Plenty of restaurants, not enough cooks

If you're skilled in restaurant work, it's not hard to find a job in the Twin Cities. Just ask Jeffery Tharp; he has two of them.

Tharp, 50, works full time for a food service company in Minneapolis and has a part-time gig at a hotel. Altogether, he said, he puts in about 75 hours a week.

He was recently in downtown St. Paul, heading to an interview for a different job. He wants something closer to home.

"It's a chef's market out here," he said. "They need good people in the restaurants, people who really have the ability to work all different aspects of the back of the house. And it's really hard to find individuals who can fill that need."

When it comes to dining out, people in the Twin Cities have more choices than ever. The number of restaurants is growing. But this blossoming food scene — combined with low unemployment — is making it tough for restaurant owners to find staff, especially kitchen workers.

Restaurant managers confirm the trend. Last year, Bedlam Theatre opened a new location in St. Paul's Lowertown. It includes a bar and restaurant.

Jon Cole manages that bar. He's been with Bedlam nearly two decades. When he's off duty, he loves going out to eat and welcomes all the new options. But as an employer, he said, "it's a tough scene out there right now." There just aren't enough people to fill the jobs.

"We're constantly hiring," he said. "I still want to hire a couple more cooks, and I'm still looking for a couple more servers and bartenders. We've been hiring almost the entire time we've been open."

Pay at Bedlam is as competitive as it can be for a nonprofit, Cole said. Servers start at minimum wage — that's $9 an hour — plus tips. Base pay for kitchen staff starts at $11 and goes up with experience. But Cole said that even if Bedlam could pay more, it would still be hard to find workers.

"It's like we've never seen it before," he said. "You used to be able to put up a 'now hiring' sign for the kitchen and people would be fighting over those jobs. Just two or three years ago, you'd have a line out the door and 100 resumes. But now we've just got too many restaurants."

The number of full-service restaurants in the Twin Cities has grown by almost 270 since 2004, an increase of 18 percent. Demand for restaurant workers has surged as well. Average weekly wages for restaurant workers in the seven-county metro area — when adjusted for inflation — grew more than 6 percent from 2004 to 2014.

In comparison, pay for all Twin Cities area workers rose less than 1 percent during that time.

Steve Hine, a labor market economist at Minnesota's Department of Employment and Economic Development, said the improving economy means workers have more options.

"Those kinds of jobs were easy to fill during the recession," he said. "There were people who were desperate for any kind of job. Those lower-paying jobs now may have to be competing with better-paying alternatives that people may now be able to take advantage of."

Minnesota's minimum wage hike a year ago is only part of the story. Twin Cities restaurant workers historically have earned more than the industry's national average. And their wages grew slightly faster than the national average in the decade before Minnesota raised the minimum wage.

Dan McElroy, executive vice president of the Minnesota Restaurant Association, opposed the increase to the state's minimum wage. He said wage pressure will likely force restaurants to make do with fewer workers, even as the industry grows.

"The number of locations will go up; the number of jobs per location will go down," he said.

McElroy said that diners should expect more fast casual restaurants, ordering via iPads and receiving less service at the table.