The new-to-me org that's changing restaurants

MORE, a new coalition of heavy-hitting industry organizations, is working to harness a collective effort to support the future of restaurant work.

photo credit: Emily Winker for MORE

A new hospitality coalition formally announced its presence earlier this month with some ambitious goals. MORE — the Movement to Organize for Restaurant Equity — wants to advance economic mobility and workplace protections inside the restaurant industry, and it’s tapping into decades of experience and work from some of the industry’s best-known advocacy groups.

The coalition started three years ago as a partnership between three industry organizations: the James Beard Foundation, Women in Hospitality United, and Regarding Her. A year ago, it expanded to include even more, including the Independent Restaurant Coalition, the LEE Initiative, Southern Smoke Foundation, and others.

“We recognized that the industry and the landscape for all the nonprofits doing equity work was going to drastically change post Covid,” says Liz Murray, a MORE cofounder, chief operating officer of The Marlow Collective in New York, and co-founder of partner of Women in Hospitality United. MORE’s founding orgs knew they needed to work together, with a “real platform,” Murray says, “not just random emails or different people being connected to [other] different people.”

This is a familiar (if inefficient!) response from an industry that’s known for stepping up immediately — often to its own detriment — when local communities need help. MORE is an effort to streamline those efforts for clarity, but also for progress.

After years of organizing, optimizing, and operating quietly, MORE’s co-founders, including Murray and Mary Sue Milliken, a Los Angeles-based chef and restaurateur and co-founder of Regarding Her, which supports women-owned restaurants and other food businesses, are excited for what comes next.

I spoke to both co-founders last week in a conversation that ranged from federal policy to diner responsibility. Both Murray and Milliken understand exactly what’s at stake: Restaurant operators are struggling with increasingly slim margins, supply chain constraints, food costs, looming (or at least threatened) tariffs; workers are struggling with wages that don’t keep pace with the costs of living, long hours, challenging conditions, and policy decisions that don’t necessarily make sense for restaurant workers.

None of these challenges are new. In fact, that’s the point.

“I went to chef school in the ‘70s,” Milliken told me. “I thought by now the industry would be further along with workplace protections and economic mobility for all of us.”

Here’s more from Murray and Milliken on MORE and what it’s doing for a better future of the business. (Spoiler alert: they don’t agree on everything!) As longtime childhood hero Mister Rogers famously said: When the world gets scary, look for the helpers.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Expedite: I’ll start with a broad question: Why does MORE exist?

Mary-Sue Milliken, MORE co-founder: “I’ve had a very fortunate career and I want to see it be better for a greater number of people. Watching different organizations duplicate each other’s efforts and not know about each other is frustrating.