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New York City restaurateur and veteran of the wine and hospitality industry Yannick Benjamin was voted as one of Fine Dining Lovers’ Hospitality Heroes. His passion to improve the industry for disabled people both as staff and customers serves as an inspiration and more importantly is driving real and lasting change.
“The work will never be done,” says Benjamin on the phone on his way to work. It’s St. Patrick’s Day and New York is painted green, but Benjamin is focused on his wine shop and restaurant Contento. “Every day should be better than the day before. Change is increment, so we should never get complacent.”
In 2003, Benjamin was in a car crash that left him paralysed below the waist. As a sommelier, he faced challenges to continue doing what he loved, but he quickly adapted, outfitting his wheelchair with a table that allows him to work the floor as a sommelier. It was the beginning of a journey that saw him expand his influence across the industry to advocate for greater accessibility.
“In hospitality, things have gotten much better. The conversation is being had, people are much more aware. Operators and management are seeing how incredibly valuable it is to not only employ people with disabilities, because they offer so much and bring so much talent and unique perspective, but also how lucrative the market can be.
“Over 61 million Americans have a disability and they have over $5,000 billion of spending power. If you cannot get emotionally incentivised, then you should be getting financially incentivised, because the numbers game of this business is very tough and challenging. So why are we excluding such a demographic?”
Benjamin doesn’t preach, he fully understands that there are challenges for restaurateurs to making their spaces more socially accessible, but there are small things we can all do that can make a big difference.
“It’s great to acknowledge and talk about it, but action needs to be taken,” he says. “I’m very blessed that I get to travel quite a bit, and unfortunately, when I leave the States, other countries are behind in making things inclusive. I realise that places like Western Europe, the infrastructure is very old. I have seen situations where there are two or three steps to get in a restaurant, I understand that maybe the building is 300-years-old, but there’s nothing preventing the owners from getting a portable ramp so someone in a wheelchair can access it. There’s nothing stopping them from having menus in braille, or a QR code so people from the blind community can use their app to have the menu read out to them. Social accessibility can be achieved for people with intellectual disability, hard of hearing, vision disability… These are things that can be implemented easily.”
Benjamin understands both sides of the coin as he knows what it’s like to be an able-bodied person working in the industry. However, disability is something that he was very familiar with, before it became part of his life.
“I was in a car accident at the age of 25-years-old,” he says. “I have people in my family who have disabilities. I have two cousins that are blind, I have a cousin in Brittany with the same spinal cord injury as I have and my grandfather was blind too in his later years. So the concept of disability was not foreign to me.
“There are people who are born with a disability, but mine came later, so I learned as a non-disabled person then I had to transition to the life of disability and relearn everything. But the passion, curiosity and desire never left me and that is the most important thing.”
Together with his friend, Alex Elegudin, who suffered a spinal cord injury in the same month, Benjamin founded Wheeling Forward, to provide people with diabilities the motivation and resources to resume active lives. The organisation’s success is driven by a group advocates working to make real progress on behalf of the disability community.
He recently opened restaurant Contento in Harlem. The food is Peruvian and there is a focus on making the space an exemplar for inclusion.
Contento is a restaurant with the tagline “accessible for all.” The New Yorker described it as a restaurant that "treats accessibility as a right". Tables are higher to accomodate wheelchairs and spacing between tables allows for free moveent of whellchair users. The restaurant has plans to roll out a job training scheme for neighbourhood people with diabilities and people from marginalised communities. Inclusivity is baked into everything they do at Contento, with the aim to make it a model for better business and labour practices, as well as a safe, respectful space for guests and staff.
“Contento has this element that I think is really important, that we practice social accessibility, we made sure that it’s as accessible as it can be, physically. We provide a space and a service so that people with disability can come in there, [be] treated with dignity and respect, and above all that they are comfortable there. We have people that come from all over just to come to our restaurant just because they know they are going to be treated in a certain way that they can’t find in other establishments.”
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