When did Ted Cruz start writing restaurant reviews?

Umwut?

To you and I. We live in a world where the restaurant scene has never been better. Those restaurants are packed 7 nights a week because nobody cooks any more. (Thank you booming economy) They are staffed by eager students or people looking to make extra money in the front of house, and staffed by Spanish speakers in the back of house, eager to earn a living while learning English proficient enough to be promoted up front.
25-30 years ago those back of house jobs were filled by the Irish. Nobody complained back then, because well the Irish are white. I should know. I am one.
Thankfully people like Kerry Byrne will die off soon enough. Just like my 66 year old friend who sits at home in his white suburb, with his newly gotten guns, complaining about socialism while sucking down every benefit Medicare offers.

In short, it is false. As recently as April (2015), the Wall Street Journal reported that 56% of those currently receiving welfare assistance are employed:

It’s poor-paying jobs, not unemployment, that strains the welfare system.That’s one key finding from a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that showed the majority of households receiving government assistance are headed by a working adult. The study found that 56% of federal and state dollars spent between 2009 and 2011 on welfare programs — including Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit — flowed to working families and individuals with jobs. In some industries, about half the workforce relies on welfare...More than half of front-line fast-food workers receive some form of government assistance.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/13/get-a-job-most-welfare-recipients-already-have-one/

Additionally, as recently as September (2014), the Census reports that the number of households receiving government assistance has not increased:

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/acs/acsbr13-13.pdf

The good economy means that talented FOH staff can switch jobs easily and shitty restaurants and/or asshole managers are finding that the good people want better pay, better treatment, or both. This change really sucks if your the type of manager accustom to having people begging for work.

"Welfare" has nothing to do with -- the amount you can make as a good server is far above what you'd get from unemployment.

To anyone who complains of "Welfare Queens" I dare you to quit your job and live entirely off unemployment and other public benefits.

EDIT: It should be noted that even good restaurants are having trouble finding/keeping talent as the economy improves. There is simply a shortage of good waitstaff given the demand for them. But this is due to the good economy -- the complete opposite of what the moronic reviewer is suggesting.

I admire the statistical rigor he brings to sports analysis, especially the NFL, and he has fine moments as a food writer: check out one of this other contributions to the Eater Boston year-end survey of local critics and bloggers, like his description of his best meals of 2015. Good, evocative stuff there.

But the notion that potential workers are staying at home rather than taking restaurant jobs so they can collect welfare is a risible, paranoid right-wing fantasy.I think he is way off base in his assessment of why restaurants struggle to find good talent, which he starts off on the wrong foot by citing it only as a front-of-the-house problem; many restaurants are also struggling in the kitchen, notably with a dearth of good line cooks.

There's clearly a living-wage issue here -- if you're going to work for shit pay (like $3.35/hour for tipped roles), maybe you'll seek a job that isn't as back-breaking and benefits-free as a restaurant industry work -- but blaming it on shiftless poor people strikes me as utterly divorced from the realities of the restaurant business. With fitful progress on increasing the minimum wage, some restaurateurs are trying to address the issue with surcharges for back-of-the-house staff and no-tipping policies.

The bigger problem is an unsustainable overexpansion of restaurant seats in Boston in general, which I place squarely on the shoulders of the large-format, national chain restaurants in the Seaport and elsewhere that are sucking up talent and dining dollars from better, locally-owned restaurants. These deep-pocketed chains are gutting the innovative indies that make our restaurant scene unique and vibrant, and distinguish it from the many other US cities that are dominated by those chains. As I put it in that same series of interviews, "Without those independents, we’re just Des Moines with oysters."

It doesn't help that Byrne loves and defends those Seaport places. Part of this is market-driven -- the Seaport succeeds because it gives many diners what they want -- but I see it as a pernicious Wal-Mart effect. I don't want to see brighter, less mainstream talents driven out of business by middlebrow, corporate-concept chain restaurants with scale economy advantages. If you don't want that either, support your local indies, I beg you.

Kerry is who he is, politically. He writes for the Herald, after all. But on this score, as he is on many politically-charged questions (like climate change), the facts just aren't on his side.