Toronto's restaurants: sprinting to the top, but feeling the burn

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There's never been a more exciting time to be a chef – or food lover – in Toronto. Everywhere you look, a hot new restaurant is popping up. Tiny, trend-setting eateries attract line-ups down the block. Rollicking cocktail bars pack the house night after night.

"It's pretty amazing," says chef Rob Rossi, who is poised to open a new restaurant, Bestellen, on College Street. "A lot of the restaurants, the quality of them is really starting to come through."

Many chefs believe Toronto's status as a food city is on track to match the likes of Montreal or even New York and Chicago. But to do so, it's going to need a major boost in qualified manpower – and the thing that defines Toronto's culinary personality, its proliferation of small, iconoclastic restaurants, is leaving them in short supply. Just ask Mr. Rossi.

After months of plowing through countless résumés and interviewing dozens of cooks and multiple servers, Mr. Rossi says he and co-owner Ryan Sarfeld have finally assembled a team.

It hasn't been easy.

"I went through a lot of people trying to find the right individuals," says Mr. Rossi. Some job applicants had unrealistically high salary demands. ("Outrageous salaries," he says. "Outrageous!")

Others far overstated their abilities. ("There's people that come and say, 'I know everything. I can do this, I can do that'...and they don't know what they're doing. They haven't worked anywhere.")

He managed to find a selection of employees that he had faith in, but he admits that they are fairly green. "It's just something you have to work with 'cause you can't really find the A-Team, you know?" he says. "A lot of them are really young, and there's nothing wrong with that... but I think a lot of them just don't have a ton of experience, so you can't really expect too much from them."

It's an increasingly common complaint among local chefs and restaurant owners: As the city's food scene takes off, a lack of reliable and experienced kitchen and serving staff – the foot soldiers of the restaurant world – is proving to be a source of growing pains.

The food scene has begun attracting global heavyweights such as New York's David Chang and Daniel Boulud, both of whom are setting up shop here, but in the current environment, they'll be facing down challenges unique to a city whose culinary culture is still in its fledgling stages.

Mickael Damelincourt, who is general manager of the newly opened Trump International Hotel & Tower Toronto, notes that, by international standards, Toronto's service is still rough around the edges. "If you compare to some other cities, probably because of the lack of competition – when you don't have a competitor across the street and you're busy every night – you probably tend to be a little more relaxed with your standards."

"We have really good cooks here," adds Mr. Rossi, "but we don't have that many, so they're not all going to just move over to [David]Chang's place... I think [the restaurateurs]are going to experience more labour issues than they anticipate."

Part of the reason for these challenges is that the recent explosion of tiny, 20- to 40-seat restaurants, led by a wave of young, talented chefs, has diluted the pool of available workers.

"You can open up a restaurant for 50,000 bucks, 75,000 bucks now. Before, you had to be somebody," says chef Matty Matheson of Parts & Labour restaurant. "Now in Toronto, you don't need a name. You don't need anything. You need some experience and you need some balls."

Although that bodes well for the selection of food in the city, it creates a new set of staffing challenges. Ambitious culinary graduates may not be drawn to working for chefs they don't recognize. And in an intimate kitchen environment, new hires are not only required to possess culinary chops, they need to fit in personality-wise with everyone else. Furthermore, they're expected to be able to carry out a full range of duties, Mr. Matheson says. Unlike at large restaurants that may have 30 cooks to share the load, small operations rely on just a handful of people who can multi-task.

"It's hard to find somebody you can leave alone and [tell them] 'I need you to make this cassoulet, I need you to make a charcute, and I need you to make three different kinds of stock,'" he says.

Another problem is many young workers think of the restaurant business as a transitory pit-stop rather than as a career, says Mr. Damelincourt, who's met his fair share of challenges recruiting staff.

"The problem you have in this situation is they're not passionate for what they do," he says. "They're just here to pick up their paycheques, to get the tips."

Mr. Rossi agrees, noting a lack of drive is common among both servers and cooks he's encountered.

"I'm not sure if a lot of them are 100-per-cent, you know, dedicated to being a server," he says. "And with the cooks, a lot of them are in transition too. Like they want to work at [world-famous restaurants such as] elBulli...and Noma and they have all these aspirations, but they don't pay attention to where they're actually working now."

Mr. Damelincourt has dined at high-end restaurants across Europe and the U.S., in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. He notes that at some luxury restaurants in Toronto, glasses remain unfilled, half the items on the menu run out, and no one acknowledges diners as they leave – all little overlooked details that he says are unheard of at comparable restaurants in other major cities.

"So many restaurants you go to, you feel you're rushed because they want to bring the next customers at your table. When you're spending $150, you don't want to feel like this," Mr. Damelincourt says.

At L'Unità restaurant, the struggle to find quality employees has meant senior staff are working extra hard to fill in the gaps, chef Michael Angeloni says.

"It's harder for us to take time off," he says. "We don't want to obviously lose the quality when we're not around."

On a recent Saturday night, the busiest of the week, one of Mr. Angeloni's cooks said he couldn't show up for work, with only an hour to go before the restaurant opened. The chef managed to find a friend to help him for the night, but the limited selection of reliable workers offers little leeway. Among his network of fellow chefs, "we all kind of have a little tight-knit circle of good cooks that we know that we're all trying to snatch up," Mr. Angeloni says. "As of right now, they're pretty much all snatched up."

At George Brown College Chef School, chef John Higgins says he sees a generational shift in thinking among young cooks. Culinary students now are more selective about where they want to work, and they're also more likely to overestimate their abilities, he says.

"I think it's just part of life now that people think they're much more qualified possibly than they are," he says, adding it's the same across other sectors as well. "No one wants to do the grunt work."

On the other hand, he says, students don't just want to be employed; they want to be mentored. The industry may also partly to blame, he suggests, since restaurants tend to "cannibalize themselves" by luring workers away from each other with the promise of minimally higher pay or fancy titles, like junior sous chef, a rank that does not traditionally exist in the kitchen brigade hierarchy. "You either are a sous chef or you're not a sous chef," Mr. Higgins says.

Ultimately, most agree, the outcome of the current labour woes will be a positive one. Many anticipate Toronto's restaurant boom will eventually attract workers from elsewhere, employers will groom enthusiastic, albeit inexperienced, cooks and servers, and the food scene will only get better.

"We have some...tasty food and some brilliant chefs in Toronto," Mr. Matheson says. "But it's like, yeah, I guess it's our job to train them."

Editor's note: Mickael Damelincourt is the general manager of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Toronto. An incorrect spelling of his first name appeared in an earlier version of this story. This version has been corrected.