Is It The Food Network’s Fault That There’s No One To Cook You Dinner?

Have you been following this story? Granted it’s been unfolding slowly over the course of a year or so, but it’s still alarming. Cooks are disappearing from our nation’s kitchens!

First, from that San Francisco of the South, Asheville, NC:

growth in [the food & beverage] industry is outpacing available labor.

Fernandes, who said Isa’s pays starting cooks $11–13 depending on experience, faced the struggle head-on when he had to replace two longtime employees who left Asheville for bigger markets.

“I was lucky enough to have two really talented people with me for that long,” he said. “That doesn’t happen that much in the food and beverage industry.”

Fernandes said he thinks a systemic work-ethic issue is partly to blame for the labor shortage. Some culinary schools lead students to believe that they’ll walk out of class on the final day with a diploma and the title of chef. But the reality of the restaurant business is often hot and harsh. …

‘A lot of these students just coming out grew up on the Food Network. I really feel it’s just a glamorized version of what is really going on.’

Is the Food Network responsible for the fact that there’s no one left to make you dinner? That would be a fun thing to blame! It fits in nicely with the anti-Millennial “kids these days” grousing grown ups, and reporters, love to do.

Sadly no, cost of living is the less sexy, more real issue. In Buncome County, where Asheville is located, getting by on minimum wage, or anything like it, is almost impossible:

According to data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, renters need to earn $16.48 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent in Buncombe County.

But data from The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the mean wage for cooks in full-service restaurants in Asheville is $10.47 an hour. The mean wage for dishwashers is $8.99 an hour.

New York City is, of course, the same, only worse, so, according to the Washington Post, the restaurant worker shortage has also affected the Big Apple — and beyond.

skilled cooks are an increasingly rare commodity. “If I had a position open in the kitchen, I might have 12 résumés, call in three or four to [try out] in the kitchen, and make a decision,” Alfred Portale, the chef and owner of Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Gotham Bar and Grill, told Fortune recently. “Now it’s the other way around; there’s one cook and 12 restaurants.”

And it extends to restaurants out West. Seattle is coping with the same dilemma. San Francisco, too. …

One of the clearest obstacles to hiring a good cook, let alone someone willing to work the kitchen these days, is that living in this country’s biggest cities is increasingly unaffordable. In New York, for instance, where a cook can expect to make between $10 and $12 per hour, and the median rent runs upward of $1,200 a month, living in the city is a near impossibility. As a result, people end up living far from the restaurants where they work. Add to that how late dinner shifts can end, causing people to arrive home well into the night.

Even franchises are hurting, and are, as a result, playing around with perks and other sweeteners:

As the service sector keeps expanding, Rice predicts the labor shortage will abate as wages and benefits improve. “This is probably the last industry, the only industry left in America where somebody can truly have the American dream, because somebody can go from a busboy to a regional manager making six figures with a GED,” she said. “As that opportunity gets out there and more people are looking for jobs or looking to switch industries, they find an industry that is hiring and giving you a real career opportunity.”

Making life better for workers, though, is less possible for individual restaurants in big cities, which often operate with extremely narrow margins and have a dramatic failure rate as it is. Though arguably that failure rate has as much or more to do with poor management, uneven service, and so on, than the difficulty of making money by selling food.

WaPo also experiments with blaming the Food Network, but only after first acknowledging the bleak realities of trying to find a place to live anywhere relatively close to where you work when you only make $10-$12 an hour. It then identifies the even bigger elephant in the room.

After years of steady inflows of Mexican immigrants, who have proved both eager and talented cooks, the trend is reversing itself. The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States has leveled off over the past decade (it peaked eight years ago in 2007). By 2012, net migration to Mexico was already zero, or even negative, meaning that more Mexicans were moving out than moving in.

That’s terrible news for an industry that has relied on the demographic. …

“I would be surprised if the slowdown in Mexican immigration isn’t responsible for more of the problem than many people realize,” said Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University who has written extensively about the economics of restaurants. “This sector is, as anyone in it will tell you, kept afloat by immigrants, especially Latinos.”

DING DING DING. Now that makes real sense. The restaurant industry built itself up on the backs of cheap, immigrant labor, assuming that such labor would continue presenting itself to be exploited ad nauseum. But permanent underclasses are the past, and the Fight for $15 is the future.

Where does that leave restaurants? They’re trying to help prospective workers find affordable housing. And they’re having to find the funds to get creative.

At his flagship Deuxave, [owner Chris Coombs] is offering to pay $1,000 a month toward the student loans of hires who make it through a three-month probationary period. He said he got the idea earlier this year after a promising candidate for a chef’s job at his restaurant said she needed to earn enough to pay off $120,000 in student-loan debt from Johnson & Wales University in Providence. She ultimately accepted a more lucrative job at Disney World.

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