🔒Dining dilemmas: Restaurants have seen labor and supply shortages and learned to strategize

Typically, Side Street Café in Bar Harbor employs about 100 employees. “In 2021, we had 85,” says co-owner Jena Young. “If we were fully staffed, things would flow a lot easier.” The staffing issue was exacerbated by constant uncertainty.

“We started the season already scrambling the find enough people,” she continues. “If anyone had any symptom of illness, they were out for a long time. And people they had contact with needed to be out for some amount of time.”

To compensate, there was a lot of cross-training and schedule-shuffling, as employees began working in positions they weren’t used to. Young encouraged a team approach.

“We leaned on that team mindset much more than any other year,” she said. “It was one day at time.”

Adding to the year’s challenges were supply chain issues. Avocados were a key item sometimes hard to get. Young compensated by giving customers a discount.

“It created confusion if a dish couldn’t be priced the way it was intended to be served,” she says. “This year we’ve been more strategic. We have looked at the ingredients that we will have difficulty sourcing and have tried to remove them from the menu where we could.”

Online wait list

Side Street’s dilemmas were no different than any other eatery in Maine and beyond.

It’s well known that the pandemic resulted in a near-existential crisis for the industry in 2020. As the crisis eased in 2021, restaurants continued to face challenges that included workforce shortages and supply chain issues. The result could be long wait lines, fewer restaurants open in busy tourist communities, and ingredient shortages.

Restaurants have come up with strategies such as shorter hours, revised menus and the use of new technology.

Side Street adopted technology that helped with longer wait times resulting from distancing guidelines that accommodated fewer seats.

That included an online wait list and takeout portal.

“We’d tell people, ‘Go for a walk and you’ll get a text when your spot is ready.’”

Although 2021’s revenue came in higher than 2020, Young had to cut key parts of the business model, such as offering take-out at night.

“The revenue was higher but so were the high costs,” she says. “The strain was also incredible due to the other issues we were running into. So, while revenue was technically higher, so was everything else.”

Shorter hours

Elsewhere in downtown Bar Harbor, Café This Way had 25 to 30 employees last year, down from 40. The seasonal restaurant typically serves breakfast and dinner. It cut dinner service from seven to five days per week. This year, it will offer breakfast only. Based on 2020, which was also breakfast-only, that’s likely to cut revenue in half, says owner Susanne Hathaway.

“I’ll do dinner again in the future,” she says. “But this year, I’ll do one meal, one menu, hopefully longer hours.”

She expects that could minimize the stress of having fewer employees, but could also create scheduling complications because employees will likely have second jobs.

Hathaway obtained two rounds of Paycheck Protection Program loans, which helped keep her café afloat.

“We raised everyone’s salary, like everyone else, in order to keep people,” she says.

For example, the dishwasher position increased from between $16 and $18 to $20.

A key breakfast item difficult to source was pre-cut potatoes for homefries. She ordered whole potatoes, which meant a time-consuming process for an already short-handed crew.

To compensate, Hathaway thinks she’ll do more a la carte.

“So instead of homefries immediately coming with your omelets, you’d have to order it,” she says.

The changes likely mean higher menu prices.

“If we go a la carte, we’ll lower the egg prices and then they’ll have to add on,” she says.

Overrun

“We were overrun, absolutely overrun,” says Jim Heyer, co-owner of the Water Street Tavern & Inn in Lubec.

Heyer says the small coastal town in general saw a huge influx of visitors last year.

“People ask me all the time, ‘Why don’t you advertise?’ And I say, ‘I don’t need to.’”

The tavern’s crew, including a local chef, has remained steady through the years; that was largely the same last year.

But the influx meant adjusting operations. The tavern accommodates 58 people per seating. The first week it was first-come first-serve.

“We open at 5 o’clock. At 4 o’clock we had 40 or 50 people standing in the street waiting to get in,” he says.

He instituted 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. seatings, with reservations recommended, and sent latecomers to the local pizzeria and deli.

“All of them did extremely well last year,” he says.

When certain supplies fell short, Heyer substituted. He likes a particular brand of Italian wine.

“The wine was at the ship, but the distributor couldn’t get it off the ship,” he says.

So his distributor bought the wine from another in New York. “You’ve got two distributors involved, plus shipping,” he says. “But it wasn’t anything you couldn’t overcome. I’d say, “Where’s the wine I like?’ They’d say, ‘We can’t get it.’ Well, the customer drinks something else.”

Order at the counter

Not far away in Lubec is Cohill’s Inn and Irish Pub, where staffing was a top challenge.

“We were only able to hire one person for our restaurant last year and that created a cascading series of issues along with the necessity to change our business model,” says co-owner Glenn Charles.

Operations changed to an order-at-the-counter model instead of having traditional wait staff.

“This model worked as well as it could, but caused frustration with longtime customers and no doubt cost us revenue,” he says.

The pub also reduced hours to five days per week and 3.5 hours per day, from six days and 10 to 12 hours.

“We are expecting things to be worse this year than last,” says Charles. “It will either be worse because we continued to be overwhelmed due to increased demand and a lack of staff or it will be worse because of the ‘world’ conditions.”

If the pub is unable to find staff for 2022, it will likely continue with last year’s model while looking for creative alternatives to deal with lost revenue, he adds.

Further down the Lubec coast is Inn on the Wharf, which houses the Fisherman’s Wharf Restaurant.

“We were very much overrun, but we were able to stay open for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” says co-owner Victor Trafford.

The three Lubec restaurateurs all note that multiple other local eateries were closed in 2021.

“Not often do you wish your competitors were there,” says Trafford.

Fisherman’s Wharf typically closes at 8 p.m. But the line of people waiting to get in was getting so backed up that he would close at 6:30 in order to take care of the backlog.

“We were short-handed,” he says. “We kept it afloat but it was tight.”

Visa backlog

In Camden, Natalie’s, a restaurant that’s part of the Camden Harbour Inn, saw an increase in the number of guests in 2021, compared with 2020 — double the number in the shoulder season months and an increase of 51% for the year. Sales were up by 70% to 80%.

“That resulted in a lot of pressure on our staff and the kitchen,” says owner Raymond Brunyanszki, who attributes the growth partly to other restaurants in the area being closed or operating shorter hours, plus more visitors during the shoulder seasons.

For the year-round fine-dining restaurant, “we made the decision to overstaff just in case we’d lose people in the process. That benefited us,” he says.

Retention strategies include above-average compensation and benefits that reach the high five and even six figures for some management positions, he says. The restaurant’s 23% average gratuity on an average $148 check per person is an attraction for employees, he adds.

“We’re able to give people a year-round income and benefits, so it’s easier to actually have a life here versus being five or six months unemployed and maybe have to move to Florida for a season there,” he says.

The establishment also benefits, he says, from being a member of Relais & Châteaux, a global trade association headquartered in Paris.

“Forty percent of the employees we hire decided to choose us because we are a Relais & Châteaux property,” he says.

Still, for 2022, Brunyanszki is having more problems getting a team together.

“We took a very long time for the kitchen and restaurant staff to come together,” he says. That has mainly to do, he says, with a backlog in H2B and J1 visa applications, a source of seasonal workers from abroad. About half of Natalie’s staff is non-U.S. workers.

“American embassies around the world have massive backlogs after limited ability to operate during the pandemic,” he notes.

The interview for one foreign worker he was expecting to hire was delayed until 2023.

“If visa applications can’t be processed, you might as well do nothing,” he says.

Positive mindset

Restaurants also strategized to deal with negative customer attitudes.

“We saw a level of rudeness for the general traveling population that we had never seen before. This was experienced by most in the industry and was quite demoralizing,” says Charles.

He adds, “All you can do is try to smile and work it out.”

At Side Street, Young instituted a somewhat unorthodox approach, including team workshops on how to have a positive mindset.

“We’re embracing the challenges and proactively asking, ‘What can we do about this?’ Rather than getting lost in the frustration, I’m trying to create a shift toward having compassion and thinking, ‘They must be having a bad day. Let me get them some food.’ Just keeping it simple and not personalizing the experience.”

But many customers are supportive.

“People go out of their way, to say, ‘We appreciate what you’re doing,’” says Young.

Charles agrees: “There were plenty of people who were very grateful and very happy that we and other establishments made it through and were there to be open.”