Why do restaurants in SF close so early?

Since when does “late-night dining” mean 9PM?

You’ve disembarked from an evening flight into SFO, rolled your suitcase home, and realized that after the better part of a day subsisting on airport snacks, you’re starving. It’s 9PM on a Wednesday and you search for restaurants nearby that are open to see what sounds good. Only as you scroll through the list, you notice a common theme: closed, or closing soon. A bar-pub-ish place down the street says online that they’re open to 10, so you scramble over there, only to be informed by the bartender that the kitchen went dark twenty minutes ago. Time to see what flavors of instant ramen are buried in your cupboards.

You need only glance through the various Bay Area subreddits to find that this is a commonly recognized and much lamented trend. While we were never an infinite dining options twenty four hours a day kind of town, this has certainly become worse post COVID, and is not trending positively. So why is it so difficult to get a hot meal in SF on the ever so slightly late side, or on a Monday, or in the off hours between lunch and dinner, when in many other cities, not even just the New Yorks and Vegases of the world, this feels like a solved problem?

What it costs to work in hospitality

The going rate in the city these days for an entry level employee in a restaurant, such as a dishwasher, prep cook, or busser, runs somewhere in the low to mid $20s per hour. A person working full time at this rate will be paying taxes on about $50k a year in income.

A quick trawl through the job boards will show you that even for top level management positions such as executive chef, beverage director, and general manager, salary offerings hover just around the six figure mark on the high end. Bear in mind that the types of candidates qualified to fill these positions have often devoted years of long hours, high stress, and nonexistent work-life-balance honing their craft to arrive at a wage that is comparable to that of a freshly minted undergraduate interning at Google.

In the Bay Area, earning $104,000 a year qualifies as low-income, and renting a modest apartment requires around $125,000 per year to stay within your means. While living further away can help economize on housing, commuting isn’t free, with estimates ranging around 10+% of your total income.

Given these constraints, you might ask yourself, how on earth do the over 100,000 hospitality workers in SF survive?

Convergent evolution

I began noticing an interesting new problem when hiring for my restaurant in around 2015. Our dining room was open from 5:30-10PM, a pretty standard schedule at the time. You typically figure around two hours from the last seating to shut down at the end of the night, so for cooks to work an 8 hour shift plus their 30 minute break, the start time was 2:30PM, which again had been typical in my years in SF kitchens prior to that time.

However, when interviewing kitchen candidates, I began receiving the same answer time and time again: I want the job, but I can’t start until 4PM. This might not sound dramatic, but considering that the meal break ideally needs to happen before the restaurant is open, it leaves exactly one hour to be ready to open the doors, which is barely enough time to get changed and write a list, let alone actually cook anything.

So what happened? Hospitality workers in SF figured out how to solve the $100,000 a year problem with their $50,000 a year in earnings: work two jobs. Gradually and then suddenly, not a single prep cook or runner was going to be caught dead working anything less than two full-time jobs. We found a new set of rules had emerged, not through purposeful design but spontaneous evolution: there was now an ironclad set of constraints around our staffing schedules: the morning shift ran from around 8AM to 3PM, and the evening shift from around 4PM to midnight.

We eventually had to redesign our entire approach to prep to accommodate this new world order, shuffling SOPs, adding hours to the AM schedule, and reducing the responsibilities of the PM line cooks to the bare minimum. What had once been a position which imbued a certain level of prestige upon the prideful cook who prepped and orchestrated their section from start to finish, devolved into a glorified short-order cook capable of basic, repetitive reheating and garnishing. Menu and recipe design had to shift to simplify the final steps, with the bulk of the “real cooking” being done far in advance by other people, who passed the 90% complete product to the line before service.

Is it happenstance that this coincides with a timeline where the median rent in the metro area increased by about 30% in 5 years? And what does it have to do with the original question as to why it’s so difficult to get a plate of food at 10PM in our fair city, heaven forbid on a Monday?

Labor costs: smooth curve, or sharp steps?

As the hospitality workforce has transitioned to a de-facto two shift model, hiring managers are caught against an immovable object. Starting shifts later in order to have staff work later is tantamount to asking somebody to stretch their already 16+ hour day to 18 or 20 hours with no additional compensation. Not to mention past the cutoff time for most regional transit options if they’re clocking out after midnight.

Keeping the start time but extending the close means overtime, which is the ultimate four letter word in restaurant budgeting, and means that the additional hours of operation would, at the margin, run less profitably, since each hour of staff time now costs 1.5 times normal.

How about the growing preponderance of restaurants operating only five days a week? Here, the staffing problem is twofold. Firstly, let’s imagine the life of an hourly employee working two jobs. They might wake at 6AM, travel, start work by 8, and clock out at 3:30. Second commute, work from about 4 to midnight, and hopefully clock out in time to catch the last bus or BART home. Door to door, this is a grueling 18+ hours, with three potentially expensive commutes, for poverty wages.

Now ask, how do these ten shifts land in their week? There is no guarantee that their days off are synchronized, and in fact my anecdotal experience from speaking to my staff is that working 7 days a week is very common, where four of those days are “half” days, meaning they only work 8 hours at their AM or PM job. The lucky ones manage to align both jobs one day a week, so they get an actual day off. And the most fortunate have won that hardfought, exquisite luxury: two full days off every week, at the cost of the other five being full-length doubles.

Now apply your empathy and place yourself in their shoes, when it comes time to change jobs: you might place a very high priority on choosing a position whose off days line up with your other schedule, maximizing your ability to actually experience some respite on a weekly basis. This decision tree, repeated countless times, is what drives a convergent evolution across the industry, where it is more and more difficult to hire staff to work on the classic off-days of Sunday and Monday.

The second piece is on the management side. Let’s say the cute neighborhood bistro on your corner has one manager in the morning and one at night. That means they can operate all year long on a five day a week schedule with two full-time managers.

Now, the owner decides that with everybody else on the block closed on Sundays and Mondays there is an opportunity, and they should open every day. Increasing top line revenue means fixed costs like rent are more readily defrayed, and it feels like something that residents of the neighborhood desperately want. Why didn’t we think of this sooner?

However, as we do not quite fully inhabit a robotic dystopia, salaried managers tend to expect to work five days a week. The bistro now needs another AM and PM manager to cover those two extra days. By moving to capture two more days worth of clientele, they have increased their management overhead by 100%.  Add the fact that these are also traditionally the slowest days and are not likely to generate as much marginal revenue as the other five, and you have a pretty unappealing business decision. Close Sunday and Monday it is.

Now what?

Not that we needed it, but we now have yet another set of reasons to be frustrated at the housing crisis, absurd cost of living, and dysfunctional public transit of the Bay Area. Sure, getting a warm pappardelle and a nice glass of wine at 11PM isn’t anywhere near the top of the list of reasons to get in arms over much needed reforms in our gorgeous city.

But perhaps it is useful to understand how every time a butterfly flaps its wings and a residential housing unit doesn’t get built, somewhere nearby a restaurant quietly starts closing at 8PM.