The real cost of being short-staffed…
Right next to the sauté station, there was a list on the wall, written in Sharpie. Full names of every cook who couldn't cut it, and how long each one lasted.
A shift, a few days, a few weeks, and rarely more than a couple of months. The owner started it as a joke, the way most things in a kitchen do, but I should have read that wall for what it was my first week. Nobody keeps a list like that in a kitchen that's working.
Tim was one hell of a line cook, and he mainly worked sauté. I was on grill. We crushed prep every day, had each other's timing down during service, and rarely got in the weeds. Ham and egg, peanut butter and jelly, whatever we called ourselves that week. If you've worked beside someone like that, you know what it's worth. Especially when you're already short.
Saturday was an unusually quiet service, which was good because Tim needed to leave on time for a family thing. I told him I'd break down his station and pick up whatever came in.
At quarter to eleven, forty-five minutes after we'd closed, a 15-top walked in from the show across the road. We thought they just wanted some drinks, but they were hungry and wanted some food. No problem if it were just some quick snacks, but oh no, they wanted the tasting menu. All ten courses. These 'guests' were friends of the owner, and the restaurant needed the money, so he took them.
Everything came back out of the walk-in, grill fired up. However, it was a 15-top, and the tasting menu needed some precision. Because Tim left, the owner and resident 'celeb chef' had to put on an apron and help cook. After serving them, breaking everything back down and clean up, I clocked out at one in the morning.
Eight hours later, I was back. Tim came in behind me, and the owner laid into him in front of the crew for leaving early the night before.
"Fuck this," Tim said, and walked. We were already down three and now lost one of our best.
That last part matters. Before Tim left, we were still getting through service. The people who were there knew how to cover the gaps, and we did. From the outside, that can look like a kitchen managing just fine. It doesn't mean the staffing is fine. It means the crew is making it work. Then you lose someone like Tim, and you find out how much of the operation was resting on certain key people.
We never replaced him. Not for lack of trying. There were interviews, offers, trial shifts. People came in and didn't come back. By then, the place had a reputation, and we'd burned through too many of the cooks in the area. The people who stayed picked up more. Standards slipped, and I left not long after.
Years later, I heard the owner was running the place with one part-time dishwasher and one server, limiting how many guests he took because that was all he could handle. About six months after that, he closed for good.
There was more wrong in that restaurant than staffing.
But being short meant every other problem landed harder, and every departure made it harder to recover. That's the cost that doesn't fit neatly into a recruiting budget.
You can count the ad, the interviews, and the hours spent training someone new. It's harder to put a number on what happens while the position stays empty. Prep gets squeezed. Training gets rushed. Your strongest cook keeps covering the station you haven't filled. Then there's your time, which nobody prices at all. The back and forth to get the interview booked, the prep, sitting down to go through the role and their background, the walk-through, the stage, all of it multiplied by however many rounds it takes before somebody sticks. The first few are fine. It's the tenth that gets you, especially the afternoon you blocked out for someone who never showed and never replied.
For a while, the tickets still go out.
That's where it's easy to fool yourself. You see the crew getting through it and decide you have a little more time. They see another week without enough help and start wondering how long you expect them to keep doing this. Overtime is nice for a few weeks, but nobody's getting rich on it, and people value their time a lot more than most owners think they do.
By the time someone says they can't do it anymore, getting an ad up isn't going to fix tomorrow's schedule. Finding the right person takes time. So does getting them comfortable in your kitchen. Now you're trying to do both while the team has even less left to give.
That pressure also changes how you hire. When you need someone who can start tomorrow, it gets harder to walk away from someone you wouldn't have hired a month ago. In my experience rushed hires work out about one time in twenty, and you've seen the resumes as well as I have. Twenty jobs in two years, or the cook who moved for a dollar an hour and will move again for the next dollar.
Hiring proactively gives you room to make a better decision. Start when you know a departure is coming. Look at the schedule before the busy season is on top of you. Pay attention when the same people are always staying late or giving up days off. And if you're already short, be straight with the crew. Tell them what you're doing, what the timeline looks like, and what you can change in the meantime. Pay them for the extra work. Thank them properly. But don't mistake their willingness to help for an arrangement that can go on indefinitely.
Tim leaving was the moment our staffing problem became impossible to ignore. It wasn't the moment it started.
