Rumors of a labor crisis in the Los Angeles restaurant industry began about four years ago as a grumble — whispering at the farmers market, the occasional kvetching on social media — but as more and more ads for line cooks go unanswered and scheduled interviews bail without so much as a call or an apology, L.A. chefs and restaurateurs are practically shouting from the rooftops: “Where are all the cooks?”

It’s a problem that began in New York and San Francisco, before spreading to Washington, D.C., and now L.A. At Michael’s in Santa Monica, assistant manager Chas McCarty will chase after anyone he sees walking down Wilshire Boulevard in chef’s whites. Clémence Gossett, who runs the Gourmandise School of Sweets and Savories in Santa Monica, fields daily phone calls from chefs and restaurateurs asking if she knows of any qualified pastry chefs. At Cosa Buona in Echo Park and Alimento in Silver Lake, chef-owner of both restaurants Zach Pollack keeps an ad for a line cook open even when his kitchens are staffed up, in hopes that the right résumé might trickle in.

A decade ago, when Pollack was a line cook at Sona, chef David Myers’ now-shuttered white tablecloth restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, there were probably fewer than 10 ambitious restaurants in Los Angeles. “It was Sona, Grace, Spago, Lucques,” Pollack says, rattling off the restaurants that launched today’s generation of homegrown chefs, “and every line cook was competing for the same position. Now you can be late to an interview, you can make a silly comment, you can leave your knife at home” and you can still land a job. “There are just so many more restaurants,” Pollack adds, but the talent pool seems to have stayed the same.

According to the Los Angeles Health Department, there were 2,228 more restaurants operating in January 2018 than there were at the start of 2014. The data reflects the restaurant boom across Los Angeles, where out-of-town chefs are arriving in droves and new developments in Chinatown and the Fashion District are converting once-industrial blocks into culinary destinations at a breakneck pace.

The crisis comes as the restaurant scene crescendos and the public’s appetite for new openings reaches a fever pitch. At least on paper, there has never been a better time to be a cook. Opportunities abound and hazing rituals — like placing metal tongs in the oven while a cook’s back is turned, or the flinging of pots and pans by tyrannical chefs — are largely a thing of the past. In the wake of #MeToo, it’s no longer a given that female (and male) cooks will helplessly tolerate sexual harassment. A rising minimum wage and increased scrutiny around labor laws mean cooks are making more money and working less hours than ever before — and the kitchen, once a blue-collar haven for misfits, has blossomed into a glamorous profession. The possibility of celebrity lingers over every stove….Readmore