from West Seattle Blog
Jeremy Hardy is an experienced restauranteur who owns Coastal Kitchen and Mioposto. He contributed to the Forward Seattle effort to repeal Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law and argued repeatedly in support of a sub-minimum wage loophole for employees who receive tips.
What they said
- 9/20/2013: “Having owned numerous restaurants over the past 25 years, this is not one of those Chicken Little moments.… We cannot afford the proposed increase without being given tools such as tip credit.…To raise the minimum wage without providing a tip-credit is a feel-good move akin to smoking pot instead of doing our homework.”
- 6/10/2014: “This is a game changer. The myriad of unintended consequences is too complex to really understand…We are going to adjust using all of the tools at our disposal; pricing, reducing menu offerings, look at operating hours, reducing labor where we can and certainly not opening another business in our beloved Seattle…. It falls somewhere between feeling sad and feeling betrayed that this grenade has been dropped on us.”
- 3/25/2015: "I am not a cry wolf type of person, until this came up…your volumes are starting to come back, starting to make money again, and then, at that point, this $15 an hour thing comes up. I was really angry. "
- 5/9/2015: "With the labor pressures that are coming from this $15 eventual minimum-wage increase, we are juggling with razor-sharp daggers," Hardy says. "And if you don't get it right, it's really going to hurt."
What happened
In July 2014, Hardy opened a second outlet of Mioposto in Seattle — the third restaurant under his ownership. A third Mioposto is slated to open in Seattle this summer — meaning Hardy will have doubled the number of restaurants under his ownership since the minimum wage law passed.
All four of his restaurants are in his beloved Seattle.