or DIY pop-ups and I feel so encouraged to see an influential, mainstream magazine purposefully and thoughtfully shift away from covering monolithic fine dining culture. I see women like Moonlynn Tsai of Kopitiam putting in incredible amounts of time and energy to serve senior Chinese communities. I see business owners like Paige of Archestratus Books working so hard to provide nutritious, affordable food to her neighborhood and doing it without any desire for recognition or accolades. These are the people I look up to. These are the people who are redefining power as more gentle and less self-serving. I've been thinking a lot more about a true multi-purpose community space — not just a restaurant but a place to gather, discuss, share ideas and resources, to socialize and to learn, stripped of ego and power. I'm still holding hope that there may be a way forward that will make this possible.
August 2020
Your mom is Chinese, your dad is a white American, and you grew up in San Diego. Could you talk a little bit about your own racial consciousness as a young person? How did food inform or reflect your family identity?
This is a big and complicated question, one that I am examining more than ever during this time of self-reflection and isolation! I am a biracial Chinese American but white passing. I’m also an only child and our family was very much a tight-knit unit of three; outside of visits to China I had very little communication with my Chinese relatives when I was growing up. When I was little, my parents sent me to Chinese school — a weekend school for Chinese-American kids to improve their Mandarin fluency — but I felt very lonely. I had a really hard time making friends and begged my parents to let me leave. I definitely didn’t feel Chinese enough there.
My childhood and young adulthood was spent batting away these sorts of careless observations: “But you don’t look that Chinese,” “You seem more white,” “You looked more Chinese when you were little,” and so on. (I still get these comments way too often). I dealt with this ignorant, casually racist line of thinking with a lot of self-effacement and jokes, often at the expense of my own self-esteem and confidence. In high school checking the “ethnicity” boxes during the college application process was a very fraught experience — am I white, am I Asian? What am I, anyway? A fraud? A liar?? I’d have a crush on a guy, only to have him ask the dreaded “What am I” question and then feel the disappointment tumbling down around me. I’d notice that someone I was dating had a history of dating only Asian or Eurasian women, and it would make me feel like a cliche, a collectable item. Biracial Asian women have some cachet culturally and I was so insecure that it felt like a compliment rather than the exotification that it really was.
In college I embraced my Chinese heritage much more — I fell in love with contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese directors like Wong Kar Wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien, I enrolled in Mandarin language and worked my ass off, I traveled to China for the first time without my parents, and I started telling people that my middle name, Lee, my mother’s Westernized last name, was really Li, her true family name.
Sometimes I still feel self-conscious around my Chinese friends who can order better in restaurants, speak in Mandarin with their parents, and have a bond that I feel like I cannot penetrate. Culturally I know that I am not the same and every day is a reckoning with this deep feeling of lack or “less than” — simply not being enough of one thing or another, and feeling like an imposter, dislocated from both worlds. Being biracial is its own clique, too — I relate pretty strongly to my other biracial friends, who grew up in mixed households, have frizzy hair and unexpected freckles, and have to manage multiple cultural heritages and expectations.
Food of course is a powerful piece of this story. My mother is a phenomenal cook. She immigrated to San Diego after marrying my father in China; many of my childhood culinary memories are of traditional, simple Chinese dishes: steamed vegetables, braised chicken drumsticks in ginger and garlic, pans of fried rice dotted with lap cheong and spring peas. We celebrated Western holidays like Christmas with Chinese hot pot and on the weekends we ate pan-fried noodles and dumplings at canteens on Convoy St., a heavily Chinese strip in San Diego. As I grew older and my mother became more Westernized herself, we started eating other kinds of dishes that reflected her love of fresh California cuisine.
Now that I cook professionally, I find that food has become a powerful channel to access my Chinese roots. I uphold my favorite of our family’s traditions (annual hot pot parties), actively seek out Chinese peers in food circles, and support Chinese restaurants and chefs. I feel a lot of pride today around that part of my identity.
I have noticed that in profiles and pieces that celebrate you as a pastry chef and activist, your identity as a biracial woman is rarely acknowledged. To you does that feel like a deliberate omission or an example of the food media’s reluctance to engage with matters of race — or maybe something else entirely?
I think because I seem “white passing” — and have a “white” last name, Pickowicz — strangers/media may not even think I’m Chinese? Or that I am not Chinese “enough” to be worth mentioning? Or perhaps journalists feel uncomfortable asking me? I don’t know. I wish it came up more. It rarely does.
I hope that food journalists will work much harder to identify cultural appropriation and tokenism in NYC kitchens, particularly in fine dining. I’ve seen it in so many restaurants, not just the ones I’ve worked in, this very casual appropriation of techniques, dishes, and flavors not being put in the proper context or acknowledged as Chinese, all in pursuit of Western ideals and for a Western palate. There are many egregious examples — the closing of the whitewashed “Lucky Lee’s,” the horrifying racism and xenophobia being hurled at Chinese restaurant owners due to COVID-19 — but often it is more subtle and nuanced, tricky to identify, even trickier to discuss and reform. Part of my struggle as a biracial person is that I have a hard time feeling Chinese “enough” to point any of this out to my peers.
Recently, I’ve taken more agency around broadcasting my Chinese heritage to the world — I’m contributing an essay to Doris Ho-Kane’s forthcoming book Asian Women: Trailblazers and Luminaries, which will shine a light on Asian and Asian American womxn: disruptors, artists, musicians, and politicians. I was honored to donate to Heart of Dinner, an initiative led by two brilliant Asian womxn working against the stigma and discrimination that people of Asian descent face, particularly in the wake of the pandemic and misinformation surrounding the spread of COVID-19. Earlier this summer I was part of the Kitchen Rodeo “Cooking For Equity” series, which featured Asian American chefs cooking in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. This pandemic has destabilized a lot of good will towards Asian communities in NYC, which makes me feel more strongly than ever that I have to use my platform to communicate how important my Chinese heritage is to me.
Community and accountability are major topics of conversation as more and more food world figures are called out for failing their audiences and employees when it comes to being actively anti-racist, championing diversity, and creating healthy, equitable workplaces. We have talked about the pressure to respond to each new offense as it surfaces and how the speed at which social media churns can make reflection and processing nearly impossible. How are you thinking about your responsibility to your own audience? How vocal do you feel compelled to be right now?
I do feel a tremendous responsibility to address these topics but it is tangled with a sometimes crippling anxiety and stress. I acknowledge that there are many young cooks and peers that appreciate my candor and willingness to go into these tough spaces. That is part of being actively anti-racist, to speak up when so many have stayed silent. But the emotional labor that surrounds that kind of vulnerability is really, really overwhelming and hard. So I oscillate between the two states – spurts of rants that I publish online followed by long periods of self-doubt and isolation and recovery.
I was shattered after I read the news about former Planned Parenthood NYC CEO Laura McQuade’s racism, bullying, and greed behind closed doors. I scrambled to turn my anger into an Instagram story and was blown away by the quality of sensitive responses I received. After reading so many other narratives of abuse in the workplace, I shared a few of my own experiences with kitchen abuse online, and received a torrent of responses from peers who had been through similar or worse. I screen-shotted them all and put them in a special folder in my phone. Their testimony is so precious and sacred! It is very cathartic, that bonding together, that swapping of intimacies, but it is exhausting.
Luckily I have a very brilliant and generous group of friends that will have rigorous conversations with me in private. Figuring out how to distill those conversations into statements that I can share online is hard but necessary. My “tone” online has always pushed joyful/exuberant/positive expressions of empowerment but behind the scenes sometimes I worry my cynicism and anger is making me brittle and bitter. Reconciling these two sides of me is the difficult work that I do every day, need to do better, and will continue to do.
I also want to point out that many kitchen exposes of the #MeToo era in 2017 relied on anonymous testimony from womxn who feared retribution (including in the case of my former restaurant group Matter House and ousted restaurateur and abuser Thomas Carter). This summer when the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement was gaining traction, I was incredibly inspired by the many BIPOC Bon Appetit staffers who testified against racism and boldly used their names to punctuate their claims, as well as the bold first-person accounts from womxn like Angela Dimayuga. So brave! I aspire to that level of transparency and vulnerability.
In optimistic moments, language that centers family-like relationships is used to describe restaurant and food work, as in “my kitchen family” or “this place feels like home.” What do you make of that kind of vocabulary now, when reckonings over racial injustice and anti-Blackness are happening in the industry? Do you think emphasizing notions of family and home serve a particular function in an industry riven with inequity?
I am hyper-sensitive to the appropriation of “family” terminology in a kitchen context, when I have seen, over and over again, the gaslighting, abuse, manipulation, and coercion of staff at every single level; all forgivable offenses because we’re “family,” right? I moved from Montreal to NYC because I was seduced by this line of thinking. It is an illusion of utopia with very dark capitalist underpinnings that relies on cheap labor and evangelical levels of staff devotion in order to thrive. Again, this is a softening of language used to take advantage of people, pay them less, offer them no rights or benefits, work unsustainable hours, dangle but not deliver on promotions or raises, have zero meaningful support from HR (don’t even get me started on the joke that is the state of HR in restaurants). It makes me really angry.
At the end of the day, a restaurant is a business. Not a family. Of course, businesses should be run with respect, inclusion, sensitivity, and compassion, but that does not mean “family” is an appropriate word to describe the culture within. It is dangerous, lazy, misleading, and manipulative. I see many restaurateurs in NYC co-opt this familial language in order to reinforce their patriarchal supremacy or their bottom line. It is then inherited by their staff as a way of creating intimacy or humanity in an industry that is punishing. Running a business and charging people money for goods and services does not mean you have created “family.” Having neighborhood “regulars” does not make them “family.” I bristle at that language, which softens and dilutes the capitalist nature of literally every restaurant.
Many cooks (including myself) talk fondly about the intense bonds formed while suffering in a hectic kitchen — the long weeks, working doubles, the sweat and tears and affairs. Often those bonds create a feeling of closeness and intimacy, but at what cost? To me, that bond is closer to those shared between people who have experienced or suffered trauma together. Marginalized people tend to create community/family around those shared traumas. Restaurants like the word “family” because it makes them seem more sensitive, caring, and also reinforces their status as a patriarch or person in control — i.e., if that person fucks up, it’s on the staff to forgive because “we’re family.”
Of course, there are many wonderful people in so many kitchens. But do not confuse “family” for “team,” which is really what a high-functioning kitchen should be called. You are there to serve a purpose, fulfill the requirements of your role, work with others, not waste food or make too many mistakes, and move as one towards a common goal: making delicious food and serving it to paying guests.
What could “family” and “community” and “home” truly mean in a business, I wonder? I think it should encompass rigorous devotion to mutual aid, community service, and forming bonds with individuals outside of the transaction of capital. It means making sacrifices and abandoning the pursuit of capital gain in service of helping others. Which of course no restaurant struggling to make ends meet will ever prioritize.
