BALTIMORE — Well Crafted Kitchen needed to process tons of tomatoes this month, enough to make sauce for its Margherita pizzas for the year. But the Hampden restaurant was short on staff.
Co-owner Liz Bower, who started the business as a food truck in 2016 with her husband and another couple, mentioned the problem in a newsletter she sends weekly to customers: “We have 10,000 pounds of tomatoes,” she recalled asking. “Anybody want to help?”
The response was immediate. Within days, the pizzeria had dozens of volunteers, all customers, showing up for free pizza and for the chance to give back to a favorite restaurant.
It’s the business’s first time using volunteer labor, and it comes at a time when the Jones Falls pizzeria — and so many other local businesses — are caught between rising demand from customers and massive worker shortages. Elsewhere in Baltimore, business owners say they have closed restaurants because they can’t find the staff to maintain them. Others are raising pay and offering incentives to retain and hire staff.
Last week, Baltimore’s Atlas Restaurant Group, which owns high-end restaurants in Harbor East and Fells Point, announced that it would raise its minimum wage for all staff to $15 and offer $250 bonuses to new employees that stick with the company for more than 90 days.
Since the pandemic, SoBo Cafe owner Anna Leventis said, many former employees have left the restaurant industry for office jobs with more regular hours. “Staff with young kids say, ‘Why do I want to work nights and weekends?’” she said. Others have looked for positions with health and retirement benefits, which most restaurants don’t offer.
She closed Annoula’s Greek Kitchen, her food stall in Cross Street Market, because she couldn’t find workers. At her nearby Federal Hill bistro, SoBo Cafe, she’s stopped serving weekend brunch and weekday lunch primarily because she didn’t have employees to cover the shifts. “Now we’re closed on Tuesdays as well because of lack of staff,” she said.
In Fells Point, Tony Foreman said he shut down Bar Vasquez, a large Argentine steakhouse, because he needed to consolidate his team. His Foreman Wolf restaurant group had just opened Milton Inn, its first foray into Baltimore County, and it was all hands on deck. In an attempt to woo new employees, the restaurant group has increased wages — and service staff are earning more than ever, said Foreman.
In addition to concerns about wages and the historically high labor shortage, restaurant owners are also worried about burnout among existing staff.
The volunteer initiative, said Well Crafted Kitchen co-owner Tom Wagner, “is not a replacement for us paying workers.” Jobs at the pizza shop can pay up to $20 per hour or more including tips. Wagner said he wants to make sure that current employees don’t feel obligated to take on more hours than they want to. “We want to do the best for our team.”
While the average tenure of a restaurant worker can be around 60 days, Wagner said Well Crafted Kitchen strives to create an atmosphere where workers want to stay.
Well Crafted Kitchen manager Kelly Sniffen called the volunteering effort a “tremendous help” to her and the rest of the staff, who are already stretched thin fielding orders from customers. Without the volunteers, she said, “I don’t think we would be able to complete our goal of 10,000 pounds this year.”
Her dad even volunteered to help out. “It really shows the type of support and community we have around us,” she said.
Meredith Lustig and her husband, Mike Axtell, were part of that community of about 50 volunteers who showed up recently to process tomatoes. The couple — she an opera singer, he an actor — relocated from New York City to Baltimore last year after the pandemic canceled live performances, their main source of income. After moving to Maryland, Lustig said, “Priority number one was to find a great pizza place so we don’t feel so homesick.”
Well Crafted Kitchen fit the bill. It had also helped connect them with a CSA where they could buy local produce and eggs. So when the restaurant’s owners shared with customers that they needed volunteers in the kitchen, “it just made sense to help out,” said Lustig. “And also selfishly we wanted to make new friends because we don’t know anybody here.” There would also be free pizza.
But it wasn’t all fun and games: “I’m surprised by how much my wrist hurts,” said Lustig, as the duo sliced tomatoes by the warmth of the wood-fired pizza oven.
Volunteers like Lustig and Axtell learned about the project through Well Crafted Kitchen’s newsletter, which co-owner Bower began sending out at the start of the pandemic to keep customers, or “pizza pals,” informed about how the business was doing.
“I write it as if I’m talking to a friend,” said Bower, 36. In the early weeks of that tumultuous period, she shared sales goals with emails. “We need your help!” she wrote in 2020, telling customers the restaurant’s target was 250 pizzas per week, enough to keep the lights on and pay their team.
This transparent approach paid off for Well Crafted Kitchen, which not only survived the pandemic but is seeing more demand than ever before after a slight drop off last year. In May, they began turning a profit for the first time since COVID-19 hit.
Among the volunteers on a recent Monday night was Val Seaberg of Charles Village, who recently retired from her sales job at T. Rowe Price, where, she joked, “I learned to say things like ‘It’s only 25 million dollars.’” In the past year she’s signed on to a “pizza pals” subscription, which allows customers to prepurchase pizza at a discount. Such subscription programs, for everything from food to wine to coffee, have taken off during the pandemic as business owners look to establish more consistent revenue streams and solidify relationships with customers.
Volunteer Kara Hunerson, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and a former restaurant worker, described the experience as “a fun change from what I do every day.” She lifted the oversize immersion blender to puree a huge pot of tomatoes fresh out of the oven. “I wanted to try the big blender, but my arm’s not going to last,” she said.
Many volunteers were struck by the simplicity of the sauce. Local tomatoes, oven-roasted and pureed with an enormous immersion blender. That puree gets frozen in zip-lock bags and used throughout the year to top pizzas. “It’s always just tomatoes. Not even salt, oil or herbs,” said Tom Wagner.
After a few hours of labor, it was time for the reward: free pizza. By the flames of the oven, Bower demonstrated the technique for sliding a pie off a wooden peel.
“You got this,” she told volunteer Sarah Emrich. “Now shake and pull.” Emrich tossed the circle of dough in the oven, where it began to bubble almost instantly.
The room erupted in cheers and applause.
