Cara Chigazola Tobin is nowhere near being able fully to reopen Honey Road, her restaurant at the busy intersection of Main and Church streets in Burlington.
“It’s not just as easy as unlock the door and let people in,” she told Vermont Lt. Gov. Molly Gray, who visited the restaurant to learn what Chigazola Tobin and other restaurant owners need from state and federal agencies to reopen.
Vermont restaurant owners are struggling to reestablish their businesses, even as Vermonters and tourists are returning in droves to eat out.
In 2018, Vermont had 1,413 restaurants and bars, according to The National Restaurant Association. It’s not clear how many pre-pandemic businesses will be able to survive since revenues took a severe pounding during the Covid-19 crisis.
Chigazola Tobin, 38, kept her restaurant open during the pandemic by offering takeout, but a lot of deferred maintenance accumulated, she said.
“We’re going to have to shut down to reopen because we have to put everything back,” she said. “We have to hire. We have to train.”
She plans to reopen her indoor space in early fall.
As Burlington restaurants reopen, they are competing with one another for workers, Chigazola Tobin said.
“Imagine a ghost town and all of a sudden, six restaurants are opening up,” she said.
Chigazola Tobin posted a help-wanted ad on social media in June for line cooks and said she received little to no response.
“We are very lucky here at Honey Road,” she said. “I typically don’t have to put out ads. I get resumes.”
At Bluebird Barbecue in Burlington, owner Sue Bette said four or five employees have moved back home and that she has not seen college students returning to work.
“We might have put together the most perfect recipe for eliminating an entire pool of talent this year,” Bette told Gray, who’s 37.
Bette says she plans to keep her restaurant to-go-only this year.
Employment factors
Chigazola Tobin cites several reasons for the shortage of workers. One is the difficulty of finding child care. Another is fear of infecting unvaccinated children. Another is the supplemental federal unemployment benefit of $300 a week that expires in September.
“People are getting good benefits right now,” she said.
Gray said another reason restaurant workers are reluctant to come back to work is that they were the last to be vaccinated — a result of Vermont’s age-banding vaccination strategy, starting with the oldest and working down to the youngest. She said they are asking themselves: “Can I live with my roommates in an apartment and be working?”
Restaurants — along with manufacturing, skilled trades and retail — are one of four Vermont industries that had more than 10 outbreaks of Covid-19 in the workplace between March 5, 2020, and March 10, 2021, according to the Vermont Department of Health.
Chigazola Tobin and Bette are asking Vermont officials, including the congressional delegation, to replenish the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, a federal program that provides emergency assistance to restaurants, bars and other businesses affected by the pandemic. Congress set aside $28.6 billion in aid for the entire country.
Restaurants in Vermont received additional support from state Emergency Economic Recovery Grants.
“Vermont absolutely secured the restaurant industry with the grant program,” Bette said. “Unlike any other state, it creates a security that really set us up.”
“This is our go time,” Chigazola Tobin said of Burlington restaurants. “We’re not a ski community here in Burlington, so moving into the winter when we do see our revenue cut in half, it’s going to get scary this winter.”
A lot of fear in the workplace
At the Green Mountain Inn in Stowe, innkeeper Patti Clark faces similar challenges.
“We’ve had help-wanted ads for months, and we get very few responses,” Clark said. “It’s very hard to hire locally right now. A lot of people left the workforce. A lot of people don’t want to come back to work full time. They want to be part time. Some people, they’re just not comfortable coming back into the workplace. They may have children, taking care of people that may be health-compromised.
“I still fear the Covid pandemic. There’s a lot of fear in the workplace.”
The shortage of workers is particularly acute in the hotel’s restaurant, Clark said.
“It’s really difficult to hire restaurant staff right now,” she said, even though the hotel has long paid above $15 an hour.
“It doesn’t matter. You can pay $20 an hour, and we still wouldn’t find the staff,” she said. “It’s shocking.”
The hotel has discontinued lunch service, which Clark said is normally very busy.
“We can open for lunch any day and do 100 to 200 lunches,” she said, “but we are just not equipped to do it right now. That’s painful because our busiest months are June through October. This is when we really contribute to make the inn profitable.”
The shortage of staff has an impact on those who are working.
“I can see a lot of our staff are getting beaten up, burned out, tired,” she said.
