"That's business," said Balek when Valleywag reached him by phone.

The reason for the closure: Google is subleasing an entire complex of offices. It has already laid off thousands of contractors, so it no longer needs the space. How sudden is this move? Basic Deli, which won raves from San Francisco Chronicle food critic Michael Bauer, had only been open a year. 5ive, the cafe where Googlers are eating in the clip above, has also proved popular.

The company already closed Off the Grid, one of the complex's three cafés which offer free food for Google workers, last October. Plymouth and Oasis, two cafés on the edge of Google's main campus, may be next, a source says.

Balek, a colorful chef who has the words "foie gras" tattooed on his knuckles, confirmed his café's closure. He's moving to another café on the Googleplex, and says that all of the kitchen staff — contract workers employed by Bon Appétit — have been placed.

That will be news to them: We hear that none of the Basic staff have yet learned whether they'll have jobs on Monday. They were promised word two days ago.

"That's a vendor issue," Balek explained before hurrying back to his kitchen.

The chef is being highly diplomatic here. Google has long sparred with Bon Appétit, squeezing the café operator to keep dishing up organic expensive fare at rock-bottom prices. The result of the infighting: Steady cutbacks on meals and hours served, culminating in this weeks' outright closure of cafés. A scandal forced out John Dickman, head of Google's food operations. (He landed briefly at Apple afterwards, but reportedly left in January.) Googlers, meanwhile, have treated the company's cooks, servers and dishwashers with the kind of dismissive disdain they usually reserve for media executives.

Under a new, well-paid CFO, Google is focusing intensely on costs. Patrick Pichette, Google's penny-pincher in chief, is preserving Google's profit margins. But at what cost to the culture? Free food is the legendary perk around which Google has built its reputation for treating employees well. You can't cut your cake and have it, too.

Where did the other 6,000 go? The 4,300 were only a "subset" of the 10,000 contractors Brin cited, a spokeswoman told the Associated Press, implying that the cuts were not as heavy as the numbers might suggest. But in the filing, they were described as "temps, interns, contractors, and vendors" — a more expansive category, not a less inclusive one.

How classically Google, which seeks to make all the information in the world easily accessible — except when it has to do with Google's own business.

Whatever the numbers, Valleywag tipsters have consistently told us of heavy cuts. Deep Fried, a source within Google's kitchens, told us last fall of the unprecedented closure of one of Google's free-food emporiums, a cornerstone of Google's culture of employee perks.

And now, another perk — on-site technical support — is getting slashed to almost nothing. Our source writes:

I got laid off from google’s internal helpdesk a few months back; now I’m watching my google talk list drop one by one while a colleague there gives a play by play. Apparently the vendor is cutting costs (at Google’s request per my previous boss) by axing most of my friends in the mountain view call center (tech stop now). When I was there there were 24 people, three of us were axed when I left, two more people have quit in the interim but weren’t replaced in headcount. As of this writing, five of best techs have been escorted out – mostly the ones working way below what they were worth to keep their jobs alongside the Hyderabad call center.

Keep in mind that I love Google, Inc. and I think they’re trying their best to survive a shitty, shitty market without their employees getting hit too hard or looking weak in the press. It’s the vendors and contractors that are sweating bullets, since Google can only go to them and say “reduce your cost by X” and most of the vendors bend over backwards to keep the contract rather than negotiate. To illustrate how far backwards they’re willing to bend, all the layoffs from SlashSupport have been chosen soley by HR, with no input from the supervisors or leads. Google said “we can no longer pay for this amount of headcount,” and the knee-jerk reaction was to fire the people that the Slash HR person disliked the most. Slash HR never even set foot on the mountain view campus until they turned up with a stack of pink slips already filled out. Google can’t do anything about it aside from threaten to not renew the contract.

Tech Stop Now, the telephone helpdesk, is operated by SlashSupport. It looks like this is being gutted down to a skeleton crew before the contract is up for renewal in April; they probably intend to move the whole thing to the Hyderabad help desk, who are quite a bit cheaper to operate. Either that or Slash knows the contract is dead and they’re taking the opportunity to trim the fat so it’s cheaper when they have to give severance to the remaining eleven mountain view techs.

Yes, this means that from 9am to 6pm pacific, only eleven people at maximum are available to field tech support calls from across every Google office in the world. Estimates are that at least 50 issues a day will go unhandled and be passed off to the Hyderabad help desk. Used to be zero.

TSA – Tech Stop, the guys who sit in the rooms that are in almost every building and get to watch Futurama on a projector while they fix hardware that’s brought to them. TSA means alternately Tech Stop Associate or Tech Stop Astreya, as Astreya is the vendor for them. I am getting word today that TSAs are also getting reamed.

Who's being spared? For now, the elite tech-support crews on staff at Google, who fall into two groups:

FT – Field techs. Full time google employees. TSN and TSA escalate to these guys if it is something to do with confidential information,* needs someone with admin privileges beyond what TSN/TSA has, or something that really, really needs someone at the desk that is unencumbered with vendor NDAs about intellectual property. FTs also do a fair bit of coding and engineering, but as much as I think my SlashSupport NDA is garbage, Google’s is a lot more frightening :)

There are also xtechs, who are dedicated field techs that serve JUST the executives, but I’ve only ever seen one of them in person. Executives never came to Saladoplex where most of IT was quarantined to avoid offending visitors to the main iplex.

The Saladoplex is a cluster of offices across a parkway from Google's main campus. Heard more about contractor cuts at Google? Send in your tips.

Update: A tech-support contractor writes:

I too was laid off by SlashSupport, the helpdesk vendor. I was laid off on Monday, 7 of the remaining 16 of us were cut - That's a 43.75% cut. However, our whole team was also asked for resumes for a possible 6-7 conversions to FieldTechs, indicating that Google may be trying to retain the best of us. Many of those who remain in the helpdesk are not Google-quality, and all 7 of those of us laid off had had some sort of disagreement with Slash's HR manager, so we're certain that the selections were retaliatory in nature.

The move by Google to keep some tech-support staff is noble, if odd, since the search giant has an unofficial hiring freeze on. It speaks to the kind of tensions that exist between Google and contract firms like SlashSupport.

(Photo by Getty Images)

From: "Kim Huskey"
Date: October 28, 2008 12:44:03 PM EDT
To: [REDACTED]@google.com
Subject: [Everyone-ny] NYC Cafe and Microkitchen Updates

Hi Everyone,

Changes have been made recently to programs throughout our company to ensure cost effectiveness and consistency across offices. In New York City, our food service team has closely examined cafe usage, food consumption and labor costs to find areas where efficiency can be improved without compromising food quality and nutrition. We would like to announce the following NYC-specific changes to the food service program:

* Meals The below hours were determined to be the most cost effective to serve meals based on traffic flow to cafes.
* Breakfast will be served from 8:30-9:30am (formerly 8:00-9:30am) and the menu will be simplified. 
* Lunch will be served from 11:30am-2:00pm (formerly 11:30-2:30pm).
* Dinner will be served from 6:30-8:00pm (formerly 6:00-8:00pm).   Please note that dinner is provided for those working late in the office and is not intended to be taken home.
* Microkitchens
* Those of you who have been around for a while know that the microkitchens started for a variety of good reasons, including a genuine desire to make it easy for folks to grab some food while working long and/or odd hours.  While we are staying true to that original purpose, we are also looking for ways to be smarter, more cost-efficient, and more earth-friendly in the usage and product offerings of our microkitchens.   
* There will be changes to the selection of snacks in the microkitchens.  We will be sending a survey to Googlers in NYC soon asking for them to vote on their favorite snacks. 
* Socials and Guest Policy
* Afternoon tea on Tuesdays will be suspended. Similar to Mountain View, there may be occasional surprise "snack attacks" in the future.
* On those occasions when a senior executive would like to speak at TGIAF, temps, contractors, vendors and guests will be restricted from attending, for confidentiality reasons.
* To maintain consistency with other Google offices, we are going to adopt the guest policy announced in MV last month.  Please see below for more detail about this policy.

We look forward to continuing to provide Googlers with a great meal experience every day. Questions, comments or concerns can be sent to [REDACTED]@google.com. 

Thank you,
Kim Huskey
Food Services Manager Northeast and Canada

Off The Grid's closure is the harbinger of more cuts, a source within Google's kitchens we've nicknamed "Deep Fried" tells us. The building, 2350 Bayshore, is also having its "micro kitchen" snack stations closed. A large number of workers in the building were contractors, Deep Fried says, some of whom are losing their temporary jobs at Google. The closure also leaves a large area of Google's campus without breakfast service.

Food is just one area where Google is slashing costs; under recently hired CFO Patrick Pichette, Google has been having a series of meetings about eliminating expenses, and Googlers have been implementing the cuts with the same slapdash speed with which it rolls out new websites.

Google executives gave food-service operator Bon Appétit sharp budget cuts this year, which has only worsened the already troubled relationship between the companies. Google eliminated dinner at one café earlier this year. But the closure of Off The Grid was sudden, coming after a meeting between Bon Appétit executives and Derek Rupp, the café's executive chef, Deep Fried writes:

The whole staff came into the cafe and sat before the corporate panel and we were told OTG would close, effective immediately. Bombshell. They had their menus for the week planned out, their pantries were fully stocked, everyone working at full tilt, and suddenly they were told it was all over. Nobody expected it. Derek was stunned - OTG was his baby. Some were crying. They were assured from corporate that if an alternative position could not be obtained within the Google account then Bon Apetit would move them to a nearby account. Oh and by the way some may be let go. If so, two weeks' paid severance.

Google has, to Deep Fried's knowledge, never closed a café on its main campus before. The food cuts could be a harbinger to further cost-cutting; Deep Fried has heard that the building might be put up for sublease. To date, Google has aggressively sought to expand its office space in Mountain View; a sublet, too, would be an all but unprecedented retrenchment.

Other cuts are being made throughout Google. Glacéau SmartWater, once commonly stocked in Googleplex fridges, is gone, though that removal was spun as an environmental move to drop bottled drinks. Deep Fried observes:

I think we are doing a good job of keeping this from the Googlers. But should it really be kept from them? Shouldn't they know the real reason we don't have SmartWater is because we don't have the money for it? Shouldn't they know that even a powerhouse like Google is being hit? Maybe they would complain less.

Sunnily optimistic Googlers, convinced of their ability to better the world, complaining? Google has lost more than just a café. It has lost a bit of its innocence.

(Photo by Jatbar.com)

Hello everyone,

There has been a lot of concern and debate on campus about abuse of the guest privilege in the cafes.  We wanted to take the opportunity to review our guest policies and ask for your help in enforcing them.

1 - Every Google employee and intern in Mountain View is allowed two meals per month in our cafes for personal guests. 

We understand that there may be an occasional month when you have special visitors in town and you exceed two personal guests (4 family members visiting from Omaha?) but we trust you not to exceed more than an average of 2 personal guests per month. 

2 - After reviewing the number of guests on campus each day, we have decided to limit the privilege of bringing personal guests on campus to part- and full-time employees and interns only. 

We know that this will be disappointing to our temps, vendors and contractors, but we feel that it is a necessary step to alleviate the over-crowding and congestion on campus.

3 - Everyone is responsible for signing in guests (business or personal) at lobby reception and all guests are required to wear visitor badges visibly while on campus. 

This holds true for lunch and dinner.  Much of the abuse of the guest meal privilege in Mountain View is occurring at dinner time.  To help us maintain security, please refrain from bringing guests on campus on weekends and late evenings. 

4 - Prepared meals in containers are provided at dinner time for people who are working late on campus. 

We know that there has been a lack of clarity about this, but the intention of this meal service is not for people to grab meals "to go" on their way out the door, or to "stock up" on multiple meals.

5 - Anyone bringing a group of business guests to a cafe for lunch should bring them after 1 pm to avoid our peak lunch hour.

To help us to monitor and enforce these guest policies, we will be adding a simple step to the process of signing in guests on campus beginning later this year.  When visitors sign in at reception, they will be asked to identify themselves as a personal or business guest, and to indicate whether they are having a meal in one of our cafes.  If they are, the word "MEAL" will appear on their visitor badge. 

Our on-site meals are intended to foster community building among employees.  We want there to be enough room in our cafes for employees and teams to enjoy meals together.  Abuse of the guest privilege creates over-crowding and congestion, at great expense to the company.  This is an incredible perk that we benefit from each day.  Please do your part to use this privilege appropriately and honestly.

Many thanks,

Laszlo

(Photo by blmurch)

The poster claims Dickman then arranged to get a kickback from Bon Appétit. Google, he goes on to write, investigated Dickman and Bon Appétit, going as far as testing fruits and vegetables, presumably to see if they met Google's high standards for organic and sustainable ingredients. The implication there: Bon Appétit had been feeding Googlers slop dressed up as fancy fare. The end of the Craigslist poster's story: Dickman was brought before Google's board and fired. All juicy gossip — but there's one thing that doesn't make sense about this whole tale.

Dickman is now working at Apple, a company with close ties to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors. Apple directors Bill Campbell and Al Gore are important advisors to Schmidt. If Dickman left Google in a cloud, how could he possibly land a job at Apple? Either the poster's allegations aren't true — or something darker is going on here. One possible explanation: Google's leaders might have arranged for Dickman to get a job with their friends at Apple in exchange for buying his silence on other matters.

Here are excerpts from the original post on Craigslist:

Disclaimer: I don't work at Google. I probably never will. I'm not smart enough. As far as I can tell, almost nobody is. So it goes.

From a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, comes the following strange story ...

It seems that once upon a time, there was a guy - we'll call him Dick.

'Dick' was director of food services for a really big dot-com.

'Dick' had a wife. She was a highly placed executive at Bon Appetit....

It's not clear exactly HOW Bon Appetit came to acquire the Go^H^H big dot-com's contract. Right there, some thorny questions can be asked ... like, whether inside information influenced Bon Appetit's bid? ...

It seems that 'Dick' negotiated, it is alleged, two deals - the second deal translated into a end-of-the-year 'rebate' check being cut by B. A. and delivered to, yes, you guessed it, 'Dick'.

To make matters worse B. A., it has been said, did not deliver what they contracted to deliver, to big dot-com's cafeteria(s). Apparently there was a little watering down of quality, a little substitution here and there going on.

Big dot-com, it is said, did an audit. What sort of audit? It seems likely that there were private investigators involved ... I'd surmise a few bugs, here and there ... and maybe some chemical and DNA profiling of fruits and vegetables.

(If 'Dick' was like every other 'dick' I've ever known, he lined up every week to have his car detailed by the inhouse auto detailing service - so installing a bug in his car, as well as retrieving the audio, would have been child's play. Note to would-be 'dicks' ... don't be a dick.)

'Dick' was invited to a meeting of the BoD, I hear, and given two choices - resign, or be terminated. He's outta there, now....

Undocumented workers chop vegetables and wash dishes throughout the food industry; why would Google's cafes be any different? The hypocrisy of America's immigration rules isn't the issue, though; it's the foolishness of Google's management.

Even if everybody does it, Google executives claim that it runs its business differently — and better. Claiming the moral high ground may prove harder now. Google's chief people officer, Laszlo Bock, has lobbied Congress vigorously to expand the number of H-1B visas the company gets. Getting caught with an undocumented nanny has torpedoed many political careers. The next time he appears in Washington, D.C., don't you think Bock will get pointed questions from self-righteously huffy Congressmen why he doesn't think American citizens are fit to serve his employees' meals?

Google, which has been feuding with Bon Appétit over the running of its kitchens for months, may be addressing the problem. "There are rampant rumors in all the kitchens that Guggenheim [sic] will be taking over the account come December," Deep Fried tells us — actually referring to Guckenheimer, a less highfalutin' food-service competitor to Bon Appétit. "Everyone is paranoid that when [Guckenheimer] comes in all the undocumented workers will get the can."

If that happens, who will serve Googlers the free meals they've become accustomed to? We suggest Larry, Sergey, and Eric don hairnets and gloves.

(Photo by midom)

Tough luck. They're not available to the public, yet. And we suspect this may be a limited edition. The introduction is written by John Dickman, Google's former director of food operations, who left the company amidst controversy in January, and now works at Apple.

The trouble started when Google hired John Dickman as its director of food operations. Dickman is married to Lisa McEuen, an executive at Bon Appétit. At the time, Bon Appétit and Google were two of the largest buyers of organic and sustainable food in the region; by picking up Google as a client, Bon Appétit gained considerable purchasing power. A source in Google's kitchens says that Dickman was "the reason Bon Appétit got the Google contract."

But in exchange, Bon Appétit, a division of Compass Group, got a very testy client. A former Google chef who had his own ideas about how to run the cafes profitably said he tried to get founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt interested, but they didn't listen "because I didn't have a Stanford degree."

Google's ethics cops have never looked askance at, say, Schmidt hiring his girlfriend for a high-profile PR gig, or Brin getting Google to invest in his wife's startup. But Dickman's marriage to a Bon Appétit executive raised eyebrows, and he left the company in January.

Two top chefs followed him out the door. Josef Desimone went to Facebook, in March. Dickman himself went to Apple, and Nate Keller, a protégé of Google's first chef, Charlie Ayers, followed him there. Both Desimone and Keller took several members of the kitchen staff with them. "All management staff has quit within the last three months," says a source at Google. That may be an exaggeration, but if so, not by much.

One issue that's been underplayed: The behavior of rank-and-file Googlers. "Pride is all cooks and dishwashers have," says a former Google chef. But Googlers, whose sense of self-aggrandized entitlement is already legendary in the Valley, have been taking out their frustrations on the people who dish out their food. Kitchen staffers are "invisible" to them, says a Google food worker — except when they somehow displease Googlers who expect free meals and servile deference, too.

Google's cafes have always been at the heart of its PR strategy, helping to portray the company as generous to employees, dedicated to doing things differently, and caring about Mother Earth. Google PR director David Krane took on the replacement of original chef Charlie Ayers as the task he worked on in the 20-percent time Google gives employees to work on side projects. I can't remember the number of times Krane cajoled me to enjoy a free meal, courtesy of Google.

He wouldn't want me there now. A Bon Appétit executive said in May that the company was planning to drop Google as a client. Arrogant, tightfisted, and argumentative, the Googlers were more trouble than the food-service contract was worth. Even so, Bon Appétit has been scrambling to patch things up.

"The two founders of Bon Appétit come on site at least once a week," says a Googler. "Other representatives from Bon Appétit headquarters are on site every day — as visitors. It's a very sticky situation. The kitchen staff isn't being told anything. When dinner is cut how many jobs will be cut, too? The thing that really gets me is that the Googlers have no clue and will be asking us questions when dinner and other programs stop. They won't know the truth either."

The company seems uninterested in letting Googlers know the truth. It's telling that Google PR won't go on the record to deny the cuts, though they're happy to persuade reporters on background that the cuts are limited. A spokeswoman, conveniently unnamed, told CNBC's Jim Goldman that the company had no idea where the rumor came from.

Here's an idea for Google PR: Go down to a kitchen, and talk to the people who actually make the food you love to eat while chatting up reporters. They seem to be better informed than you are.

(Photo by Jeromy Henry/Fortune)

Last year, when we aired the mildest speculation about Google cutting back on free food, commenters were outraged. Google has long milked its cafeterias for their publicity value; company executives have crowed about the company's resistance to recessions and its commitment to coddling its employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even promised shareholders they'd add perks, rather than cut them.

In 2004, they wrote:

We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge ... We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.

What went wrong? For one, Google handed its restaurants over to an outside management company, Bon Appétit, which runs many Valley corporate cafeterias. The change did not go well, with Google and Bon Appétit constantly clashing — even over minor things, like whether kitchen workers could use Google's foosball tables. Star executive chefs like Nate Keller and Josef Desimone left. Desimone, who was recruited by Facebook, took many chefs with him.

The departures left Google's kitchens understaffed even as it undertook an expansion of its cafes to Alza Plaza, an office complex close to the Googleplex it acquired last year. Bon Appétit simply didn't have the staff to keep offering dinner, and Google didn't want to foot the bill to hire more.

Could this all stem from a change of heart by Google's formerly perk-crazy founders? Sergey Brin is said to have complained about employees' overweening sense of entitlement to "bottled water and M&Ms," a comment company flacks denied he made. Regardless of what Brin precisely said, it makes sense that he'd rethink his generosity. Brin has made his billions already. Spending to keep his employees motivated at startup levels won't pay off. Tightening the belt to keep profit margins high? That, and not free dinners, will preserve Brin's outlandish wealth.

The savings from cutting dinner, as well as some snacks, should be substantial. By one estimate, Google spends $7,500 a year on food per employee. But the phrase "per employee" is used loosely here. Employees often took their spouses and children out to dinner at the cafes, or wrapped up food to take home for the family — on shareholders' dime.

Fine, some Googlers abused the perk. Even then, consider the message Google is sending to employees: Go home and have dinner with your families. What will Thunder Parley, Google's self-appointed in-house food critic, say? This is a slashing of benefits Google executives can't sugarcoat.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images))