Page 26 - BusinessWest January 24, 2022

Bryan Graham, regional manager for the Bean Restaurant Group, which boasts a family of 11 eateries throughout the region, many in Hamp- shire County, agreed that staffing has been a chal- lenge even for the most popular restaurants.
“All restaurants across the region are struggling to find hourly cooks, along with a few entry-level positions,” he said. “We definitely had to reshift our labor pool and are taking care of employees with more aggressive wage increases to retain them.”
Edison Yee, president of the Bean Group, agreed with that assessment of the workforce shortage. “It’s still a big part of the picture. We’re definitely focused on the future and retaining our employees, but the general application pool is way down.
“We have guys, hourly employees, with lon- gevity, who love this group, but when someone is offering a $4 hourly increase to them, they have to jump ship a lot of times, unfortunately,” Yee added. “We’ve been giving more increases to employees in the past six months than in prior years.”
The problem has been exacerbated by Omi- cron, which has kept many employees out of work at establishments around the region, forcing some restaurants to reduce hours or even close for certain days.
All of this affects the bottom line, but so does another global economic issue currently impact- ing not only restaurants, but industries of all types: supply shortages and costs. For restaurants, that largely means food products, but affects paper products and other supplies as well, Gra- ham said, and it sometimes forces eateries to switch menu items or ingredient brands to keep
up with price fluctuations and availability.
“Products have definitely increased in price. As far as sup- ply goes, it’s hit or miss. We’re still seeing shortages on some of your higher-end meats — prime meats are definitely a little scarce to come by and very expensive — but some other products have come back down in price. There’s no rhyme or reason to it — just the trucking-industry delivery windows of these vendors getting their products in.”
Still, overall in 2021, “we did see
a good recovery, with most of our
restaurants operating at 2019 lev-
els or a little bit below,” Yee said.
“I think we saw a good amount of
pent-up demand in 2021, espe-
cially in the latter part of the year;
through the summer and into fall,
we were really busy, traffic-wise.
Probably in late December we noticed a little slowdown because of the resurfacing of Omicron and the changing variants. But overall, it was a very good year for our restaurant group in Hamp- shire County.”
Takeout Takes Off
Amit Kanoujia, general manager of the India House in Northampton, said the pandemic has taught everyone to be nimble and to roll with the punches. His recent renovation of the India House came as the result of winning a liquor- license lottery; when the Sierra Grille closed, that
Bryan Graham says there’s often “no rhyme or reason” to what products will be harder or more expensive to obtain.
license became available. Kanoujia entered the lottery and, to his great surprise, won, calling it a blessing in many forms.
“Before the vaccines were widely available, we were only doing takeout, so that’s when we considered remodeling,” he said. “When we won the liquor license, we now had to install a bar,
so we did a once-in-a-lifetime renovation of the restaurant.”
Kanoujia, like other restaurants, is also facing a shortage of help, noting that his ‘help wanted’ sign has been up since April. And because he has had to rely so much on takeout business, he said the costs for supplies used for takeout meals has
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26 JANUARY 24, 2022
HAMPSHIRE COUNTY
BusinessWest
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