What you can expect to be ‘normal’ at Philly-area restaurants

Fifteen months after America locked down, the occupancy restrictions are ebbing and a sense of rosy optimism is filling restaurants.

Normal, or what passes for normal, is on the way. Restaurants are booking up, filling not only previously barren indoor dining rooms but also the outdoor seating areas; some restaurants will actually yield a gain in overall tables by summer. There’s also a restaurant boom in the making, with The Inquirer counting about five dozen new restaurants in varying stages of readiness, more than enough to replace the crop that closed over the pandemic.

But in the short term, during the journey to normalcy, at least two issues are vexing the industry, whose pandemic losses totaled in hundreds of billions of dollars. One, says the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association, is the need for additional government relief from the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, whose portal just closed after fielding 362,000 applications for $75 billion in funding. Many restaurants are still in debt; landlords who may have deferred rent payments now have their hands out again.

If conversations with dozens of Philadelphia-area restaurateurs are any indication, labor likely is the chief impediment to the industry’s speedy recovery. The U.S. Labor Department recently said about 1.7 million fewer jobs are filled than before the pandemic. “We’ve never had to look for staff like this,” said Michael Franco, a longtime hospitality professional and consultant in Philadelphia. He recently helped to organize a job fair that drew more than two dozen employers. About 50 people showed up, which Franco deemed a win.

» READ MORE: More than a dozen Philly-area restaurants have opened so far in 2021

Every restaurant seems to be short on staff, particularly servers, to work all of those additional tables and barstools. Fed up with safety issues and their pay, millions of workers left the business entirely in 2020, taking jobs in other fields, often for similar money with more civil hours. Others collected unemployment and stimulus money. Workers and former workers called out long-standing industry practices, both in compensation and working conditions.

Of 202 respondents to The Inquirer’s recent survey of workers currently and formerly in the industry, nearly 80% identified benefits — including health insurance and paid time off — as a very important factor in making food industry jobs more attractive. The respondents also identified higher hourly wages, positive workplace culture, and regular schedules as overwhelmingly desirable qualities in industry jobs. (Not important? Signing bonuses, according to 60% of respondents.)

Here is what “normal” is looking like, at least in the short term.