Emerging from the pandemic, staffing shortages have plagued restaurants across the country as unprecedented numbers of restaurant workers opted not to return to their jobs after shutdowns were lifted and restaurants were reopened. According to the National Restaurant Association, four out of five restaurants were understaffed this year, resulting in reduced hours of operation, reduced items on the menu, and reduced seating capacity. In the worst instances, restaurants couldn’t open at all. On Nantucket, that national trend was only exacerbated by the island’s housing crisis. Even if restaurant owners could somehow lure their staff back to the dining rooms and dish pits, many restaurants had nowhere to house the workers.

“Nantucket is such an amazing place in the culinary world, but the struggle to retain talent is primarily due to the lack of tenable housing situations for talented people,” explained Orla Murphy LaScola, the co-owner of Proprietors. Like many owner struggling to keep their restaurants staffed, LaScola and her partners have purchased staff housing and secured expensive seasonal rentals for employees who couldn’t afford them otherwise. “All we want to do is serve food and drinks,” LaScola said, “but now we are landlords as well.”

David Silva, the owner of Galley Beach and Afterhouse Seafood Bistro and Wine Bar agrees. “Restaurants are left with the difficult decision to purchase housing, which is very tough, if not impossible, for the independent operators to afford,” he said. “Strangely, the most expensive ingredient in any dish you order on Nantucket is most likely the employee housing.” Despite owning a number of properties for staff housing, including one he purchased just last year, Silva was forced to close Galley Beach once a week this summer to give his skeleton crews a chance to catch their breath. “This had never happened in my twenty-five years of owning Galley Beach,” he said. In the case of Afterhouse, Silva was forced to take even more drastic measures by not opening at all.



The staffing dilemma, along with the housing crisis, reflects changes in the restaurant industry as a whole. “In both front of house and kitchen,” said Chef Michael Getter, the owner of Dune, “there aren’t any young aspiring cooks who want to be chefs, or to work with great chefs and ingredients.” Getter indicated that many of those applying for kitchen positions do not possess the same passion and drive as cooks in the past, who came to the island to apprentice under experienced chefs. “COVID seemed to have taken the remaining professional waiters out of the pool as well,” Getter said. “Thank God for the Eastern European workforce; they have saved Nantucket restaurants, because the American college kids that used to flock to the island every summer are gone. I don’t know where they went, but they aren’t coming to Nantucket.”

Some of the island’s most popular restaurants today, such as Nautilus or CRU, are owned and operated by people who started as waiters, bartenders, humble cooks and front of the house managers. If the apprenticeship tradition on the island is lost, diners should prepare for the menu to shrink in the years to come. “I found the best solutions for us have been to really work to improve the CRU company culture so it is an appealing and rewarding work environment and continue to strive to build a strong team that will attract others,” said Jane Stoddard, the co-owner of CRU, who employs roughly 130 people each season, all of whom need housing. “Additionally, making employee compensation, benefits and work lifestyle top priorities for the business has played a big role in our employee retention.” Indeed, to secure what talent can still be found in the job market, island restaurant owners need to offer not only housing, but also competitive compensation packages that often include health insurance and retirement plans.

Operating a successful restaurant on Nantucket has always been a risky endeavor. As one longtime restauranteur once described, it’s like sailing a boat that’s full of holes, plugging those holes with money, and then hoping that you have some money left over at the end of the year to show for it. And as we’ve seen this past summer, many of those sailboats end up sinking entirely. Now, with staffing shortages preventing establishments from running at full capacity, matched with the profound burden of adding a mortgage to the balance sheet (not to mention the ever-rising food costs), island restaurants are facing a mighty tall order to survive in the years to come, unless affordable housing becomes more than just a rare special on the menu.