By Blair Tynes and Tucker Thompson
Photo by Blair Tynes
A waiter at The Bistro on Main in downtown Lexington was asked one day recently to comment on reports of a shortage of staff at local restaurants.
“That’s funny,” he said. “We’re short on servers, so I don’t know how much free time we’ll have to do an interview.”
Bistro Manager Judy Cain confirmed that she’s been struggling off and on for a year with a shortage of wait staff. Cain felt the shortage acutely recently, when many servers called in sick. But other local restaurateurs are also having trouble finding and keeping a full staff of trained servers.
A busy local dining scene got even more crowded starting in the summer with the opening of two new high-end restaurants, Haywood’s and Rocca, both, like The Bistro, on Main Street. A third, Taps, is scheduled for a late October opening. All three list jobs for servers on their websites.
Existing restaurants are feeling the same pinch. Cain said The Bistro has to choose between limiting seating or paying servers overtime. Stephanie Wilkinson, co-owner of The Red Hen on Washington Street, says some restaurants have had to cut their hours because of the shortage.
All three strategies can mean less revenue, higher costs or lower margins.
Rocca is one place that has turned to the Washington and Lee student body to help fill its labor force. When managers there discovered that Mary Beth Benjamin, a senior, was a trained bartender, she said, she was offered a full-time job.
The shortage isn’t limited to upscale eateries. Applebee’s, north of town, has openings for servers, and Cook Out, which opened last summer on East Nelson Street, had to search outside Rockbridge County to fill its staffing needs.
One reason for the difficulty is an improving national and state economy; workers have more jobs to choose from than they did in the wake of the Great Recession.
The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 5.9 percent in September, the lowest rate in six years. Virginia’s rate is 5.4 percent and Rockbridge County’s rate is 5.2 percent. (The state and county rates are for July, the latest month available.)
But Phil McManus, head of the culinary arts and management program at Dabney S. Lancaster Community College in Clifton Forge, thinks the problem is a shortage of trained talent rather than bodies.
“Each year restaurants in the Rockbridge area call me looking to recruit,” McManus said. Nearly all of his program’s graduates find jobs, he said, about one third of them in restaurants in the Lexington area. He hopes to expand the college’s program to meet the demand for trained staff.
McManus says the demand by the growing cadre of upscale restaurants feeds a vicious cycle locally. Patrons of high-end places demand a high level of service. Restaurants respond by seeking trained servers and paying them well to avoid frequent turnover. Those costs are passed along to diners, who then demand a higher level of service for their money, he says.
Some help could be coming in the form of a local initiative by Main Street Lexington, a group of downtown merchants chartered last year to promote business.
The group is teaming up with the community college and the Shenandoah Valley Workforce Investment Board to try to spread the word about adult education programs that train food service workers, said The Red Hen’s Wilkinson, who is also executive director of Main Street Lexington.
But Wilkinson acknowledges that the initiative might not be able to solve a characteristic that many food service workers share.
“It may be the nature of the business that they move on,” she said.