A Restaurant Staffing Success Story

How Bacquet’s in Eagle used a media blitz to bring in new hires

Courtesy Michele Bacquet

Story by Lex Nelson

On Easter weekend 2021, Michele Bacquet realized her husband Franck’s restaurant was in crisis. It happened in what should have been a pleasant moment. The couple had invited the team from their Eagle eatery, Bacquet’s, over for an Easter meal at their home. Franck was in the kitchen cooking when Michelle sat down to plot the next week’s work schedule — and the numbers didn't add up. 

“I just panicked,” she said. “How was I possibly even going to be able to staff that following week? … I never dreamed, ever, through COVID, that I would have money in the bank and I wouldn’t have people to pay it to.”

For months, Bacquet’s had been suffering under a staff shortage, just like other restaurants in the Boise area including Vincenzo Trattoria, Rice, and Luciano’s. A perfect storm of factors has combined to keep new hires away from restaurants nationwide: disillusionment with service work, increased unemployment payments, fears of exposure to COVID-19— and in Idaho specifically, a booming construction industry, lack of affordable housing, and influx of new employers like Amazon. 

Michele said Bacquet’s has also lost staff to new career paths and drug and alcohol addiction. At one point, Franck was the lone cook in the kitchen while Michele served lunch orders. The conventional ways of hiring, which Franck had used successfully for 40 years, weren’t working. Neither was advertising that servers who worked their restaurant could make more than $75,000 per year. So Michele tried a new strategy: She went public.

“My mom always says ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease,’ and I’m squeaky,” she said.

Michele sent out a plea for applicants to the high-end French restaurant’s email list and Facebook followers. Soon, KTVB, KBOI, and the Idaho Statesman picked up the story. The last-ditch attempt worked. 

“The product was hundreds of applicants. Hundreds! Just within days. And not only was it hundreds of applicants, what surprised me most was the customers that volunteered. Non-industry people! They were just like, ‘You can’t quit now,’” Michele said. 

Bacquet’s needs at least 16 employees on the payroll to run smoothly, and on April 23, it was fully staffed for Friday night service for the first time in months. Michele also sent quality applicants to other restaurants, including Rice and Luciano’s. Looking back, the Bacquets are thrilled that the media blitz worked for them, but Franck cautions it’s not a solution for every restaurant in crisis. 

“They have to decide for themselves. We cannot say, ‘Oh, do that!’ or ‘Do this.’ You [restaurant owners] should do what you think,” he said. 

It's true that while Bacquet’s story is heartwarming, not every eatery has thousands of Facebook followers or customers willing to serve plates. Some also have problems that media attention, even stories from The New York Times, won’t solve overnight. Chef Steven Topple, who owns four restaurants in McCall, Donnelly, and Caldwell, told us it will likely take government action to fix his biggest hiring barrier in Valley County: a lack of affordable housing. 

“The struggle is that a lot of people have turned long-term rentals into Vrbos. There’s nowhere, really, for my employees to live. Every restaurant in town is struggling with the same situation. It’s a really sad situation — every restaurant has ‘Help Wanted’ signs in their windows. You only have to drive around McCall to see that every rest has that sign out,” he said, adding that the increased unemployment benefits and challenge of finding quality staff in small towns doesn’t help. “We need to get the word out there, and we need to try to work on programs to fix housing up here. I know the commissioners of Valley County are working on that, but there's no short-term thing. I have suggestions. Nearly every business owner does.” 

In early April, Idaho Department of Labor Researcher Craig Shaul told BoiseDev that there were just 14,100 unemployed workers in the Boise-Nampa metro area, and said, “If you managed to get them all working and unemployment wasn’t an issue, we would still have workforce problems.” His words paint a concerning picture for the future of restaurant work. In our current economy, out-of-the-box strategies like Michele Bacquet’s may be the future of hiring.