A Fair Slice

As with any death after a protracted decline, it came as both a shock and a relief when I finally got the call. It was this past February, and I was working as a server at Barboncino, a popular Brooklyn pizza joint where workers had voted unanimously to unionize with Workers United in July 2023 with visions of fair pay, regular hours, and Narcan behind the bar. But a year and a half later, those visions remained precisely that: we’d lost almost half our organizing committee, burned out by months of stonewalled negotiations and declining tips. I was one of the holdouts, determined to win a contract before I put in my notice. I wouldn’t get the chance. “It’s as we suspected,” the union’s lawyer told me over the phone, his voice gravelly. “They’re closing at the end of the month.”

When the staff first set out to unionize, almost a year before I started working there, they never imagined that Barboncino might fail. The thirteen-year-old restaurant was a fixture, credited as part of the “rebirth” of Crown Heights—a symbol of gentrification turned neighborhood hangout, beloved by both transplants and longtime residents for its wood-fired pizza, late-night happy hours, and annual free brunch. Staff described then-owner Ron Brown as a more-or-less benevolent overlord, who prioritized vibes over convention; one previous employee said that the owner characterized his hiring process as “auditions,” and that he favored people who were passionate over those who took the job seriously. Like any service job, it had its indignities and frustrations, but the workers, by and large, were loyal. While Brown could be strict and occasionally unfair, he was known for his generosity in a pinch: coworkers told me stories of him giving advances on paychecks to cover rent, helping employees set up therapy sessions, and hiring people who had nowhere else to go. His business model seemed to work: the restaurant became profitable within its first year and was rumored to be valued at approximately $3 million by 2014.

But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and Brown took a step back from day-to-day operations, staff began to consider their positions in a new light. The restaurant stayed open through lockdown as a DoorDash hub, and employees described the place as largely self-run: “The inmates were running the asylum,” as one coworker put it to me on my first shift. As the pandemic raged on, workers began to wonder why they were risking infection to make near-minimum wage. They were in the early stages of union organizing when Brown announced his retirement: new owners were coming to Barboncino.

A husband-and-wife team, Jesse Shapell and Emma Walton seemed like a new generation of enlightened business ownership: young, hip, tattooed, with industry experience. The two met at Oberlin in 2006, where Jesse was studying philosophy and Emma was pursuing a degree in theater. But they also had resumés boasting management positions at Cafe Cluny, Win Son bakery, and even Barboncino itself in its early days. They were, by all accounts, not so different from the workers at the restaurant they had purchased, in age, background, and belief. As one of their first acts as new owners, they called the staff together for a meeting where they expressed their goals as the new stewards of this neighborhood institution: open communication and “being present”—ideally, they said, they planned to be at the restaurant five to seven days a week. Their aim was “to run a fair-minded, honest working environment and make [Barboncino] as awesome to work in as possible.”

If any business owners were going to be sympathetic to calls for a living wage, staff thought it would be Shapell and Walton, so much so that the organizing committee decided to present them with a request to meet and discuss concerns in the hopes that they could form a new, collaborative relationship without the need for a union drive. The staff’s primary concern was, at the time, pay: the restaurant paid kitchen staff between seventeen and twenty-one dollars an hour, and paid tipped staff ten dollars an hour—the tipped minimum wage. It was nearly impossible to live on in gentrifying Brooklyn: staff skipped doctor’s appointments they couldn’t afford, missed birthday parties and holidays with their families, accrued student loan payments and credit card debt.

At the meeting, workers asked for a more consistent schedule, higher pay, an improved sexual harassment policy, and a revision of an arbitration clause that prevented the staff from suing the restaurant; Shapell and Walton said they would consider the conversation and get back to them. When staff sat down with Shapell and Walton two months later, however, the new, “progressive” owners claimed they couldn’t afford to pay higher wages and rejected the staff’s proposed revisions to the employee handbook. On the question of the arbitration clause, Walton responded, “How many of you think you’re going to be here in ten years? We want to be here for twenty, thirty years . . . we’re thinking about Barboncino as a long-riding business.”

I started at Barboncino in April 2023, two months after that meeting. I’d worked in service for six years, and I loved it, though I had never loved the places I worked—not the fondue spot managed by a twenty-two-year-old in Gucci sneakers that would run out of bread halfway through the shift, nor the upscale diner franchise patronized by Upper West Siders who paid thirty dollars for meatloaf. When I met Walton at my interview, I was optimistic, like the staff that worked there before me, that I was talking to a different kind of business owner: she had a nose ring; she was a doula! She reassured me that she and Shapell were invested in the business, that they were “industry people” who knew what it was like to work for minimum wage and tips. I left the interview excited.

It was immediately clear to me that Barboncino was unlike any of the restaurants I had worked at before. Everybody was friends—coworkers and I would talk about movies, politics, our last night out, would dance along to Ja Rule and ABBA on the floor—and I didn’t have to fear abuse from the chef, a gentle man with a degree in jazz guitar who often hired female cooks. There was an employee height chart penned in Sharpie on a support beam behind the bar; nineteen-year-old line cooks would nap in the break room while neighborhood kids came in for free cones from our gelato station. It was a true community.

My first shift, a coworker mentioned the burgeoning union; by the summer, I was a regular attendee at organizing meetings, helping coordinate mail-in ballot drives and bonfires. My initial interest in the union was motivated by ideology more than anger at Barboncino’s conditions. In fact, I found aspects of working there to be uniquely humane: staff could take breaks and order off the menu, and no one screamed at me during service. But Shapell and Walton’s top-down managerial approach had brewed resentment among staff, some who had worked at the restaurant for upwards of ten years and felt an ownership over the place’s culture that was threatened by Shapell and Walton’s new initiatives.

During the pandemic, the restaurant had fallen into a cycle of neglect; when Shapell and Walton took over, the ice machine had been broken for months, and the floors were rotting from the inside. The duo’s attempts to refresh the restaurant were occasionally warranted, occasionally superfluous—but always expensive, and staff who had kept the place open through the pandemic, largely unsupervised, bristled as ownership invested money in, it seemed, everything but their staff. They hired a glossy graphic design firm to redo the restaurant’s signage. They updated the wine list—all natural wines, all names that bewildered customers. They brought in an out-of-touch general manager who harped on the “five points of excellent service,” nagged us to upsell sparkling water for seven dollars, and berated a twenty-one-year-old black busser for how he walked. They contracted an HR firm, and then when we used it to complain about the general manager, they told us to stop using it so much. They raised prices, once before the union election and twice after—a personal margherita pizza suddenly cost twenty dollars, with a five dollar upcharge if you asked for Parmesan to sprinkle on top. Meanwhile, tipped staff continued to make ten dollars an hour (it went up to eleven dollars an hour in January 2025). Rents skyrocketed all around us; nobody had health insurance, even though we worked over flames and with knives.

We won our election unanimously, riding on a balance of dissatisfaction and a general sense that a union was the right thing to do—that industry workers generally make too little money and have too few protections. But we quickly found that the power we wanted most, the power to protect the restaurant’s culture, couldn’t be granted by a union. Despite their professed desire to come in five days a week, staff saw Shapell and Walton less and less—typically once a week for their management meetings before service started. We saw firsthand that ownership’s changes were turning off customers. People balked at our new, overly attentive service style; I once had a group ask me if I was “trying to push them out” because the manager directed me to check in on them twice in ten minutes. Customers were also beginning to comment on the rising prices, ordering fewer pizzas and cocktails per table. Nobody knew how to order off of the new wine list; frequently, I’d bring tables wine tastes, and they’d end up opting for soda. Fewer Crown Heights locals were coming in to eat, and fewer were working on the staff. What was once a gathering place for the community was increasingly becoming a haven for transplants. We told management about the customers’ discomfort, but nothing changed. The union, according to ownership, had no say over “operational decisions”—pricing, hiring, hours, and management directives were all their prerogative.

The union made no better progress in contract negotiations. We had hoped to negotiate with ownership directly, but were instead faced with their lawyer: Steven Nevolis, Esq., partner at Ellenoff Grossman & Schole LLP. Nevolis specialized in “management-side services” for employers facing class actions, hostile work environment suits, and staff unionization; in practice, we found that he was hired to sit in on Zoom meetings and tell us “no.” Shapell would sit mutely behind his screen, Walton occasionally ducking in and out of the camera, as our staff explained the urgency of the opioid epidemic and city-sponsored initiatives to bring Narcan to restaurants. Nevolis rejected clause after clause, regardless of whether they’d cost the business anything to implement—like establishing mutual respect and dignity between management and staff and codifying already-existing sexual harassment procedures. We would come to occasional agreement, but any headway we made in negotiations couldn’t be implemented until the process was complete—and between our staff’s full-time work schedule and Shapell and Walton’s vacations, negotiations dragged on for months with no end in sight.

In the spring, ownership brought in a new manager who had clearly been chosen for her capacity to get staff in line; she announced, loudly and often, that she “didn’t care about being our friend.” Her antagonism was pervasive and troubling, and extended to customers: I once watched as she got into a screaming match with a twelve-top who had waited over an hour for their food to arrive, telling them that they had “clearly never worked in the service industry before” if they were unhappy about their wait. She told us she had a “list” of people she wanted fired, called a coworker a “fat fucking lard,” and told another they’d be more rational if they “weren’t on their period.” She had a particular animosity toward the union, telling new hires not to hang out with the “union losers.” Another manager once showed me a text thread between management and ownership in which she said a staff member was “so dumb” that she was “going to push her down the stairs” of the restaurant. It seemed to be a fantasy of choice; rumors circulated that she’d often discuss doing the same to me.

The owners had always been antagonistic to the union, but as time went on, their allegiance to their own authority became clear. I had anticipated that ownership would reject our asks for higher pay and health insurance, but now it seemed they were neglecting real problems that the restaurant was facing out of disdain for their staff. After an incident where the manager berated and swore at a staff member who left the floor while having a panic attack during their final week at the restaurant before moving home to help their sick father, I requested a meeting with ownership to discuss the manager’s behavior. They resisted for a week, communicating via their lawyer that her actions were “not nice, but aren’t illegal,” but ultimately conceded after the union threatened to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. In the meeting, I explained that the manager was a liability to the restaurant: staff were afraid of her, and customers were put off by her hostility. Shapell denied there was a problem and stated that “some of the staff liked her management style.” At the next week’s manager meeting, Shapell warned them to watch how they spoke around the staff because the union was “trying to get them fired.”

And behind all the petty politics, the restaurant was slowly dying. Front of house was making less and less in tips—we didn’t have the usual bump in business in the fall as the weather cooled, and by winter, the owners had cut half our shifts. Customers were complaining about prices and a decline in food quality; we were buying cheaper ingredients and hiring less experienced workers, and it was showing. The kitchen was perpetually understaffed, and servers were burned out and tense. Shapell and Walton, meanwhile, were no more present than usual, but managers told me that they seemed calm in meetings and kept talking about the finances as normal, telling managers that it would turn around and asking them if they had seen any new Instagram food trends. When Shapell and Walton finally announced the closure in February, it was the first time the union had heard from them in a month.

A union doesn’t have to have an antagonistic relationship with ownership. Our lawyer had decades of experience representing unions and told us that Shapell and Walton were uniquely difficult and disrespectful to the staff; they treated us “like the help,” driving up legal costs rather than negotiating with the union directly, bringing in obscurely credentialed labor advisers to speak for them in disciplinary meetings, refusing our input on operational issues that they were too distant to see or understand. There was a palpable distrust, or even contempt, for our motivations—a manager told me they’d complain at meetings about staff wanting to visit the restaurant on their day off, wished we were more indifferent. They saw staff concerns as petty “bitching,” and the union as an attempt to “stage a coup.” Regardless of how hard I worked, how similar my education was to ownership’s, how much I loved the restaurant, I was treated as an unwelcome interloper with suspicious intentions and naive self-interest. (Shapell and Walton did not respond to a request for comment.)

From the union’s inception, the staff was aware that if the business failed, the union would be blamed; the common logic is that restaurant margins are too slim to support worker benefits like health insurance or an above-minimum wage. But contract negotiations had stalled; we never received any of the union benefits that would have increased operational costs. The owners were required to conduct “effects bargaining” with the union, where they would explain the restaurant’s finances and negotiate severance with staff, but skipped it and sent Nevolis in their stead. We were curious to know where the money had gone, if not to us. The lawyer claimed there was “nothing left”: he screen-shared hard-to-verify financial documents with our lawyer that showed the restaurant was $200,000 in debt. Our lawyer told us that the documents showed Nevolis’s fees alone as half that amount.

The restaurant’s final weeks were funereal. Customers poured in for a final pizza, asking servers how the restaurant could be closing, asking if anyone would buy it—some making offers—as the waitlist climbed to two, three hours. We marveled at the impending end of a place with so much spirit. How could it be that such a successful, beloved restaurant could be closing? How could it be more financially feasible for the owners to close and swallow the loss of a multimillion-dollar investment than to keep it open and try to make up for lost profits? Where had all the money gone? Why hadn’t two “industry people” saved the place they claimed to love?

The money question haunted us. From the union’s inception, we struggled to understand ownership’s financial relationship to the restaurant—they were so young! A new family! How could they afford to buy a multimillion-dollar business, even with loans? After the restaurant’s closure, though, a manager finally showed me where Shapell and Walton had gotten their money: Shapell Industries, a California real estate firm cofounded by Jesse’s grandfather and great uncle, that sold for over $1.6 billion in 2014. Former coworkers dug up their donation records—at least $5,000 to BAM, between $10,000-$25,000 to the Holocaust Museum, a spare $1,000 here and there to Kamala Harris or Jon Ossoff. We found the housing records that indicated they bought their first home six years after graduating college for $1.2 million, when they were still working as restaurant managers.

Despite their assertions early on that they were industry people just like us, they weren’t like us in the most fundamental way: we needed our jobs. Whatever their interest was in making Barboncino successful, it wasn’t their own financial survival. On the final night of service, Shapell’s friends, drunk and rowdy, teased him—I walked by as one said, “There’s the union buster!” They all laughed as Shapell rolled his eyes. We were running a two-hour-long wait when we ran out of pizza dough, and though customers were still waiting to come in for a final drink, Shapell insisted we close early and that all the employees and customers vacate. When we walked by an hour later, he was sitting at the bar with his friends, drinking negronis at the restaurant he owned but didn’t work at, ran but didn’t save.

Restaurant unions are exceedingly rare: only around 1.6 percent of restaurant workers are represented by a union, compared to just shy of 10 percent of workers nationwide. Meanwhile, the industry is the second-largest employer in the country: today, more than 15 million Americans work in restaurants, or about 10 percent of the country’s workforce. Barboncino Workers United was lauded as a labor success story simply by virtue of our existence at all—many attempted union efforts at restaurants don’t make it past their election. The presumption that we fell for was that the election would be the hard part, and that everything would come naturally after the union was formalized. But what we found was that rallying restaurant workers around unjust labor practices was relatively simple; none of our workers felt they were treated fairly in the workplace, even if they were wary of a union as a solution. That we won our election unanimously was a comment on the faith workers had in our capacity to affect change given the appropriate legal protections.

What no one prepared us for, though, was that the logic that we followed—we want the business to succeed; we need our jobs to make money—didn’t apply to ownership. After we announced the closure on Instagram, someone commented, asking, “Respectfully, how did a union not win any of their demands? Was there no threat of striking?” This is my response: it is exceptionally difficult to leverage worker power when the owners of the restaurant care more about dominating their staff than they do about making their business profitable. We tried to explain to the owners that their decisions ostracized their customers and hurt their staff; but any action we could have taken to affect their bottom line would only have expedited the place’s descent. And we did, truly, want the restaurant to survive. We loved it there; we knew it was special. The sad and frustrating truth is that in this and many cases, the people who needed the business to succeed the most were the workers, who were given three weeks to find new jobs in one of the more hostile and turbulent economies in recent history. What we risked when we threatened a work stoppage wasn’t our employers’ wealth; they had wealth before us, and they still have wealth now that the restaurant is gone. What we risked was the livelihoods of forty working class people.

More than six months after the restaurant’s closure, there are workers who are still struggling to find a new job. One coworker was facing eviction, so the staff pooled money from our unemployment checks to support him. We find little ways of keeping it going, even after it all ended. But walking down Franklin Avenue, I see families that I used to serve, eating at other restaurants. New shops are opening in the neighborhood almost weekly—a martial arts studio, a halal grill, an ice cream shop—but our restaurant remains empty. When I reach the doors of what was once Barboncino, a “For Rent” sign hanging on the perpetually drawn metal gate, I always look in the window at the empty bar and kitchen, wondering if they’ve painted over the height chart behind the bar. Some of my old coworkers cross the street to avoid walking past it. The place is in our bones and our blood; what we lost when we lost the restaurant was not just a job but a home.

People wonder what the owners will do next, and I do too. I’ve seen Shapell once since the closure, at a bar in the neighborhood, sipping a martini. I went to visit a friend, a former Barboncino coworker, who now served there. Shapell didn’t seem to recognize my friend, who was once his employee; but when he saw me, he raised his eyebrows and grimaced. A few minutes later, he closed his tab and walked away.