It might be the most prosperous time of the year for restaurants, but with staffing woes still lingering like last year’s fruitcake, it’s hard to say if these holidays will be the most wonderful time of the year for area restaurateurs.

There are more workers than there were six months ago, but restaurants still aren’t fully staffed for reasons not completely understood by many employers, who are willing to pony up the pay.

Table Talk: Staffing woes and rising numbers, but we have bakeries!

It’s not always enough to attract or retain employees.

“I can’t tell you exactly why all this is happening,” said Ben Brock, who owns Char and Amerigo locally, plus other locations and other restaurants in Mississippi, Nashville and Huntsville, Alabama. “Something just doesn’t seem right anymore. We’ve had people come in and we hire them, we think the world of them, then they just don’t show up.”

Or they come for training, work a few shifts and don’t come back.

“People know you can get a job on any corner now,” Brock said. “It’s definitely an employee’s market, but I wish they wouldn’t make us go through the trouble of onboarding, make us invest training and time and then disappear.

“I schedule interviews five days a week because we’re nowhere near fully staffed, but half the time people don’t even show up. I’m constantly scheduling interviews.”

Labor shortage creates a ‘great time to be an employee’

It’s hard on management and it’s hard on the staff. Experienced workers in general carry a heavier weight than new hires, but now, coupled with the fatigue of the pandemic, it causes extra stress.

“The hardest thing about my job right now is I’ve got employees that have been working a long time and understand the expectations and they generally do the right thing, no matter how hard it is,” said Kelly English, who owns Restaurant Iris, The Second Line, Pantà and Fino’s.

“Then you have new people in who don’t understand the ethic. You tell them they have to sweep or mop up, they walk out with their middle finger up. Obviously that’s not everyone — we have great new people, too — but someone walked out just the other day and I was bussing tables. The long-time employees end up picking up a lot of slack, something they didn’t have to deal with before COVID.”

Restaurant work is stressful, built around lunch and dinner rushes that are demanding and for many employees, their pay is performance-based as they rely on tips. When dining rooms shut down in March 2020 and most workers were sent home, some left the restaurant industry for good.

Jeffrey Opp, 24, started working in the service industry at 15 and had been at Texas de Brazil four years when he was laid off. With a little experience in landscaping, he went to work for Two Broke Bartenders and is now a carpenter there. He doesn’t plan to return to restaurant work.

“I found out that having consistent pay is nice, not having to depend on what the clientele feels they want to pay me,” he said. “It’s such an interesting dynamic. I always felt like I had to bend to their every whim because my paycheck depended on how they think I do my job.

“But you have a lot of complainers, people who are very demanding and will blame everything, even the quality of the food, on the server. Look, there are wonderful people too, people I miss seeing, but most people were hard.”

Allan Creasy started working in the service industry in 1997 and though he planned to leave, his departure coincided with the COVID shutdown.

“I’d stayed longer than I should’ve anyway, partly because I enjoyed Celtic Crossing so much and felt such a connection to it,” said the former longtime bartender at the Cooper-Young pub.

“But it’s sort of strange, working in a restaurant, to be passionate about something, to consider your work a vocation, something higher than a job, to be a career, but never being able to be fully respected for that. When you’re an attorney or have a have another white-collar job, you have this social capital, but if you choose to bartend for a living, no matter where you are income-wise, it always comes down to ‘when are you going to get a real job’.

“When we were sent home in COVID, a lot of us realized we could move on to those other jobs, to make that final leap,” Creasy, who now manages social media for Memphis For All, said.

To attract former workers back or get new ones in, restaurants are paying more.

“I can tell you this, the days of the $10 dishwasher or the $12 prep cook are over; that’s long gone,” said James Taras, co-owner of Jim’s Place Grille in Collierville. “We — everyone — had to accelerate our wages and if you can afford insurance, you provide it, at least for your top people. Here all salaries got bumped across the board. It shows our commitment to our employees and helps keep them from being recruited, whether by another restaurant, a hotel, a construction company or whatever.

“But I’ll tell you this, too: If you’re not raising your menu prices, you’re going to be in trouble. We’re paying more for wages and we’re paying more for our products and you can only absorb so much of it without having to pass the cost along.”

Taras said he feels like he’s redeveloped his team in recent weeks, that he’s in pretty good shape for the holidays.

“If you want to have a workforce, you have to make it work. We found out there are no shortcuts. You listen to your employees and your customers, you pay more money, and you do whatever it takes. Everyone has to work humbly. There’s no room for the Gordon Ramsey style; those days are over too.”

Back in Midtown, Andy Feinstone has struggled at Boscos.

“It’s stressful work. We’ve had people walk out in the middle of shifts,” he said. “I think it’s getting a little better now, but we were going through a lot of turnover for a while. You’d think you were staffed, then over the weekend you’d lose a few people. That would happen every few weeks.

“But we’re still short-handed. I’ve had ads out for over a month and haven’t had anyone apply for a hostess job, and half the people who schedule any interview don’t show up.”

Feinstone has increased his wages and offers insurance, which he’s always done, but says the industry’s full recovery from COVID is tough because the first year was so hard on restaurants.

“Once the Health Department put such tough restrictions on us, it made it hard to keep staff or bring on new people,” he said. “It was just too uncertain. If someone got COVID, you had to do a COVID clean, and shut down for 24 to 48 hours.

“So for the people who were still working in restaurants, it was affecting their hours and therefore their livelihood. They couldn’t count on us because we might have to shut down at any time.”

Like other places, Feinstone has had to raise prices because of higher wages and food costs.

“My last (menu) reprint I had to go up and I might again after the first of the year. We’ll take the hit, at least for a while.”

He’s back to full hours, which some places haven’t been able to manage because of staffing.

“I never really stopped being open seven days, but I kept shorter hours, and we’ve had times when we’ve closed down early or for a few days to give the staff a break,” Feinstone said.

English’s Restaurant Iris was only open three days a week; it’s closed for now and will reopen in Laurelwood in 2022. Panta is open four days; The Second Line, five days; and Fino’s, six.

“Very few restaurants have returned to seven days a week,” he said. “Most of us have a model where we’re asking our teams to work as hard as they can five days a week, not seven. That guarantees the staff some sanity. Part of the examination of our industry has been mental health, and that’s not just about people in crisis. That’s just fostering our daily mental health. We have to take care of our people.”