Mains and Sides: The Culture of the Side Hustle in New York’s Restaurant World
January 21, 2025
At some point in recent history, the side hustle became so ubiquitous as to seem a key ingredient in the main hustle — an essential condiment, if you will. And for folks in the food and beverage industry, the metaphor runs even deeper.
It’s not a new phenomenon for one to maintain a hospitality job while, say, writing a novel, or auditioning for a screen role. A stable, clock-in-clock-out gig in support of some creative aspiration is a tale as old as time. The newer marvel, however, is the creative side hustle directly tethered to food and drink, rather than the opposite. We’re seeing a thrilling uptick in hospitality-adjacent professionals launching indie food magazines, pop-up event series, wine making ventures, and the like — which is to say, a new wave of people finding ways on and off the clock to rethink how we consume. Here’s a look at some of the creators helming main-hustle-worthy side gigs right now.
preshift!
Helmed by Dante Clark and Julianny Gomez, preshift! is a wildly fun and inclusive take on the wine social club: a space for folks to gather, converse, learn, share bottles, taste new things, and revel in the inevitable version of community that great hospitality can so readily foster. Then again, the wine community hasn’t always been a uniquely welcoming or diverse space — and preshift! is reimagining the wine *enthusiast* or *professional* trope in the best ways.
“When we started preshift! in 2022, Dante was working full-time as a manager and sommelier at Bar Blondeau, and I was working full-time as an instructional designer at a tech company,” says Gomez. “We had opposing schedules and had to steal time in the early hours of the morning or use the few days that we were both off to plan our vision for the project.”
Now, Clark works as a wine rep for Zev Rovine Selections while attending grad school at NYU, and Gomez works in service full-time — but, nevertheless, the duo manages to make time for preshift!. “Balancing our time is still a challenge. We still have to catch each other in the mornings or late nights during the week where we list out our tasks, ideas, and who we need to correspond with,” says Gomez.
When a project of this caliber is not your primary money-making endeavor, it is, of course, endlessly difficult to make time. Then again, when you’re as devoted as Gomez and Clark, the added effort is indisputably worth it. “We’re both incredibly passionate about wine, and preshift! allows us to share bang-for-your-buck wine from smaller producers that we’re really excited about,” Gomez continues. “We started the project with the intent to subvert what it means to be a sommelier and who gets to be a consumer. Our target audience is people who look like us: queer, trans, and BIPOC individuals with a wide range of wine experience. Regardless of who you are and what your background is, everyone is a PX.”*
In short, the project allows the pair to maintain their love for the wine industry — whereby it’s all too common for folks to become jaded after a matter of years.
Barbichette
Finger Lakes natural wine label, Barbichette, from husband-and-wife team, César Vega and Louisiane Remy, operates out of both a production warehouse upstate, and a rented space in Brooklyn’s Pfizer building. When the two aren’t busy pressing and sorting locally-grown grapes, however — or pouring their new cuvees at wine fairs stationed everywhere from Rock Center to France’s Loire Valley — they’re off roasting coffee for beloved New York roastery, Café Integral. “In terms of time and revenue, Café Integral still has most of our attention,” Vega explains. “Though, during harvest time we tend to dedicate many more hours to grapes. No surprise there.”
In some ways, Café Integral usurps more time on a day-to-day basis just by nature of the project (and its tethered income) — but that doesn’t mean Barbichette is merely a small-scale hobby. “I hope the term ‘side hustle’ doesn’t make [wine production] sound like an afterthought. Coffee is a fresher, just-in-time type product, so we roast, pack, deliver and brew on a daily [and] weekly basis while vinification has a different timeline,” Vega adds.
The wines, all of which are fermented naturally, are a staple at major hot-ticket restaurants across New York (and the country, writ large). At the same time, so is Café Integral coffee. “Balance is maybe an illusion,” Vega says, of navigating both projects simultaneously. “But the secret, if you can call it that, is sometimes just as simple as long, devoted hours.”
Cake Zine
The women behind Cake Zine — the brilliantly curated literary journal-meets-food-mag-meets-recipe-trove you’ve been seeing everywhere — make for an algorithmically brilliant pair: Tanya Bush, much-lauded pastry chef and soon-to-be cookbook author, alongside food media veteran Aliza Abarbanel. The natural makings for “cake” and “zine.” And for Bush — who still writes freelance while finishing her cookbook and working in hospitality — Cake Zine is just the cherry on top (an unavoidable dessert pun).
“This is an especially intense work moment,” Bush admits. “I’m wrapping up the proof for the new issue of Cake Zine (Daily Bread), shooting my cookbook while moving through copy edits, finishing a freelance piece, and juggling my restaurant job… so all the plates are spinning.” In fact, for Bush, all of the above hustles take turns occupying the labels of “main” and “side” — depending on the phase of the project, timing demands, income, and, well, commitment. All the same, she’s learned to devote as much energy as possible to each, without letting anything fall by the wayside.
“There are ebbs and flows, crescendos in the work. Sometimes, everything feels perfectly balanced and doable and then there are stretches when all the projects seem to demand time-sensitive, specific attention at once,” she explains. “Often, I rely on a rigid schedule to make it work. I block out chunks of time: an early morning doing production at the restaurant, afternoons editing the manuscript, evenings reading proof passes or doing managing editor work for Cake Zine, plus various administrative tasks and so on. Not because I want to do all those things in one day, but because that’s what this hybrid work life sometimes requires.”
*A PX is restaurant back-end shorthand for a flagged or starred VIP diner.
Edited by Edith Young
Photography by Marissa Alper, Marisa Langley, and Chelsea Kyle