District 4 City Councillor and candidate for mayor Andrea Campbell joined chef Tiffani Faison at Sweet Cheeks Q restaurant in Fenway last Wednesday (May 26) to lay out her restaurant recovery plan and the state of the hospitality industry as it begins to emerge from the limits of the pandemic.

Their conversation, which was live streamed on Campbell’s website, touched on several themes: expanding outdoor dining and Open Streets pilots, reforming the liquor licensing process, and setting up a hospitality division at City Hall to support food entrepreneurship across the city.

Faison, a nationally known chef who owns four eateries in the city, reflected on the boost that outdoor dining gave to restaurant owners last summer in the middle of the crisis. 

“What I liked,” she said, “is that it allowed a little bit of individualism, a little flair. If we were able to do that in perpetuity, that would be great…it was a bridge for us to keep ourselves alive, to feel like all was not lost. In some ways I feel like it was more mentally helpful than it was financially helpful just to be operational. And it was nice to have some of the red tape taken away to make it happen.”

Faison pointed out that the permitting and licensing processes are often obstacles as restaurant owners go about their business, so seeing some of those temporarily suspended or cut back during the crisis revealed some potential fixes. She indicated that Campbell’s plan for a “one stop shop” at the city level would go far to make the entire process easier and faster.

“I think a hospitality division would be so helpful to navigation and vision. I’m in a place now where I can navigate those relationships and understand how it works – it’s a lot of inside baseball. So, until you understand where to go and who to go to and how to do it, it can be really overwhelming, especially for first time business owners.

“If there’s a road map,” said Faison,” to have someone almost like a concierge as a representative of the city doing that would be really helpful.”
In discussing the role the restaurant industry plays in bringing back tourists to the city — and the impact of those tourist dollars in the city — Campbell described an “ecosystem” of interconnected forces that could create a domino effect in the industry.

“There are many restaurants that obviously draw folks from outside of Boston, outside the Commonwealth to come here, and Tiffani is one example, she’s known nationally,” said the councillor. “There’s also the flip side – this industry is the industry helping folks provide jobs, helping the city address food insecurity, and it was doing this long before Covid-19. If anything, [the question is] how does the City of Boston maximize these partnerships and become a better partner? And that’s what I heard in the development of this plan: We need the city to make it easier for us to start a restaurant, to grow our restaurant profile, and to make sure it includes everyone.”

Another key part of Campbell’s recovery plan aims to address an issue that has long been at the root of inequity in the city’s hospitality field: liquor licenses. License application fees, which can often exceed six figures, were waived during the pandemic, but Campbell called for further action to address an antiquated system that has resulted in only a handful of the city’s 1,100 liquor licenses being owned by Black restaurateurs. 

“Waiving the fees for a year is critical; the second piece is needing to have a broader more inclusive conversation on what liquor license reform should be. I’ve talked to a whole host of folks in the hospitality industry, those who have food trucks or are looking to expand and want to be able to offer liquor or wine to help grow their business. Mattapan Square, the fact that there’s no liquor license there right now, that’s where I live! Talk about inequities in the system.

“There’s a lot of different opinions, people talking in silos, a lot of great ideas, so as the next mayor, [I’ll be] convening this group in the immediate future and doing it in conjunction with a hospitality division so we can address these issues holistically.”

The full conversation is available to view at facebook.com/andreaforboston.