SHORT STACKS

For most of the 20th century, lots of folks felt the best pancakes in Los Angeles were made at DuPars restaurants. They were just diners, really, but their batter recipe was a killer. If you had a taste for pancakes you had to go to DuPars.

The first DuPars, the one next to the west patio at Farmers Market, had waiters and waitresses who had been there a lifetime, starting as teenagers and staying into their 50s. You could go away to college, stay for graduate school, come back, and the same people would be taking your order, bringing you coffee, and calling your by your first name. To say it was part of the community is an understatement.

In the early part of 2004, that flagship DuPars at Farmers Market was sold to the Tiny Nailors chain. They didn’t take a vote. No one asked all the pancake eaters what they thought. They just sold it. The restaurant stayed open for a while but rumors of closing were constantly in the air. The waiters and waitresses, not really old enough to retire but too old to start looking for new work, walked around in a daze, looking like deer caught in the headlights. They didn’t know what to do. By summer, DuPars finally did close, leaving employees to go where they might. It sat there empty for quite a spell, until one day a crew came in and gutted the place, leaving nothing but a shell. They put up a sign: OPEN, EARLY 2005.

Well, 2005 came and went, along with the first half of 2006, and the promise of an opening date began to taste like the promise of troop withdrawals. And still, not a lick of work was done. That empty shell just sat there, day after day, making everyone sitting in the west patio wonder what was so goddamn important they had to throw everyone out of work before they had all their ducks in a row? The words on everyone's lips were, bush league.

They finally started working on the new place late this summer. Maybe they'll have it done by Christmas, hard to tell. Businesses are bought and sold all the time for a variety of reasons: the market collapses for a product, bad management, financial advantage for the owner, or maybe just on a whim. But the result is always the same - employees’ lives thrown into disarray. That's life in the big city I guess. But people are beginning to feel it may be time to rethink our whole idea of business.

Actually, people want surprisingly little. Most folks are still willing to work long hours for short pay but, if you can imagine their audacity, now they want some security. They want to know that in return for their hard work and loyalty their health needs will be covered, that a foolish business decision by an owner cannot cancel out a pension earned with a lifetime of work, that they cannot be thrown out, like the weekly garbage, simply because an owner has found a way to make an extra buck.

This may seem like a departure from the currently accepted format for owner/employee relations, but it isn’t a very radical departure. A secure work force is less likely to commit crimes, create chaos, or do anything else that starts with a c. Beyond that, it’s just fair, and I prefer to think of Americans as fair. Don’t you?

One foot on either side.

1 XCZR