Restaurant 101: Staffing

Last week we introduced Restaurant 101, our weekly feature on the inner workings of the restaurant industry. Our teacher is Miss Amy Severson, of Sevy’s Grill. Quiet please, Timmy leave Kyle alone. Miss Amy?

“Enough said, for now, about the bad news swarming around in the restaurant business, today I’d like to talk about what is working in the industry. Chasing a shrinking consumer dollar and facing rising costs of products, there is a trend where restaurants are now taking out entire levels of staff in order to make a profit. Several restaurants have found ways to save on labor costs while, in some cases, saving without sacrificing service.

Pre-McDonald’s, ordering at a counter usually meant you would be eating at a wooden picnic table by the side of the road. But over the last 25 years, fast food has normalized self-service aspect. Next came the chains (La Madeleine, Corner Bakery, Chipotle) with new culinary offerings prepared to order. When Pei Wei, started by P.F. Chang’s, cannibalized its restaurant sibling, executives quickly understood that the economics of the small operation were more profitable and required less capital.

Today on my little corner of North Dallas, comes the “mom-and-pop” counter-service restaurants such as Snappy Salads and Prego Express, both fairly new to the Preston Forest area. They are succeeding because they know that self-service does not mean no-service, offering affordable, good food (and decent wines).

I was a Houston’s server in 1990 and still have a Grilled Chicken Salad addiction which is satisfied regularly at their bar. They are a restaurant that opertes without a significant level of labor, the bussers. Dining there recently I met a gentleman, also in the food industry, and while discussing our mutual admiration for Houston’s food and service, I pointed out the lack of bus staff. He took a second look at the dining room. At that moment, he said he was going back to the management team at the resort he was opening and was going to call a meeting to discuss whether or not they were going to use bussers in the dining room.

Most service staff workers in Dallas are paid the federal minimum wage of $2.13 per hour with the rest of the wages coming from tips. Bussers usually receive a slightly higher wage, but less in gratuities. You might say “It’s only $2.13, what’s the big deal?”, but payroll taxes and worker’s comp insurance triple or quadruple the cost of wages to the restaurant owner and it becomes enticing to cut costs like paying bussers. Some restaurants will always have waiters and bussers, while it adds to labor costs, it’s a style of service that goes with white linen tablecloths and fresh flowers - usually, but not always, accompanied by a higher check. It also allows servers to give special attention to each guest while having more tables, thereby keeping their earnings up.

I like the new owner-run, counter-service restaurants that have opened, and so do my kids. Give me a counter that I can walk up to to get my second glass of wine over an overworked server in an understaffed restaurant any day. And Houston’s has been the same for years and always has people waiting in their, sometimes for hours, for a table. You’re not going to see any restaurants changing their operations, but my gut tells me that for every 5 new restaurants that open in the coming years, 3 or 4 will have similar business models. It’s the economics of the industry’s future.