(The Center Square) – When it comes to staffing, the pandemic has hit area restaurants hard and it is now forcing them to scramble to find workers.
Fear of contracting COVID-19 has scared workers away from restaurant kitchens in favor of delivery work and other jobs with less contact with the public.
“In a restaurant, you are in close proximity to the guests. A lot of staff are still really uncomfortable,” chef Carrie Nahabedian, co-owner of the award-winning French restaurant Brindille in River North, said.
Brindille is luckier than most restaurants, Nahabedian said, in that all the staff who work in the front of the restaurant have stuck with her through the COVID-19 shutdowns. They are eager to finally get back to work this spring.
Nahabedian said it is another story when it comes to the kitchen. Women workers have left the hospitality industry in droves, Nahabedian lamented. With unemployment benefits as a cushion, and side hustles in delivery businesses, women support staff and even women chefs are not willing to come back to work just yet for fear of bringing the virus home to their families, Nahabedian stated.
“I have talked to just scores of restaurateurs in Chicago and friends across the country and they all say, ‘We have no staff,’” Nahabedian said.
Nahabedian recently held a job fair and wound up with only two applicants for jobs that are normally easy to fill in her high-end kitchen. To sweeten the appeal for new hires, Nahabedian was willing to provide training to the right applicants, something that she never made time for before the pandemic. Like her fellow restaurant owners, she has upped salaries, even for people who have not been to cooking school.
“Before the pandemic, you’d have to be a rock star to get $20 an hour [as a chef in training, working on the line],” Nahabedian says.
With unemployment, stimulus checks and tax refunds, Nahabedian believes a lot of workers are able to make it through the summer without the higher risk of contracting the virus in a busy restaurant setting.
“It is not about the money,” Nahabedian says. “Unemployment is just a bridge until things get back to normal.”
Nahabedian is hoping that people will want their old jobs back by fall.
“There is nobody that would not like to flip a switch and have things go back to the way they were before the pandemic,” Nahabedian says.
Meantime, Brindille will reopen for 4 days a week by the end of April. By summer, Nahabedian hopes the restaurant will be able to open 5 days a week. Without enough staff, she and her core workers will knock themselves out to keep up the quality experience that her customers expect, she said.
