Another week, another chef down. This time it was Charlie Hallowell, who just before the end of the year took leave from daily operations of the three restaurants he owns in Oakland, Calif. Seventeen employees told Tara Duggan of The San Francisco Chronicle that Mr. Hallowell’s sexual harassment and verbal abuse were so routine that they stopped seeming remarkable.

Mr. Hallowell said he was “deeply ashamed and so very sorry” in an email to the Chronicle. “We have come to a reckoning point in the history of male bosses behaving badly, and I believe in this reckoning and I stand behind it.”

The reckoning Mr. Hallowell invoked has played out in several American business sectors, as significant numbers of women who have experienced sexual harassment at work for years have begun to talk about it in public. It reached the food world in October, with a newspaper investigation into the New Orleans chef John Besh.

But if the restaurant industry is having a reckoning, it is an excruciatingly slow one. So far there seems to be only one way to depose a serial harasser who runs a restaurant: a long investigation by reporters who have the time to gather a convincing number of corroborated accounts. Each of these articles takes weeks or months. To justify that commitment, publications generally choose well-known targets.