By virtue of its near constant appearance on Instagram, the pretzel bun on the burger at the Emily restaurants, as they are known, stands as a celebrity carbohydrate, and like all celebrities, it is both worshiped and detested.
While it might seem that a bun would be the least politically contentious feature of a $26 burger filled with beef, in all of its earth-destroying capacity, the bun itself is made by a company that has caught the ire of immigration activists. In effect, Tom Cat Bakery, in Queens, has become the Trump presidency of high-volume bread-making.
The conflict came into high relief at a recent event at Greenlight, a bookstore of predictably bohemian sensibilities in Brooklyn where people gathered to hear the owners of the Emily restaurants, Emily and Matt Hyland, talk about their new cookbook (“Emily: The Cookbook”) with my colleague Sam Sifton, food editor at The Times.
Soon enough, though, it became clear that not everyone was there to ask about the utility of combining fish sauce with chipotle butter. Immigration activists had planted themselves in the audience to question the couple about their refusal to stop using the Tom Cat bun in favor of some other. Demonstrators appeared outside the bookstore as well, just as they have recently appeared outside various Emily restaurants (there are four: two in Brooklyn and two in Manhattan).
Strange lines of enmity had been drawn: well-meaning advocates for the disadvantaged up against well-meaning progressive business owners. The protesters, though, believe that Tom Cat had abandoned immigrant workers in its own insidious self-interest and that any restaurant affiliated with it had to be viewed as a collaborator in the dark mission of backing the loaves of exploitation.
Some activists were affiliated with Brandworkers, an organization that seeks to protect the rights of workers in the city’s food industry, nearly two-thirds of whom are immigrants. It began its challenge to Tom Cat early in 2017, after the company became the subject of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement audit, known as an I-9, a process that seeks to ferret out those who are working in the country illegally. As a result of the audit, which was initiated during the Obama administration, William Wachtel, a lawyer representing the bakery, told me the company was forced to let go of 21 employees or face criminal charges.
Aggrieved by Tom Cat’s handling of the situation, some former bakery workers, members of Brandworkers and others began picketing restaurants that used Tom Cat breads, late in the summer of last year. Soon several prominent restaurants, including Le Bernardin, stopped serving Tom Cat breads altogether.
Boycotts, as historians of business have argued, rarely lead to meaningful change and in this case it isn’t entirely clear what forgoing Tom Cat products would actually accomplish. Obviously, the company had little choice but to comply with the government.
And while Tom Cat had no legal obligation to compensate the workers it could no longer employ, the company offered a severance package that included one week’s pay for every year of service, full salary for unused vacation and sick days and three months of continued health benefits. The labor union representing bakery workers stood in full support of Tom Cat.
It is worth noting as well that the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, the city’s reigning seat of ethical food consumption, looked into whether to continue carrying Tom Cat breads. After much research on the part of the coop’s general manager, Joe Holtz, it determined that Tom Cat had conducted itself decently enough. Still, a boycott was put up for a vote, and co-op members voted against it.
One of the complaints that activists advanced was that the severance pay was not sufficiently generous. They also want Tom Cat to adopt guidelines established in part by the National Immigration Law Center directing businesses what to do when ICE intervenes in the workplace.
But when Mr. Holt sought to find out what companies followed these guidelines, he told me, he could not find any. The advocacy groups involved in designing them have no account of what businesses have voluntarily decided to use them either. The State of California has signed some of the recommended protections into law but the statute has been subject to legal challenge.
Adopting the policies would be largely symbolic, and symbols can be meaningful. But even though the number of work-site immigration investigations has tripled over the past year (to just under 6,100), that figure still represents a tiny fraction of the millions of private-sector employers in the country. The chance of any one business receiving an ICE audit is minuscule; even the Immigration Law Center acknowledges that.
Rage, though, has its own logic. The antipathy directed at Tom Cat would seem to implicate the larger furies around globalism; two years ago the company was acquired by a Japanese baking conglomerate worth billions of dollars. Even so, Tom Cat remained in Long Island City, a neighborhood near the universe of low-income people, many of them undocumented, it could employ.
What this shows us is the extent to which protest can lose its power when it seems indiscriminate. There is a dissonance to opposing a relatively small New York City business, succeeding at a time when these businesses keep disappearing. The Emily group heeds a full roster of liberal values: it starts its dishwashers at $15 an hour, Mr. Hyland told me, and gives jobs to immigrants and sources its ingredients locally as much as possible. It even passes on a percentage of proceeds from its sale of ranch dressing to an animal rescue operation.
But none of that has seemed to matter at a time when anything short of aggressive resistance can reek of complicity.
The irony is that Mr. Hyland was in fact going to acquiesce and start using another bread supplier until the activists kept showing up at his restaurants and at his reading at Greenlight. He sent me a series of emails he exchanged with a different maker of pretzel buns to prove it.
“We were willing to make our signature item different for their cause,’’ Mr. Hyland told me. “But they went over the line, and I have no sympathy for them anymore.”
