This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. In 2020, the restaurant business as we knew it looked like a goner. Even its own lobbying group said so. As the pandemic crushed bars and sit-downs, the National Restaurant Association put out a dire prediction: The business would likely never return to its pre-pandemic state. Over the next four years, just about everything that could go wrong for an industry went terribly, unthinkably wrong for restaurants. The pandemic destroyed indoor service across the country. More than 2 million jobs were lost in 2020. As COVID restrictions waned, chaos swarmed every reopening. In the Great Reshuffling of 2021 and 2022, the “quits rate” among restaurant and hotel workers—the share of employees who left their job, in any given month—rose above 6 percent, close to the highest rate of any industry this century. This resurgence of worker power was wonderful for low-income employees, who saw their earnings grow faster than those of the rich, …