Walker Art Center restaurant Cardamom is replacing staff with QR codes
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The restaurant inside the Walker Art Center is replacing its front-of-house staff with QR codes and a counter service model starting Wednesday.
A spokesperson for DDP Restaurant Group, which owns Cardamom, confirmed employees were notified of layoffs on Thursday. Employees will receive severance pay due to the short notice, according to their email.
Olivia Martin, the DDP Restaurant Group social media coordinator, said in a Saturday email to MPR News the change has been discussed for several years as Cardamom’s guest traffic relies on Walker events and seasonality.
As a result, employees were cut early on slow days or stretched thin on busy ones, Martin said. Rising labor, food and operating costs are also a factor.
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“After careful consideration, we believe this new format will create a stronger, more sustainable and viable path forward for Cardamom while allowing us to better align staffing with the needs of the business and create more reliable, stable hours for employees who remain with Cardamom,” Martin said in the email.
Martin said back-of-house employees and bartenders will not be impacted.
But 16 hosts and servers will end their employment on Sunday, according to Jac Kovarik, communications coordinator for CTUL. The workers’ rights nonprofit has supported organizing efforts by Cardamom employees over the last year.
“Some of the workers that we organize with received the email when they were working on Friday, which is just so horrible and disrespectful,” Kovarik said.
Maya, who asked to have their last name withheld to preserve future employment opportunities, had their last day as a server on Friday. They said Cardamom workers had sought basic safety plans during Operation Metro Surge and asked management for steps like signage and briefings for front-of-house employees. Maya said Cardamom had been steadily growing business and opposed the company’s reasoning for cutting employees.
“I immediately felt like the layoff was retaliatory,” Maya said. “I felt incredibly angry and shocked. I felt betrayed.”
The DDP Restaurant Group faced criticism last year for closing Café Cerés after staff voted to unionize.
While employees were invited to re-apply for roles bussing and running food at Cardamom, Kovarik said most are not interested in that for a variety of reasons. One is that it’s typical for half their paychecks to come from tips, which would drop with a QR code model.
Workers plan to be more vocal in coming days, according to Kovarik.
The Walker Art Center said in a Monday statement they are separate entities and not involved in managing Cardamom.
