By Jane Black
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Alexandria's Restaurant Eve is just the kind of place that ambitious young cooks would like to have on their résumés. The menu changes constantly, offering the chance to make quenelles of fluke mousse one night and quail with foie gras and baby vegetables the next, all under the tutelage of award-winning chef Cathal Armstrong.

But since June, Armstrong hasn't received one application to fill two open slots for line cooks, the kitchen soldiers responsible for much of what comes out on the plate. "There should be a line out of the door of people who want to work here," Armstrong said. But with two of the 13 line cook jobs unfilled, "we've been short-staffed for six months."

The same is true at many of Washington's top restaurants. In September, Robert Wiedmaier's Belgian hot spot Brasserie Beck, Michel Richard's Citronelle and Central, and Dino in Cleveland Park were advertising for line cooks. Wiedmaier was so desperate before opening Beck in April that he traveled to culinary schools in Belgium and Iceland to recruit. Central, which was to have opened for lunch and dinner in January, didn't add lunch service until the end of February, in part because there weren't enough cooks to turn out the $16 hamburgers. Staffing was so tight that chef Cedric Maupillier often slept at the restaurant to save commuting time.

With more restaurants on the way, it will only get worse. In the next several weeks, two high-profile spots will open: the Source, a Wolfgang Puck restaurant next door to the Newseum, and Westend by Eric Ripert at the Ritz-Carlton. Ultimately, competition could slow or even end Washington's restaurant boom.

"I won't open another restaurant, because I can't staff it," Armstrong said. "We are looking at a new concept -- a butcher and bakery -- and the driving force behind it is that you don't need a lot of staff. At some point, and I mean soon, people are just going to stop opening restaurants, because it's too difficult."

A shortage of cooks may seem odd in an era when chefs have graduated from servant to celebrity status. But chefs say an explosion of restaurants has led to intense competition for low-wage workers, and the growing number of culinary students isn't making up the difference.

Washington's population is highly educated and well paid, which makes it tough to find workers willing to earn the going rate for a line cook: $10 to $15 an hour without benefits, or about $21,000 to $31,000 a year. Of the 5.1 million people in the Washington area, 45.9 percent hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the median household income is $74,710. Compare that with New York, where 34.9 percent have college degrees and the median income is $56,120, and Chicago, where 32.1 percent hold a BA or higher and the median income is $54,170.

"You have to work really hard to get good people," said Alan Popovsky, whose new West End restaurant, Hudson, debuted last week. "I remember getting a text message from my partner, and he was ecstatic that one possible candidate came in who was quality."

Even when a celebrity chef is at the helm, independent fine-dining restaurants have notoriously slim profit margins. Proprietors can't compete with hotels and large restaurant groups that start line cooks at $17 an hour and offer benefits, too. The Source, which is part of the Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining group, offers full-time employees health, dental and vision care, a matched 401(k) plan and a life insurance plan. Workers also are eligible for paid vacation time.

Such incentives drew a respectable number of cooks to a two-day Puck job fair in mid-September at the Terrace Restaurant at the Kennedy Center. Though the enormous room, with its art deco fixtures and sweeping views of the Potomac, looked depressingly empty on the second day, by lunchtime executive chef Scott Drewno said he had already collected 40 résumés. By last week, he had filled all 40 kitchen positions.

"The number of restaurants is growing faster than the labor market, so being part of a big company is a selling point," Drewno said. "Besides the benefits, there's room to move up. If you're a line cook with talent and the company has an opening in Detroit or Vegas, I can make a phone call and help you make the next step."

Culinary students in particular are looking for ways to advance, which causes many Washington chefs to grumble about the Food Network-ization of the kitchen. "The bottom line is, working in a kitchen is like digging ditches," said Beck's Wiedmaier, who also owns the upscale Marcel's in the West End. "You're peeling shallots and scrubbing the floors; you're not searing foie gras and saying oh, la la."

Culinary school L'Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, which since 2005 has doubled its annual number of graduates, encourages its students to spend time learning the trade. But that's not always practical. A generation ago, young cooks didn't pay tens of thousands of dollars to go to school. Instead, they learned by apprenticing at low pay. "We knew we were going to be on the cold station for three years just mastering the art," said Ris Lacoste, who worked with veteran chef Bob Kinkead for 13 years before taking the reins at 1789. (She plans to open her new bistro, Ris, in the West End next year.) Now, if you're a culinary graduate saddled by student loan debt, "you need to move up faster," she says.

At the outset, some students say they are willing to put in the time. Current L'Academie student Chris Fazio, for example, is working at both Central and Gerard's Place during his six-month externship. He expects to spend at least five years on the line at various places before opening his own.

That was Neil Wilson's plan, too. A retired military officer in his late 40s, Wilson signed on to work at Palena in Cleveland Park for 18 months after graduating from L'Academie in December 2004. He enjoyed the pace and even got two nights a week off. But "I did not realize fully how hard it would be on my marriage," Wilson said. "When I saw [my wife], either she was dead tired or I was dead tired. So I started to look at other ways to still pursue the culinary world."

In May 2006 he opened his own personal-chef and catering business. In his busiest month, this past June, he earned $12,000, or half a line cook's annual salary. Such earning potential may be why about 40 percent of the students in each 150-person class L'Academie de Cuisine plan to open their own business, according to Barbara Cullen, the school's director of placement.

It's a trend that worries chefs such as Armstrong. "From what I hear, chefs are looking to other cities" for new projects, he said. "There just aren't enough employees around here to do the job."