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Five years ago on 16 March, the sound of my cellphone buzzing on the nightstand jolted me awake around 8am. Unless you’re a morning prep cook or a baker, restaurant workers aren’t typically early risers. Sleeping late isn’t a luxury when you work in restaurants; it’s a necessity – essential to managing the job’s rigorous mental and physical demands.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we’re laying everyone off at the restaurant,” the gravelly voice on the other end said. “Someone from HR will be in touch with you shortly.” It was the general manager of the midtown Manhattan steakhouse where I had been waiting tables for over two years. Like most hard-nosed restaurant managers, he wasn’t known for being very sentimental. But that morning, he seemed genuinely remorseful.
At the time, I could not possibly have known that I would never serve another table in a restaurant again. I had been working as a waiter in fine dining for over two decades, and a world without fancy places to eat was a contingency that no one could ever have predicted. But for many restaurant workers like me, the trauma of the pandemic led to epiphanies that forced us to reconsider our priorities and, for some, it became a catalyst for leaving the restaurant industry behind.
This month marks the fifth anniversary of the Covid-19 lockdowns that spurred mass layoffs across the restaurant industry. During the first six months of the pandemic, over 100,000 restaurants closed across the United States, many of them permanently, and more than 5m restaurant jobs were lost. Government-mandated closures and capacity restrictions left hordes of restaurant workers in a lurch, causing many of them to defect from the industry in search of more secure employment.
Even while overall hiring in the restaurant industry has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, a majority of full-service independent restaurants still consider hiring and retaining high-quality staff a primary challenge. According to a recent survey by 7 Shifts, 65% of restaurant operators characterize the labor market as “tight” or “very tight”, with 30% of respondents citing recruiting as their top concern.
“The pandemic forced people to take a step back and breathe. When you’re in the grind, you don’t have a moment to think about whether it’s fulfilling,” said Alice Cheng, the founder of Culinary Agents, a firm that specializes in job marketing for the hospitality industry. “A lot of people reprioritized. Some people started families. Some people relocated and realized that life was better wherever they moved.”
Trading aprons for steady paychecks
After working over a decade as a craft bartender in the Detroit area, Chas Williams dreamed of opening his own cocktail bar. He had amassed an impressive resume, including stints shaking tins at some of the most popular craft cocktail destinations in Detroit, such as Bad Luck Bar and The Oakland. In late 2018, Williams landed a dream job as lead bartender for three bar and restaurant venues inside the swanky Shinola Hotel in Detroit’s Woodward district. He would lose that job less than a year and a half later when the pandemic abruptly closed the hotel.
Today, Williams is a carrier for the US Postal Service (USPS), one of myriad former restaurant workers who never returned to their jobs post-pandemic. He’ll be the first to admit that delivering mail is a significant departure from stirring up martinis and old fashioneds, but he’s learned to embrace the financial security and healthier work-life balance of his new career.
“In bars and restaurants, you always have that stress of not really knowing how much money you’re going to make every day, every week or every month,” said Williams. “With this job, I know I’ll have at least 40 hours a week with overtime. And there’s the security of knowing exactly how much money I’ll make from how many hours I work.”
Williams credits the skills he honed behind the bar for helping him better serve neighborhood residents along his postal route every day, a dynamic that he compares to having bar regulars. “The idea of providing service to the community is something that I enjoyed about hospitality,” said Williams. “As a postal carrier, now I help bring things to people who are disabled or homebound and deliver products to folks who have small businesses – the real connection I feel to the community doing this work is very rewarding.”
His transition to the public sector has been more lucrative than he expected, and the peace of mind that comes along with having more predictable income, healthcare coverage and retirement savings has been invaluable. “As a bartender or bar manager, I was usually making between $50,000 and $60,000 a year,” said Williams. “At the Postal Service, I’ve been making between $65,000 and $75,000 with much better benefits.”
Government jobs have proven to be a popular refuge for displaced restaurant workers. One month before the pandemic shut down restaurants in Cincinnati, Mary Goodhew was feeling fatigued with her assistant manager job at a gourmet pizza restaurant where she had worked in various capacities for over 16 years. She was finally ready to take on a new challenge, but less than a month after she started working as a server in an upscale, chef-driven restaurant, she was unemployed.
After bouncing around odd jobs such as a personal shopper and landscaper, Goodhew secured employment as a printer technician for the Ohio department of jobs and family services. Over a year into her new role now, she’s working fewer hours without taking a pay cut. “I’m making about 20% more than I made at my old restaurant job on average,” said Goodhew, “except that now I know exactly what my paycheck’s going to be, unlike when I was working for tips. I can budget better. I can save better. I can plan better. The security factor is really what I wanted.”
Translating skills to a new industry
Forrest Seamons had a four-month-old baby girl when he was abruptly laid off his sommelier job at an upscale Manhattan restaurant in March 2020. After briefly returning to work later that year, he and his wife concluded that moving closer to her family would make it easier for them to raise their daughter. “I thought I was doing pretty well in my restaurant life, but it turns out that I was ignoring a lot of much better opportunities that were open to me,” said Seamons. “Leaving when I did turned out to be exactly the right move.”
Today, Seamons works as a corporate sales trainer for a home remodeling company in Portland, Oregon, leaving behind more than a decade of experience as a sommelier in some of New York’s top restaurants including the Standard Grill and Carbone.
The skills he garnered selling extravagant vintage Burgundies and single-batch bourbons have transferred to his new career convincing homeowners to undertake major renovation projects. “Sales is all about reading people,” said Seamons. “There’s a similar dynamic to restaurants. Whether you’re giving people the specials or a two-hour presentation on remodeling your home, if you’re good at it, you can sense where you’re connecting and where you’re not.”
He expected to take a massive pay cut when he first made the move, but remunerative commissions raised his earning potential beyond anything he could have made in his sommelier job. “I’m in Portland, where the cost of living is much lower, and I’m making twice as much money now as I did in my last restaurant job,” said Seamons.
Kiera Baker also left New York City when she was laid off as a line cook. Since then, she’s lived in four states in five years (including Hawaii where she currently resides); hiked all 2,198 miles of the Appalachian Trail; and worked in at least five different jobs from ski-lift operator to substitute teacher. The experience of working in other industries brought into focus how she had become conditioned to accept the dysfunctional work environment in many professional kitchens.
“Working in the industry made me a worse person,” said Baker. “I was angry all the time. Nothing was ever enough.” Post-Covid, she noticed that she wasn’t encountering the same aggression and intimidation in other workplaces that she had become so accustomed to cooking in professional kitchens. “After the pandemic, I think I realized what life could be like,” she says. “I didn’t want to deal with all the things about the industry that frustrated me anymore: the belittling, the work hours, always having to be perfect. Most jobs are not like this.”
Blessings in disguise
After the culture shock of adapting to more structured work environments has subsided, most of the restaurant workers I spoke to feel very little nostalgia for their restaurant careers. A few still miss the adrenaline rush of a busy Saturday night, but they don’t miss the anxiety that accompanies it.
“When I do go out for drinks or dinner, it’s more fulfilling now,” said Goodhew. “When you work in the industry, you can be overly judgmental about the service and food. I’m not in ‘restaurant manager-mode’ all the time anymore.”
Williams was just elected union steward at his local USPS station. He’s found solace in working toward more secure future for himself, one that might be conducive to realizing the dream of owning his own bar someday. “I don’t miss drunk people yelling at me,” he said. “I’m not being physically threatened, and I don’t have to worry about someone being passed out in the bathroom and having to make sure they’re OK.”
After applying unsuccessfully for a job as a corrections officer, Baker recently returned to restaurants as the head chef of a brewpub in Oahu, where her parents have a home. She doesn’t consider the move long-term but hopes it might help provide some closure, a scenario she says is akin to going through a five-year breakup. “I feel like I’ve come to the end of my journey,” she said, “where now if I get out of the industry forever, at least I can say I became a head chef”.
Seamons’s new daytime schedule affords him more quality time with his two children, ages two and five. “I wake up now when I used to get home from closing the restaurant,” he says – referring to his new 4 am weekday morning start time. Like many others who left the industry, Seamons reflects on his restaurant past with a mix of reverie and contempt. “I don’t really see myself going back to restaurants,” he added, pausing for a moment to consider the finality of his statement. “I don’t miss the job. I miss the wine.”
