Aramark, The Company That Wants To Run The Cliff House, Just Evicted 90 NorCal Workers

A company that has stated an interest in taking over San Francisco’s Cliff House restaurants has reportedly evicted 90 of its workers

Aramark, a Philadelphia-based food, facilities, and uniform company, has business all over Northern California, including a contract with Santa Rita jail in the East Bay that’s prompted a recent forced labor lawsuit. They’re one of the top contenders to take over San Francisco’s historic Cliff House restaurants, bids for which were opened last fall. They’re also evicting 90 workers from their company-owned lodgings in Yosemite National Park, even though there’s currently a statewide ban on evictions.

The Fresno Bee reports that last week, employees of Aramark subsidiary Yosemite Hospitality were told that they must vacate their shared employee housing by May 21. Most of those workers stopped getting paid when Yosemite closed down on March 20, KQED reports, and now they must leave the park, Aramark management says.

When contacted by the Bee, the National Park Service (which also manages the Cliff House in San Francisco) said that the matter was “an Aramark employee relations issue.” Efforts by Eater SF to contact the NPS to see if Aramark remains in the running for the Cliff House contract were unsuccessful, with a spokesperson saying only that “we are working through the review process and will announce the decision as soon as possible.”

And in other news...

• Meat prices in the Bay Area were 14.5 percent higher this April than last, and dairy prices were also up year-over-year by 9.6 percent. Nationally, those costs are also higher. [East Bay Times]
• Betelnut, a 20-year-old Asian street food spot that (to its many fans’ dismay) closed its Marina doors in 2015, is back...in Boise, Idaho, where its food will be served by a ghost kitchen-based delivery startup that has “hired local chefs and taught them all of their recipes and all of their techniques. So the local chefs will be replicating what is happening in the original restaurants.” [Boise Dev]
• Restaurant dining rooms will soon return to life in even more NorCal counties, as the state has cleared El Dorado, Butte, Lassen, Nevada, Placer, Amador and Shasta counties for reopening [Associated Press], but LA will likely extend its stay-at-home order to August. [Eater LA]
• The founder of Borders bookstores (and spectacular grocery delivery failure Webvan) says he’s launching a robotic grocery delivery company that he says will eat Amazon’s lunch. [SF Business Times]
• New SF label Dewey’s Wines gets a rave review from wine critic Esther Mobley, who says its “2018 Vermentino is one of the most memorable bottles I’ve drunk since the coronavirus isolation began.” [SF Chronicle]
• Most Californians say they’re not ready to dine out again. What about you? Drop us a line, we want to hear if you’re ready to sit down in Bay Area restaurant. [East Bay Times]
• A worker at an East Bay Dunkin’ Donuts reportedly inspired a DIY kit that’s now sold across the country. [East Bay Express]
• An SF resident ordered Sweetgreen based on the promise of free delivery, and was surprised to pay an extra 15 percent, a cost the company says “is a fee that allows us to provide our delivery service.” [MrEricSir]
• Twitter says that their workers can work from home indefinitely, which prompts some to wonder how they will feed themselves. Totwaffles, perhaps? [Harry McCracken/Twitter]