Andrew Whitney
The statistics surrounding addiction within the hospitality community are alarming.
“There are an estimated 15.5 million restaurant employees nationally, and an estimated 2.5 million are struggling with alcohol and drug abuse,” says Charleston, S.C.-based industry veteran Mickey Bakst. He should know. In his 40-plus years managing renowned restaurants, Bakst struggled with sobriety himself.
“When I got sober, nobody would sponsor me in AA unless I quit my job,” he says. “I didn’t meet another restaurant person for probably three or four years. So here I am. I just gave up my two best friends — drugs and alcohol, right? And you’re telling me I’ve got to give up the other things that I love? That sucks.”
Sober since 1982, Bakst saw the impact that alcohol and drugs were having on his beloved industry, and he reached out to James Beard-nominated restaurateur Steve Palmer of Indigo Road Hospitality to discuss what they could do to help. Together they founded a support group for hospitality workers called Ben’s Friends.
“Ben’s Friends started in November of 2016,” says Bakst. “The true impetus was me being sober for 40 years and Steve being sober at the time, I don’t know, 15 years, and us seeing so many people destroy their lives or lose their lives. That was the impetus for us saying, ‘We have to do something.’ We would meet on Saturday mornings, and we would talk about, ‘Did you hear about this person?’ Or, ‘Did you hear about this person?’ And we would also both say, ‘We’re too busy to do anything about it.’”
Bakst’s tipping point came when he was hosting a special brunch for Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud in Charleston. “I had a room full of icons,” Bakst remembers. “Ruth Reichel was there, Danny Meyer was there. There was a room full of people, and they were my guests at a brunch at Le Farfalle.”
“A young kid by the name of Drew Tursi was the [chef de cuisine], and that day he cooked for all of his heroes and his icons,” he says. “And he went home that night and drank and drugged himself to death in celebration. That sort of cracked me.”
Palmer had already suffered a similar trauma the year before. “Steve had a friend come and help him open a restaurant in Florence, S.C.,” Bakst recounts. “The friend was working with three other sober chefs on the line, and he didn’t show up for work. Steve went and found him in a hotel room with a bullet wound to his brain and bottles of booze surrounding him. Steve had no idea that person had been in treatment four or five times, and that person’s name was Ben Murray. And as a result of Ben taking his life, Steve and I said, ‘Enough is enough!’ and we created Ben’s Friends.”
The idea was simple. The pair of restaurant pros started spreading the word that they were going to gather people together in Charleston and offer help to anyone in the industry who needed it.
“They’re all coming together to help each other find that path to sobriety,” Bakst says. “And that’s all we are about. We’re not mental health experts. We’re not doctors. We’re just people who know how to stay sober and are trying to help others in the industry be sober.”
A couple dozen people showed up for the first meeting, but soon people started visiting from other cities. Ben’s Friends has grown to 28 cities, with two more groups currently in the process of formation. The organization hosts 17 national Zoom meetings each week, including a daily midday meeting at 1 p.m. Eastern time and a post-shift meeting five nights per week at 11 p.m.
Local groups host in-person meetings weekly, and in Nashville, Black Hawk Farms COO and former chef Andrew Whitney leads the Ben’s Friends gathering every Thursday for an hour starting at 11 a.m. at O-Ku in Germantown. It’s usually a small group — never more than 10 participants — but it is a community. “We’re on a first-name basis, so it’s quasi-anonymous,” explains Whitney. “We share post-shift war stories and coping mechanisms. We’re all in the same boat. We’ll sit on the patio if the weather is nice.”
Whitney knows, like most people, his path to and through sobriety is unique to him. “I spent the first five to six years trying to figure out what sobriety was,” he says. “I didn’t find a like-minded community in traditional AA meetings. It was hard to find the right place in the right room.”
When he discovered the local Ben’s Friends chapter almost four years ago, he knew immediately he was in the right place. “I felt the instant shared journey at that meeting,” says Whitney. “It created an intense feeling of finding a place, and I’ve met more sober people in the last five years on the Zooms, just taking care of others and providing community.”
Bakst explains that a Ben’s Friends meeting has both similarities and differences to the traditional path through Alcoholics Anonymous.
“Nobody’s paid,” Bakst says. “We follow the AA model in the sense of how we do it, but we have slightly different requirements. Anybody who leads a meeting needs to be at least two years’ sober. They have to come to the meetings, and I have to see them there. They have to contribute. They have to get a feel of who we are and what we do.
“I said we followed the AA model, but the reality is we’re different from AA,” he continues. “We open our doors to anybody. I don’t care what drug you use. I don’t care what you drank. We are open to anybody. We believe that an addiction is an addiction. We have meth addicts coming. We have heroin addicts, opioid addicts. So we’re open to everybody.”
Another distinction is the attitude toward what AA calls a “higher power” — something Bakst knows is a personal topic. “We don’t focus on God,” he says. “Steve is talking about God all the time. I don’t ever think about God. God kept me out of AA for six years, from the time I first tried, to the time I got sober. It’s not my thing. We certainly support anything that people believe, but we’re not God-focused in our meetings. I also believe in picking and choosing the parts of AA that work for you. Not everything works for everybody. ”
“I try to lead with curiosity and offer support,” says Whitney. “I want people to understand that the meeting is there for them, and you define what that help is. For me, I say I didn’t drink yesterday, I didn’t drink today, and I don’t plan on drinking tomorrow. That’s the best I can do today. This is very, very rewarding work, and I’m fortunate to be in a position to do it.”
Woven among the altruism of Ben’s Friends’ efforts is a sad truth about the industry today. “Here’s the reality,” says Bakst. “This is self-centered for the restaurant industry. They can’t afford to lose employees anymore, and so Ben’s Friends is helping people not have to leave and stay there.”
“If somebody in 1990 or 2000 came to work drunk, I told him to get the fuck out and don’t come back,” he says. “Shame on me! Now people are listening. A lot of the work that I do is talking with HR departments that want to know how to deal with their employees.”
Bakst is pleased to see incremental change in the industry.
“I think restaurants today are doing things that are really positive,” he says. “They’re cutting out shift drinks. They’re starting run clubs and yoga clubs. I know restaurants that are doing family meal at the end of the night so that the people have a way to unwind, which I think is incredible. Somebody makes a big pot of food earlier in the day, and they roll it out when the shift is done. And everybody sits around and unwinds.”
And some of them might even log into a Zoom call afterward.
If you’re a hospitality worker who needs help dealing with addiction, visit bensfriendshope.com/meetings or call a Ben’s Friends team member at 843-990-8001. Andrew Whitney also welcomes inquiries at andrewgwhitney@gmail.com.
