The inside of Honey Road, an upscale Mediterranean restaurant in downtown Burlington, looks more like a warehouse now than a place to sit down for homemade pita or an elaborate lamb dish.
Tables covered in takeout boxes are pushed against the walls and boxes are stacked several feet high. The well-appointed indoor space, featuring high, tin ceilings, a brick wall and an eclectic combination of chandeliers, has been used mostly as a staging area for the pandemic-friendly outdoor dining and takeout business Honey Road has been running over the past 18 months, according to Cara Tobin, the restaurant’s chef and co-owner.
Now, as the pandemic drags on, Honey Road has temporarily shut its doors to customers. “We are closed to give our staff a well deserved break,” reads a printer paper sign taped to the front door of the restaurant on the corner of Church and Main streets.
Restaurants around Vermont are taking extended breaks, cutting back on hours and even closing permanently due to pandemic fatigue and staff shortages.
Some businesses are making changes in an attempt to attract employees and to support those working in a difficult industry, from raising wages to increasing benefits and flexibility. But that hasn’t immediately solved what business leaders say is the root problem — that there just aren’t enough restaurant workers in the state to fill every open position.
“Across the board there’s not the number of humans we need,” said Catherine Davis, president of the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce.
This isn’t a new situation. There has always been a shallow work pool in the state’s restaurant industry, according to Amy Spear, vice president of tourism for the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.
There are a variety of theories as to why the workforce is so limited: a dearth of housing in the state, high cost of living, health concerns over working in public-facing roles and federal unemployment benefits, to name a few.
But the result is understaffed enterprises, overworked employees and business closures.
Though Honey Road plans to reopen on Oct. 7, the Old Brick Store in Charlotte is closing until it can find enough staff to fill eight recently vacated positions. And Butch and Babes, an American restaurant in Burlington’s Old North End, said goodbye for good earlier this month after a nearly seven-year run.
Barkeaters in Shelburne, Smokey’s Low n’ Slow in South Burlington and The Scale in Williston also went the indefinite-closure route.
The regional chain Skinny Pancake sharply cut back on hours due to staffing shortages in six out of seven restaurant locations. Only its Montpelier creperie is sticking to regular scheduling.
Davis said that staffing shortages are common this time of year, when school-age employees or people who work at schools during most of the year leave their summer jobs and head back to class. However, she said, this year’s problems — restaurants closing, reducing hours or otherwise cutting back on services — suggest a more extreme situation.
According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were around 37,000 workers in Vermont’s leisure and hospitality industries before the pandemic, in July of 2019. The following July, that number dropped to around 22,000. This July, the BLS recorded around 31,000 people working in leisure and hospitality, which includes restaurants.
Davis said the biggest impediment to growing the workforce is housing. “We have this acute need for a workforce but we have this dire housing shortage,” she said. “Even if we were to bring more people to the state, we don’t have places for them to live. It’s really a chicken and an egg situation.”
According to Davis, it’s a problem that needs to be solved statewide by developing more housing and encouraging more workers to come to Vermont.
“There is just a mismatch in the number of employees needed and the number of employees we have,” Davis said.
Employers that need workers now are trying a variety of ways to incentivize them, from increasing salaries to adding benefits.
Skinny Pancake founder and CEO Benjy Adler, who saw many staff depart in mid-August as schools opened up, said he is working to distinguish his business by offering better pay and benefits, continuing to get feedback from staff, and creating a compassionate and fulfilling environment.
The minimum salary at Skinny Pancake is $15 per hour, according to Adler, who said most people make between $15 and $20 and that many make more than that. He also cited a variety of benefits: matching health care, 401k, farm share, a short-term loan program and a partnership with Invest Employee Assistance Program, a nonprofit that offers free counseling.
Adler said he hopes that some of these incentives will help bring staff to Skinny Pancake and allow him to go back to full-time operation. But he is also anticipating a spike in job interest once a federal unemployment contribution ends on Sept. 4, a benefit that he was very clear he supports. “We are seeing an uptick in applicants this week and expect that to continue to grow,” he said last week. “We hope to get back to full operation by mid-September.”
For now, Adler said he doesn’t want to ask any more of his current staff. “They are all tired and overworked and have done an exceptional job, so we are basing our operating hours on their capacity,” he said.
One kitchen supervisor who has worked for Skinny Pancake for around three months, Rafaella Hill-Mosher, said that as soon as they came on, they noticed a heavy burden on staff to keep up without a full team and deal with fast changing policies.
“We had to rush training and there was generally a lot of pressure,” Hill-Mosher said.
“Skinny Pancake is a good place to work,” they said. Hill-Mosher added that it has a fun environment and provides decent pay but that, in general, the industry is difficult because the work is hard and the money isn’t great.
“Skinny Pancake has a good balance between pay and responsibility,” they said, “but pay is a challenge anywhere in the restaurant business. A lot of restaurants focus on being a business and need to put a lot of pressure on staff but can’t pay a lot.”
Honey Road is on a similar path as Skinny Pancake, trying to figure out how to attract enough workers, support its staff and run a successful business.
Tobin, the co-owner, said that recently the exhaustion level of her employees had become so evident that taking a breather just seemed like the right thing to do.
“I could see it in everyone’s faces, that the mental toll of the last 18 months really caught up with everyone,” she said.
But Tobin herself isn’t taking much time off. The restaurant is, yet again, shifting gears and creating a new business plan. Over the course of the pandemic, it offered takeout, outdoor dining and did some retail, selling olive oil, spices and the like. Now it’s creating a new hybrid model, with plans to go back to indoor dining and retain a limited takeout menu.
“We basically need to reopen the restaurant again like it’s the first time,” Tobin said. “I mean we need to find the plates because I don’t even know where they are.”
The restaurant also needs to hire enough staff to meet the anticipated Oct. 7 reopening date. “Line cooks, servers, food runners, hosts, we need pretty much everyone,” she said. “And there aren’t a lot of people looking for these jobs, it’s really hard.”
Tobin is also hoping to figure out how to offer her employees more. In the past she has paid hourly workers at least $15.
“We’re sort of spending the next month figuring it out to make it sustainable as a business so we can pay our staff more or have them make more,” said Tobin.
“How can we pay more, how can we offer anything to help offset costs?” she asked aloud. “Because, dang, I know what it is to live here, and it’s hard.”
