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Where Have All the Good GMs Gone?
Yadid Levy/Redux
The topic du jour inside the New York restaurant industry is not who makes the best new spritz or which Greenmarket stand’s rhubarb is at its peak: It’s general managers, specifically how few good ones are out there. “The other day, our linen supplier came in, and he was like, ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of high-profile general-manager changes in the city,’” says Austin Baker, the owner of the Snail, a bistro on the northeastern edge of McCarren Park. When I asked one plugged-in chef, who is close with the owners of a slew of trendy restaurants, whether anyone else was complaining about the difficulty of finding a great GM, she promptly wrote back, “YES. All of them.”
The number of new restaurants in New York is always steadily rising — it’s essentially doubled since 2000 — and openings outpaced closings between 2020 and 2024, with restaurants and bars filling many vacant storefronts during the retail apocalypse. At the same time, experience levels among potential employees vary more widely than ever (blame the pandemic, when every restaurant worker in the city was laid off simultaneously), creating a rare situation where potential employees, and not ownership, have had far more leverage in the hiring process. And to court the people they actually want, restaurant operators are offering higher salaries, real benefits, and the heretofore unheard-of perk of agreed-upon time off.
“Hiring during the pandemic was a nightmare, obviously, but since things have normalized, it’s continued to be, at the management level, exceptionally difficult,” says one partner in several Manhattan hot spots. (In order to speak freely, he asked to remain anonymous.) When he finds people who are really caring and have a “high level of aptitude,” he adds, he’s thrilled. “You really realize that you need to take excellent care of those people because you need them so much.”
The Manhattan-hot-spot operator has worked in the industry for decades, and he says the candidates you see now are very different from when he was coming up. “I feel like you could put an ad on Craigslist back in the day and get ten pretty good resumes. Ten years ago, if you knew, Okay, I need to have somebody hired by June 1, you’d have somebody hired by June 1,” he says. These days, an owner is lucky if they find the right person in, say, 90 days. Even when a candidate works, they’re much more insistent on negotiating terms than before: This operator estimates that around 80 percent of his company’s hires over the last six months have, upon getting the job, asked for time off in advance. “It’s frequently a significant number of dates, and there’s no way you’re going to say, ‘Oh, no. That can’t possibly work.’ You’re going to accommodate it,” he says. “I remember when it seemed like nobody ever took time off, or if they did, it was the third week in August when you couldn’t even really afford to have people on anyway.”
Owners need to keep up with their competition (other restaurants) and will do what they can to get the right people: Managers are the employees who keep restaurants functioning. They take care of inventory, set schedules, assist the staff, and act as intermediary between employees and ownership. Finding good candidates for these jobs has always been hard, restaurateurs and workers alike will tell you, because managers tend to take home less than the servers who work under them (managers don’t get tips), and the skills needed for the job — managing and advocating for staff; handling customers and creating boundaries — are translatable to other industries that might offer better benefits and more consistent schedules. People who do it tend to take on the role because they want to eventually open a place of their own; those who don’t tend to leave the industry completely.
Now they’re ready to get paid: Potential candidates are no longer so reluctant to ask for raises they think they deserve. “I don’t begrudge anyone that. For so long, managers have just always been so sheepish to ask for a reasonable salary,” says Natalie Johnson, a co-owner of Anton’s and Leon’s.
Anyone with real work history is, at this point, almost like a unicorn. The industry lost a lot of seasoned workers to the pandemic, and the lack of on-the-ground experience is palpable. Yet another owner told me that when he was recently hiring for a GM position he went through a stack of 100 resumes, interviewing 30 people and passing on all of them. “What I have found is that you do have to overpay for talent, and that talent isn’t necessarily qualified for the job they’re applying for,” he says. “The amount that I have to now personally manage and mold the managers in my own image, rather than having a culture of people who are showing up with some baseline, is frightening.”
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