SACRAMENTO, CA – Aren’t you fed up?! Today, the California Restaurant Association (CRA) launches its “What The Fork?!” campaign, calling out lawmakers at the state and local levels for forcing neighborhood restaurants to make impossible choices to survive California’s expensive onslaught of regulations. 

“Forty percent of California restaurants we surveyed reported that they did not make a profit last year,” declared Jot Condie, President + CEO of the California Restaurant Association. “We’ve been ringing alarm bells as iconic restaurants shutter and, still, lawmakers add more burdensome regulations, so it’s time to get the attention of our guests, their voters.”  

Phase one of the campaign includes two billboards inside Terminal B (near gates B10 & B15) at the Sacramento International Airport (SMF), supported by social media ads around the Capitol region (additional images available upon request). 

“Our ‘What The Fork!’ campaign will raise voter awareness to pressure lawmakers to stop legislating all of us into a hole,” declared Condie.  

Many neighborhood restaurants are still paying off loans they needed to survive the pandemic closures. Meanwhile, costs for rent, food, utilities, insurance, and especially labor have skyrocketed.   

Why is that? 

The direct and indirect effects of 400,000+ regulations that California lawmakers at the state and local levels pile on year over year.  

Hundreds of regulations and laws passed each year open up new opportunities for unscrupulous trial lawyers to line their pockets at the expense of neighborhood restaurants and consumers. 

Increasing prices for guests is a last resort as neighborhood restaurants are facing closure. 

“This isn’t an exaggeration; neighborhood restaurants are at the brink,” said Fred Glick, Incoming Chair of the CRA Board and Brewpub Chieftain at Karl Strauss Brewing Company. “Voters deserve to know that the high prices we are all paying are a result of California lawmakers incessantly adding more unnecessary hoops and added costs.”  

“We aren’t big corporations that can absorb added costs; every time they pass another unnecessary rule, lawmakers are eating into the 3-5 cents that small neighborhood restaurants are making on the dollar,” reasons Dolores C. Jackson, CRA board member and part of the family ownership of Lolita’s Mexican Food in San Diego.  

When restaurants close, the entire community loses. Restaurants are the largest funders of essential services like public safety, schools, and infrastructure.  

It’s time for lawmakers to do something different and stop adding more regulations and costly laws that drive up the prices of dining out or force restaurants to close altogether.  

Learn more about some of the policies driving up prices for consumers and sign the petition at https://www.calrest.org/wtf.