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When chef Michael Bowling moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, from Washington, D.C. eight years ago, his professional future looked bright. He had cooked dinner at the James Beard House in New York and was starting a gig as executive chef at an upscale Southern restaurant. But after that venture folded in 2012, Bowling discovered it was nearly impossible to land another head chef position in Charlotte. He launched a food truck and became a personal chef, all while sending out resumes and marveling at the silence he received.
Finally, a group of chef friends of different races sat him down and explained that no one would hire him because he was black. “People are afraid to put a black chef to be the head of a restaurant in the middle of the South,” Bowling, 42, says. Owners are worried that customers will be turned off by the sight of him, he says, especially in an era when “rock star” chefs are the public face of a new restaurant. Bowling removed his photo from his resume and website, hoping to land more interviews. In the past year, he’s been featured in Food & Wine magazine and The Washington Post. Yet as of February 2019, he still had not been offered an executive chef job.
Bowling’s complaints are not unique. A 2015 study by the nonprofit Restaurant Opportunities Centers United found that just 9 percent of the highest-paid restaurant employees were African American. Waiters and bartenders hold the majority of well-paid jobs in the industry in fine dining restaurants — positions where the employees are “almost entirely white,” says ROC United president and co-founder Saru Jayaraman. Meanwhile, workers of color are segregated into lower-paying jobs, or in fast food or casual restaurants.
This scarcity of black employees is mirrored by the demographics in the dining room. Zachary Brewster, an associate professor of sociology at Wayne State University who has studied the restaurant industry extensively, found that roughly half the servers he surveyed nationally admitted to discriminating against black diners.
North Carolina has a long history of activism designed to combat such discrimination, from the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s to the Soul Food Sessions — pop-up…
