One year into the pandemic, the restaurant industry in Kentucky is struggling with a labor shortage. In Lexington on Tuesday, restaurants and food distributors participated in a round table discussion with the Kentucky Department of Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles.
Ouita Michel is a chef and owns seven restaurants in central Kentucky. She said labor practices need to change to attract younger people to the industry.
“The labor hours can be very long for a chef. The younger generation does not want to work in that way,” Michel said. “When I came up in the restaurant industry, I came up in the 1980s, and regularly worked a 16-hour day. That’s not good labor practices.”
Michel said her restaurants normally employ 200 people but currently have 150 staff.
Upcoming restaurant roundtables will be held in Louisville, Bowling Green, Owensboro and London. Agriculture Commissioner Quarles said the goal of the discussions is to listen to COVID-19 related challenges across the state.
“We’re not a one-size-fits-all state,” Quarles said. “And so we want to conclude these series of restaurant roundtables and then come up with ways that helps the entire industry address some severe problems that they, more than other industries, have suffered from over the past year.”
Shutdown orders and less business has caused restaurants to cut costs, which includes purchasing food from local farms.
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