“Almost like the dark web”
How Bowline unites restaurants around the industry’s difficult conversations

Leaderless collaboration

To promote the goal of an open and constructive dialogue, Bowline has no formal leaders and no formal industry or academic backing. It equally includes everyone with connection to the industry, from chefs and restaurant owners to university researchers—“a balance between academia and restaurants,” as Nick Curtin, chef and co-owner of restaurant Alouette, describes it. And even though the unconventional nature and flat structure of the organisation may seem hard to grasp for some, Matt Orlando sees the diverse and open structure of Bowline as a strength and an ideal environment to promote better communication and collaboration in the industry.

“Other groups I've been involved with in the past have been so bogged down by bureaucracy that just makes things go so slow.

With Bowline, it's like an even playing field, and everyone has been so open to trying new stuff just to try. That way of working is so attractive for me because it's really how we work at Amass and many other restaurants,” he explains. 

The approach has worked. More and more members have engaged in conversations to share important knowledge and experiences. For example, in the spring of 2020, an online survey Bowline conducted with the help of student volunteers from Copenhagen Business School amassed more than 4500 responses from 25 countries in under 72 hours, providing massive amounts of valuable information and driving home the point that interconnectivity and collaboration is a key part of developing the industry—both in relation to the COVID crisis and beyond.

From COVID to broader issues

Initially, the work in Bowline had a necessary focus on short term issues related to the pandemic. But conversations quickly and naturally started growing in other directions as well. As time passed, the goals of Bowline expanded to tackle more general and long lasting issues in the industry as a whole.

Just before the second lockdown in 2020, Bowline began hosting workshops for the restaurant community. The first one, “Winter is Coming,” focused on the financial challenges facing restaurants during the pandemic. The second one, “Everyone Has a Story: Let’s Change the Narrative,” brought relevant stakeholders together to tackle the current public debate on gender bias and harassment and how the industry can contribute to and learn from it. This was a quintessential Bowline event – a conversation highly relevant to an industry with rough working conditions for many women, and without much organized work being done to address the issue. 

Partly inspired by these conversations, five CBS students conducted master’s thesis projects investigating similar industry issues and concerns. These include an overview of industry responses to the crisis; an in-depth case study of one establishment’s response; a study of diversity and sexual harassment issues facing the industry; and a project tracking an attempt to promote closer collaboration between Copenhagen restaurants and local/organic farmers and food suppliers.

These kinds of activities have generated significant momentum to start tackling some of the persistent challenges facing the restaurant industry in a more organized way. Now that the urgency of the pandemic is starting to subside, Bowline needs to figure out ways to keep that momentum going.

“What's the worst that could happen?”

The lockdowns are over, but many restaurants are still fighting for financial survival. Businesses are open again, but the slow winter season is about to hit. On top of that, the severe labor shortage plaguing the entire service industry after two lockdowns means the employees that restaurants do have are under considerable stress. Meanwhile enrollment figures at the Copenhagen hospitality school are significantly lower and longer-term prospects for the industry are uncertain. The members of Bowline want to continue to address these challenges and more. 

Over the summer of 2021, Bowline orchestrated three events called “City Lights” in collaboration with Copenhagen Business School and Wonderful Copenhagen. Since meetings with more than five people in one place were out of the question, they hosted individual, curated walk-and-talks with no more than two or three people at a time. 75 different chefs, artists, architects, journalists, historians, politicians, scholars, and community leaders were brought together to discuss the effects of the lockdown on the urban community, and just as importantly to look forward, discussing how we continue to cultivate the role of restaurants as central institutions in the cultural and civic fabric.

With those conversations in mind, Bowline now looks to new challenges in a post-lockdown world. After starting as a small group, the plan is to raise money, to grow, and to engage and benefit the restaurant sector and communities across Denmark. There is still a big need for change in the industry, and as Bowline has demonstrated, collaboration and openness are some of the keys to promoting change on a larger scale.