The yacht club atmosphere that used to consist of excitedly chatting diners was now empty, aside from a few staff members. Stacks of bistro chairs sat on top of the tables, serving as a constant reminder of how things used to be. Takeout supplies claimed almost every surface area in the restaurant’s interior, reducing a once happening spot to a mere storage room.
This was the fate of Island Restaurant, a neighborhood favorite for American cuisine in Carnegie Hill.
Just two months after the restaurant’s temporary closure in March 2020, it was up and running; but only for takeout and delivery.
“I mean, to not have people inside the restaurant, when typically that’s such a part of the experience for us, felt strange,” said Island Restaurant’s owner Chris McLaughlin. “It was a very different environment to work in at that time.”
McLaughlin’s restaurant is one of many that’s struggled throughout the pandemic. According to Yelp, nearly a third of the 2,800 businesses in New York City that have permanently closed since the pandemic were restaurants.
The reasons are many, but experts say the biggest one is a lack of workers available to keep these businesses up and running.
“Because of the global hospitality staffing shortage, there’s just fewer people working in the restaurants,” said Regan Stevens, a Philadelphia-based freelance writer contributing to Food & Wine. “So, restaurants all over the world are facing a labor shortage like they’ve never faced before.”
Restaurants were still 15%, or about 1.8 million jobs, below the pre-pandemic employment level in March, according to the National Restaurant Association.
With Island Restaurant now open, McLaughlin says that he’s had to adapt to the fluctuation in customers at his restaurant, which makes it challenging to have the appropriate number of staff ready. He’s still trying to find the balance between being prepared when it’s busy, but not being overstaffed when it’s slow.
“As we were very slow, we had the right amount of staff,” said McLaughlin. “And then we got very busy and we were kind of scrambling to get staff and, you know, ended up having people work a lot of hours basically, as we transitioned into that time.”
Stevens has chronicled similar stories in her articles and says that some restaurants don’t even have a chef.
“They’re online, but they can’t find a cook to hire,” said Stevens. “So they’re working tirelessly, prepping and cooking the food and doing things that you know, they would be able to sort of pass off to another cook.”
To make ends meet, many restaurants have made significant changes to their business model.
Terms like “ghost kitchen” are now all too familiar to restaurant owners: “It’s a restaurant where you can’t go there and eat,” said Stevens. “It’s like, they just prepare the food. And it’s just for takeout.”
Smaller menus and outdoor dining are also trends that have popped up since the pandemic.
McLaughlin completely revamped his staffing strategy, menus, and customer outreach when outdoor dining became popular.
“The pandemic had required us to be agile and evolve our business plan with customer preferences and government regulation,” said McLaughlin.
A limited number of staff available has not been the only worker-related issue for restaurant owners during the pandemic. When it comes to hiring new people, many lack the experience needed.
McLaughlin says that he had to furlough a lot of his employees when the restaurant temporarily closed, which gave the workers the opportunity to go on unemployment. When many preferred staying on unemployment to coming back to work in May 2020, the restaurant had to hire new and inexperienced staff members.
“It’s wonderful to teach those people, but it also required a lot more from me to be overseeing all the time,” said McLaughlin.
According to a report from the National Restaurant Association, 2.5 million restaurant industry jobs disappeared last year due to the pandemic.
Some restaurant workers know this reality all too well.
“I used to work as a bartender before I started working here and I was working for the Marriott Hotel at that time,” said Jorge Hernandez, a waiter at Island Restaurant. “They pretty much laid off everybody from the hotel and then I spent almost 14 months with no job or anything.”
Despite all of their struggles, Hernandez and McLaughlin remain among the lucky ones. Since the start of the pandemic, many of the city’s smaller restaurants have had to close their doors for good.
As for who is getting impacted the hardest in the industry, Stevens says it’s those who are lacking the appropriate resources.
“Who I’m the most worried about is the small mom and pop shops that don’t have the resources to continue to run their restaurants,” said Stevens.
Roughly one-third of the city’s 240,000 small businesses may never reopen post-pandemic, according to a report by the Partnership for New York City.
While hardship within restaurant jobs throughout the pandemic has been common ground for many, this has not been the case all across the board.
Attempts to add more jobs to the industry have been effective in contributing to pandemic-related restaurant relief.
According to the New York State Labor Department, restaurants added 15,000 jobs in April — tripling the number of employees for the city’s full-service restaurants since April 2020.
Many of these job additions correlate directly with the opening of restaurant pop-ups throughout the city. These pop-ups have amassed a great amount of success, giving chefs new opportunities to be creative that they wouldn’t otherwise have at a regular restaurant due to stricter rules and restrictions.
Going forward, McLaughlin remains hopeful about his restaurant and its ability to thrive even in the face of adversity.
“I think that if we were able to make it through this and be where we are today, then, you know, we should continue to be successful,” said McLaughlin, who is a big believer in people’s love of socializing and dining out. “Especially after a period of quarantine and seclusion, it’s more welcome than ever, and I hope that it will continue.”
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