Restaurant industry still struggles with staffing, consultant says

In the fall, “Marketplace” reported on businesses that managed to survive the toughest part of the pandemic, only to shut their doors later. One owner we spoke with was Alexis Percival in New York City. She’d closed the Italian restaurant she co-owned and shifted her focus to a wine bar called Ruffian in the East Village.

Now, Percival has changed course and is working as a restaurant consultant. “Marketplace” host Kristin Schwab spoke with Percival, currently on a project in Galveston, Texas, to see how things have been going. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kristin Schwab: When we last met, you were running Ruffian in New York City. What are you up to these days?

Alexis Percival: I was helping to run Ruffian in the city, and I had also just closed our second restaurant, Kindred, which is a sister restaurant also in the East Village. And so, I was coming out of actively operating day to day and in the transition period of moving into restaurant consulting, which is what I’m doing now.

Schwab: What made you make that change, to take on this consulting work instead?

Percival: Well, honestly, it was already in the works. When we opened Kindred in 2019, I really shifted my focus over there to spread our administrative and restaurant building reach, and when we closed Kindred two years ago, it made sense for me to branch out and seek other things. And honestly, I was really burnt out from the floor shifts and coming out of the pandemic. And I just really needed to be the captain of my own time and kind of control my own work for a while.

Schwab: So now you’re working with other restaurants to help them manage their business. What are some issues? Are there any common issues that you’re seeing pop up?

Percival: Oh, yeah. I mean, from New York to Texas, a restaurant is a restaurant, a bar is a bar. Same cast of characters, same problems. But in terms of what I experienced in the last few years in New York and now witnessing is that staffing and labor is still an issue, even this many years after what you might call a sort of a crisis moment in the industry. It’s hard to say, I think there has been a bit of a reckoning of how hard restaurant work is. And I think there are also people like me who maybe are like, “I love the work, but I need to stay in this industry in a, in a different way.”

Schwab: Do you think some of those bullet points you’ve mentioned about labor, or just how hard it is to stay in that business, has influenced the industry at all? I just wonder how it’s changed the scene.

Percival: Oh yeah. I don’t know if you have seen across the city, I’m sure a lot of New Yorkers would notice this. There’s just this massive proliferation of, or it feels like it anyway, of pizza spots and burger joints. And there’s a very real reason for that. They’re proven models, but they’re also proven profit models. You know, you don’t need a finicky chef in the kitchen to make a good pie, and you don’t need as much front-of-house staff in order to run those kinds of operations. And so they’re much slimmer, they’re much more focused, and therefore, you know, able to turn a profit more easily. They also require less rental space to operate, for the most part.

Schwab: Last question is, how do you think the industry compares to what it was a year ago?

Percival: It seems to be better. When I look around New York, it doesn’t look as much like there was a huge gap of time of closed and boarded-up buildings. It does feel like it’s starting to normalize. Now, this is anecdotal. Of course, I don’t have the labor statistics behind it, but from what I’m seeing in the spaces that I’m working in and just walking around and absorbing from my friends who own businesses and restaurants, that’s what it feels like. It does feel like it’s normalizing and in a positive way.

Schwab: It’s crazy to say the word “normalize” this many years later.

Percival: Yeah, and to be clear, I do want to throw that in there that it absolutely isn’t normalized in the sense that people should understand that the employee retention credits still haven’t been distributed for some businesses, including my own, and that was from the IRS. So businesses that were in the hole coming out of the pandemic are still very much in the hole. So, it can feel like old news, but it’s actually very, very current news for small-business owners.