What Is 'Family Meal?' New Show Gives an Inside Look at Restaurant Life

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At most non-fast food or casual restaurants, the staff gather to eat together before any guests have arrived. Employees usually rotate through preparing this staff meal with ingredients that might need to be used up or have some blemish that prevents them from being served to guests.

“It kind of sets the tone for the service itself,” says Alex Cuper in the first episode of Family Meal, a new Chicago-based digital series that uses the staff meal to introduce viewers to restaurant life and the people inside it. “It lets everyone out here [in the dining room] know that [the cooks] care.”

That element of taking care of each other is why staff meals has become known as “family meal” or “comida,” and why food journalist Ari Bendersky and production company Bottle Rocket Media decided to use it as the scaffolding for a show about restaurants.

“It’s the time when the team comes together and gets to eat, and then also sit around and just talk to each other, and not necessarily talk about work,” says Bendersky. “Your restaurant oftentimes is your family. You’re with them all the time, so this is your chance to sit down and have a meal with your family.”

Importantly, staff meals include the entire staff: front-of-house servers and hosts as well as back-of-house dishwashers and line cooks. So Family Meal brings together people from every part of a restaurant to eat and share stories in a conversation shepherded by Bendersky. The first episode features a meal of garlic bread, pasta bolognese, and Caesar salad at live-fire Latin American restaurant Brasero in West Town and features Cuper, the beverage director; John Manion, the executive chef and owner; sous chef Brandon Bonilla; chef de cuisine Adam Meyer; and general manager Anna Broughton. 

“The whole goal is to hear from a range of people in the restaurant,” says Bendersky. “We want to hear from them, and we want to hear their stories.”

Bendersky has been a restaurant server and has long experience writing about restaurants, but Bottle Rocket Media’s Brett Singer says, “The last time I worked in a restaurant was in college at Bennigan’s.” Bendersky and Singer represent distinct types interested in the inside look of Family Meal: a knowledgeable insider who wants to go beyond superficial coverage and learn nitty-gritty details, and a curious outsider who’s interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant world – perhaps particularly in the era of The Bear, which itself brought the idea of staff meal into the wider culture. (Water is served in deli containers in Family Meal, another true aspect of restaurant culture that has been mainstreamed by The Bear.)

“There has become such a fascination with restaurant life over the last 10 or 15 years,” says Bendersky. Family Meal tries to show the “perspective of front of house, and also what you’re going to see behind the scenes.” In the first episode, there are stories of misbehaving customers as well as musings on the importance of staff meal and what it takes to succeed in the industry.

The latter could be useful for people who work in the industry, Singer says. “Ari and I wanted the show to be a little bit of a love letter to the industry, and for a line cook or a server to be like, ‘Oh my god! I can relate to them!’” he says. “The discussions can naturally go to, why are you in the biz, where do you start, what are career advancements like, and just to get a sense of what life is like in these different types of restaurants.”

Family Meal will spotlight various kinds of restaurants in Chicago; next up is Parachute HiFi, the suave Asian American cocktail bar in Avondale that features DJs spinning vinyl. “There’s passion for cooking and for artistry,” says Singer, “and that can go from Alinea to someone really giving a s--t at Johnnie’s because they make the best Italian beef sandwiches.”

There’s nothing wrong with eating the food at a restaurant without thinking about it any deeper than “yum,” says Singer. But, “Will understanding what a restaurant does as a concert of people, how they work together, and how the food gets made, and how it gets to your table, and how they care and all of that – will that make you enjoy the meal more? For me, yeah, I think so.”