How to Fix the Restaurant Industry, According to Boston Chefs

"The city's restaurant scene has never looked better from the dining room, but behind kitchen doors, the industry is struggling with thin margins, labor shortages, and a culture of burnout. To survive, today's top chefs are reinventing everything-and their solutions might just save it all."

"So you want to open a restaurant in Boston? It's notoriously difficult, and we're not just talking about the staggering cost to nab one of the city's handful of liquor licenses. (Although, yeah, that can run you upward of $400,000.) Chefs who are well versed in putting together a winning menu are also tasked with all the operational headaches that come with restaurant ownership, from managing staff to juggling building upkeep. And then, once you finally get the place open, how do you get people in the door? The path to each new restaurant in Boston is less like a ribbon-cutting and more like a dizzying obstacle course that every prospective owner is forced to run."

"Eastern Standard is definitely in a neighborhood in transition. The first two years have been a lot of heavy lifting, of overcoming construction, and even the orientation of the restaurant [is confusing]. It's not like we're on a high-traffic road. You have to find us. A lot of the work that my team has done is really trying to give people a reason to search us out. We do a lot of cooking classes, cocktail classes, any sort of reason we can provide people to come and think about spending time"

Dining rooms show vibrancy while kitchens confront thin margins, labor shortages, and pervasive burnout. High barriers make opening a restaurant in Boston especially difficult, including exorbitant liquor-license costs and complex operational responsibilities such as staffing and building upkeep. New restaurants struggle to attract customers beyond opening day, turning the launch into an ongoing obstacle course. Leading chefs are responding with creative operational reinventions to sustain businesses. Strategies include embedding restaurants in neighborhoods, offering cooking and cocktail classes, and creating deliberate reasons for guests to seek out and spend time at establishments.

Read at Boston Magazine