Five Years After COVID, the Restaurant Labor Market Has Yet to Recover

The COVID pandemic accelerated a labor shortage in the industry. Now, restaurant owners and chefs across the country say they’re still struggling to recruit and retain talent.

In the spring of 2021, restaurants across the country were scrambling to find staff. After a calamitous year of intermittent closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many local governments were beginning to loosen indoor dining restrictions. As vaccine distribution widened, operators couldn’t keep pace with pent-up demand. Restaurant workers who’d been laid off during the height of the pandemic were reluctant to reunite with their former employers, many choosing to run out the clock on their unemployment benefits rather than return to work and risk getting sick. Many found other jobs — and stuck with them permanently; others retreated to their hometowns or migrated to new cities. Workers consistently noted how the forced time off made them realize the extent to which their labor was often undervalued in the industry, and chose to walk away.

There were already labor shortages before the pandemic, but industry leaders were taken aback by the unprecedented shortfall. “Hiring is a nightmare,” Caroline Styne, co-founder of Lucques Group in Los Angeles, told AP in June 2021. “I’ve never been in a situation like this.” A New York Times article that year reported that some restaurants were shutting down for months at a time because they were having so much difficulty finding workers. “People aren’t even showing up for interviews these days,” Erick Williams, chef-owner of Chicago’s Virtue, said when asked about the staffing crisis.

Now five years removed from the onset of the pandemic, the labor market in restaurants is still suffering lingering effects. A report published in February by the James Beard Foundation found that a majority of independent restaurant owners cited difficulty hiring and retaining high-quality staff as among their primary concerns. Those surveyed also expected staffing shortages to be “one of the top three trends affecting restaurant operations in 2025.”

For many restaurateurs, the pandemic disrupted the normal inflows of talent to the industry. “At any given time before COVID, a third of the people were always on their way out — whether because they’re graduating school or are exhausted by the industry and wanted to change careers — but we always had people coming in,” says Ellen Yin, owner of the Philadelphia-based High Street Hospitality Group. “COVID not only resulted in a large exodus, but also a huge shrinkage in the number of people coming into the industry.”

For aspiring young cooks, the cachet of working with a big-name chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant is no longer a sufficient draw into specific kitchens nor into the industry as a whole. “Using clout as payment for candidates is not sustainable anymore, and I think that the pandemic really exposed this tactic,” says Brooke Burton, a senior recruiting partner for the Madison Collective, a staffing agency that works with many fine dining clients. “It’s a crutch that award-winning chefs and restaurateurs now can’t use in hiring because candidates know they can do better.”

Disruptions have extended beyond entry-level kitchen positions. The loss of so many career professionals with specific knowledge, like sommeliers and service directors, has left the industry starved for talent. “The qualified layer of restaurant workers with experience found other work, whether it’s in the industry, adjacent to the industry, or outside of the industry,” says Alice Cheng, the founder of Culinary Agents, a firm that specializes in job marketing and recruiting for restaurants nationwide. “The industry lost a lot of experience in five years.”

For millions of spurned restaurant workers, the pandemic-induced hiatus was an introspective moment — a rare break from the daily grind that allowed many to reconsider the long-term viability of restaurant work. Carrie Strong walked away from a 20-year career as a sommelier in high-end restaurants in New York City, like Lever House and Aureole, choosing instead to pursue remote work as a consultant, wine educator, and brand ambassador. The pandemic hastened a long overdue epiphany — that her restaurant career was no longer tenable. “I can’t be on the floor full-time anymore,” says Strong. “My body can’t handle it. My ankles swell up. I have bad knees from all those years in restaurants.”

Replacing tenured workers has proven to be difficult, particularly in critical back-of-house positions where there’s now a short supply of technical expertise.

“It’s still hard to find advanced cooks — specifically pasta cooks and butchers — people who can break down whole animals and cook proteins,” says Reneé Touponce, the executive chef and a partner in Port of Call and Oyster Club in Mystic, Connecticut. “You have your cooks that are very new and fresh or the ones who are in sous chef or CDC (chef de cuisine) positions that are looking for salaried jobs with benefits. But the in-between [roles] are the ones I’m finding most difficult to fill.”

The widening qualification gap has presented new challenges that have made it difficult for chefs to keep their kitchens fully staffed. When new hires are inexperienced, it raises the expectations for other employees; Touponce says that her sous chefs have had to take on more responsibility behind the line, working shifts and handling more day-to-day cooking.

The absence of tenured employees has also disrupted the way knowledge is traditionally disseminated from veteran leaders to new hires. This has impacted the industry’s more specialized sectors, like craft cocktail bars, even more acutely. “There was a huge exodus of mentors during the pandemic,” says Andre Sykes, the beverage director at Detroit City Distillery. “Those people were supposed to train the current generation of bartenders, which left a huge void of knowledge.”

Looking forward after five tumultuous years, restaurants that survived the pandemic now face new challenges, including the reality of needing to offer higher wages and more benefits in order to attract workers from outside the industry. “We had something like 40 percent inflation of labor costs in Charleston on the kitchen side from March 2020 to March 2023,” says Michael Shemtov, whose company Honest to Goodness Hospitality has seven restaurants in Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville, including Butcher & Bee.

But paying more doesn’t necessarily guarantee attracting more qualified applicants. “We’ve noticed new hires inflating their qualifications and demanding a higher starting wage,” says Grace Glennon, who along with her husband Kyle Spor owns Afternoon, Crybaby’s, and Baby J’s in Gainesville, Florida. “Then when they get into the actual job, many of them clearly don’t have the requisite skills. I never saw that happen before COVID.”

Yin says that restaurateurs are now incentivized to find other ways to attract talent. “Our company has a much more extensive benefits structure now,” she says. “We used to have only one health plan before COVID, now we offer three different tiers with dental and 401(k).”

Shemtov’s restaurants began adding a “healthy hospitality” surcharge to every bill (currently 2.2 percent), which allows his company to pay 70 percent of every employee’s health plan (versus just 50 percent before the pandemic). His employees are also now auto-enrolled in a retirement savings plan and offered a maternity/paternity savings match. “My thesis is that if I can get them to save $4,000-5,000 in a retirement account, then they’re really going to think hard about leaving me for another job,” he says.

But attracting talent can still be challenging in secondary and tertiary markets where offering comprehensive benefits packages may be too costly for many operators. Out of necessity, some have started to look beyond the traditional applicant pool to acquire capable help. “Because we can’t find a lot of cooks, we focus on bringing in interns from culinary school,” says Touponce. “It’s helpful for us because we’re busier in the summer months, which is when a lot of culinary students are available for internships. Prior to COVID, we didn’t really need interns.”

Since many new hires arrive with a lower baseline of experience, restaurateurs have had to invest in developing more comprehensive training. “We’re taking it as a given that most new hires probably won’t have the skillset we need from the beginning,” says Shemtov. “Before the pandemic, they used to spend a few days or a week shadowing someone before they go live, now they go through a three-week training process.”

The new normal can be frustrating, but Shemtov feels like the changes his company has implemented over the past five years will make it more resilient going forward. “People talk about wanting to get back to pre-COVID times, but I would say that if we could rewind, we would have the same issues,” he adds. “The good old days were never that good — we’re not going back there.”

Touponce also sees the aftermath of the pandemic as an opportunity for the industry to learn from its mistakes and rehabilitate its broken work culture. “I think a lot of good things came out of the pandemic,” she says. “Cooks are being treated better and paid better, we’re being more mindful and supportive, and everyone has a clearer understanding about the relationship we have with our community. I think COVID really made us all more aware of what’s important.”