Restaurants Are Using an App to Staff Their Kitchens By Kate Krader

Jobs app Pared helps Bay Area and New York City restaurants find staff in a pinch. The service will expand to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., later this year. Pared helps owners fill vacancies in restaurants—where hiring and retention is hard—on a temporary basis.

The Pared app, designed to solve staffing problems , was introduced in December 2015 by Will Pacio, a Stanford graduate who cooked at the French Laundry, the legendary Napa Valley restaurant, and Dave Lu, a veteran of Apple and Yahoo! who founded fan club network Fanpop. At the start, Pared was a Bay Area-based program for filling such jobs as dishwashers and prep cooks. It’s since grown to include many more positions, including servers, baristas, and even oyster shuckers. In March 2018, Pared expanded to New York, where it now has several high-profile clients, including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Tom Colicchio, and Tao Group. Pacio and Lu are expanding to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., by the end of the year, with the goal of being in all the major U.S. metropolitan markets by 2020. “Every day, I beg them to come to Los Angeles,” says Perello, who’s opening a restaurant, M. Georgina, there in the summer.

For employers, Pared’s benefits are easy to see: The cost of losing and replacing an hourly worker is $5,864 per employee, according to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. The 2016 Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the restaurant sector experiences annual employee turnover of 73 percent; over the course of 16 months, a restaurant can expect to lose its entire staff.