Workers have slowly gained leverage to demand better wages and conditions, she said. And the pandemic has led to a labour crunch as some have left the industry. Restaurant staff who were making $18 per hour pre-COVID can now demand $25 to $28, restaurant owners say. Even with higher pay, many restaurants are short-staffed, leading to shorter opening hours and slimmed-down menus.
“Fine dining is going to completely change. It’s going to become casual fine dining. … I just had a management meeting, saying we have to be more accessible to people,” Mr. Vij said. “Allow them to come to the restaurant maybe once a month instead of every three months, or we won’t survive.”
Vij’s being forced to innovate perfectly fits in with my last post about people needing to let go and unlearn the way things used to work, so they can have the space to think up new ways of working. And this requires perceiving all of the multitude of issues around this complex problem and addressing them all at once, so it creates a win-win situation for the restaurant, employees, and customers, all at once.