‘Something’s got to give’: Restaurants slash hours, trim menus as worst worker shortage ever cuts deep

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Janrikk Millan was starting to worry. The head chef at Grazie Ristorante was missing about four people in his kitchen in Vaughan, Ont., just north of Toronto. The cooks he had left were complaining about working double shifts through the weekends, lunches and dinners, to keep the restaurant running, clocking as many as 36 hours in three days.

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They needed a break, but Millan hadn’t been able to hire anyone in months of searching. After a hectic dinner service in early August, he grabbed a menu on his way out of the restaurant.

“Something’s got to give,” he remembered thinking that night. “This can’t go on.”

Millan got home, took the menu out of his pocket and started crossing out dishes. Anything that took too long to prepare had to go, as did anything that took too many cooks, or looked too much like another dish.

He scratched out the breaded veal, breaded chicken, spicy shrimp and seafood linguine. Then came the calamari. It was a tough call. The dish is a top seller, and a favourite among the 13-year-old restaurant’s regulars. It also required the squid to be gutted, cleaned, sliced, soaked in buttermilk, breaded in corn flour and fried twice. One cook would be devoted almost entirely to the dish every night. Cut the calamari, and he could give one of his cooks a night off.

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The next day, Milan sat down with the restaurant’s owners in the wine room. He pulled out his marked-up menu, with about seven dishes gone, including the calamari.

“I just told them, ‘Look, we have to take items out from the menu, because you don’t want guys walking out on you.’ That’s basically it.”

The Grazie owners agreed, and the calamari became one of the thousands of cuts and sacrifices that restaurants across Canada are making to stay afloat during an unprecedented labour shortage in the industry.

The food service and accommodation sector also has the highest job vacancy rate in the country

It couldn’t be a worse time to be short on staff. Restaurants, hobbled by months of lockdowns and seating limitations, are finally able to pull in serious revenue and start the crawl out of debt as those restrictions ease up. Instead, operations from independents to major chains are abandoning lunch services, or shutting down entirely during weekdays because they can’t find enough workers.

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Initially, some argued workers weren’t coming back because rosy pandemic benefits had made lower paying service industry jobs unattractive, but the factors behind the shortage now appear to be more complex: Many workers used the time off during the lockdowns to reconsider their careers and move to different, less precarious industries, start their own businesses or go back to school. An aging population, slowed immigration and continued COVID-19 fears are all also suspected of contributing to the shortage.

The resulting tight labour market is driving up wages as managers try to hold on to their employees, lure them from competitors or convince them to come back to the business altogether.

“I’ve talked to some operators, they’ve never seen anything like this,” said Todd Barclay, chief executive of Restaurants Canada, which estimates that at least 10,000 restaurants in Canada have already closed.

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The food service and accommodation sector also has the highest job vacancy rate in the country, with 129,000 open positions, according to Statistics Canada data for the month of June, the most recent available.

A separate Statistics Canada study on the employment rate in August showed the sector managed to boost jobs over the summer, though they’re still below pre-pandemic levels.

But if the numbers don’t keep climbing, many fear the rebound that so many struggling restaurateurs have been hoping for won’t be enough, especially as patio season winds down and high infection rates in some regions start to temper enthusiasm about indoor dining.

Recipe Unlimited Corp. — one of Canada’s biggest restaurant chains with brands including The Keg, Swiss Chalet and Harvey’s — is looking to fill 3,500 vacant positions this month.

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“Managers are constantly dealing with new staff and having to train new staff, so it’s quite exhausting,” Julie Denton, chief people officer at Recipe said in an interview last month.

“You’re seeing many restaurants across the country close on Mondays and Tuesdays … They have to give their management teams a break. They cannot work seven days a week. That, for sure, has a ripple effect across the board.”

One of the more noticeable effects of the labour shortage, for diners at least, has been lineups outside restaurants that have full sections cordoned off with empty seats.

At Le Virunga in Montreal, Zoya de Frias and her mother, the chef Maria-José de Frias, are running the place on their own after their employees either moved or switched industries during the pandemic. To keep up on busy nights, the mother-daughter team limits the number of customers they let in.

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Diners show up looking for a table and Zoya, who manages the front of house, has to tell them she’s fully booked.

“They look at you, they’re kind of puzzled, because you’re fully booked, but you still have space in the restaurant,” she said last month. “It feels like you’re lying to them, but you’re not.”

Some diners will offer to be flexible, as long as they can sit and wait at one of the empty tables.

“They tell you ‘Oh, it’s OK, we’ll wait … We’ll have some water in the meantime,’” she said. But after they get their water, the reflex is to ask for a cocktail. “It’s a human thing. But you can’t bring them a cocktail, because you have to finish serving the people who are already seated.”

Earlier in the summer, Zoya posted a call on Facebook for workers and put a help wanted sign in the window.

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“I got eight resumés,” she said. “To be honest with you, some of them had no experience.”

Zoya has heard stories from friends in the industry about rounds and rounds of interviews and tryouts only to find a candidate who disappears after two shifts.

Le Virunga’s mother-daughter team, working two services, six days a week, barely has time to keep up with the existing service, as well as all the usual bills and paperwork, so there just isn’t time to train someone green.

A further complication, Zoya said, is that her restaurant, run by two women specializing in pan-African cuisine, has struggled to attract the same level of applicants as other restaurants.

“It’s not an elephant in the room, but it is my reality,” she said. “Even before COVID, I would get less people wanting to come in and work than my friends who are doing mainstream French cuisine.”

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Zoya said the restaurant industry is a man-led one and “we’re women, and we’re women of colour. When you’re getting directives from a woman, some men have trouble dealing with it.”

The plan, since June, has been to hire someone when the business slows down and they have some time to train them.

After months of careening between open and closed, it didn’t make sense to slow down the minute diners started coming back. It’s just that they’ve kept coming, week after week, looking at the empty tables and wondering why she can’t seat them.

“We’re just trying to, I would say, probably, survive. It’s a sad word, but it’s not. It’s just trying to keep going,” she said. “This is all we can be thinking about and all we’ve been doing.”

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A survey released in July by U.S. job search site Joblist found that 38 per cent of former hospitality workers are looking elsewhere in search of a different work setting (52 per cent), higher pay (45 per cent), better benefits (29 per cent) and more schedule flexibility (19 per cent). Furthermore, half of them say that nothing would make them return to their old restaurant, bar or hotel jobs.

Denton at Recipe Unlimited, said the chain recently conducted a competitive market assessment, comparing its compensation rates to competitors, and opted to improve its benefits packages for salaried and hourly staff, including mental health benefits and personal days. The company is also offering a digital app so employees can change or swap their shifts more easily.

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“I think folks are careful about increasing labour rates too much,” Denton said. “In some of the markets that are particularly hot, you’re seeing that.”

A few weeks ago, Millan — the head chef at Grazie — got a message from a friend, asking if he wanted a job. They were offering an hourly wage well above most pre-pandemic standards.

“They’re short. Now they want to hire you. They want to throw money in your face,” he said. “But how? Like, how can you afford that?”

Millan didn’t take the job.

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“I’ve been at Grazie restaurant for 11 years,” he said.

During the lockdowns, when the restaurant was shut down, Millan and his wife started a side gig, a little pop-up burger stand and the Grazie owners let him use their kitchen to run it.

“They’ve been my family,” he said, explaining why he didn’t want to leave them, not for another restaurant, not for anything except his own restaurant, some day.

The 31-year-old chef is still hiring. He’s posted on online job boards. He’s calling old staff and digging up old resumés lying around from pre-pandemic times when he had no use for them. But he said all of them have new jobs, some in new industries, or have started their own thing altogether.

“I think people are just tired,” Millan said. “There’s no one coming in. No one’s on Indeed. No one’s applying.”

• Email: jedmiston@postmedia.com | Twitter: jakeedmiston