Luke Tedeschi has been in the restaurant business on Nantucket for thirty years. The owner of the Gazebo/Tavern, he would never complain about his restaurant being busy but fears that the demand the island will face this summer could exceed the resources Nantucket can provide. “It is going to be a problem and I think people are going to talk about it,” Tedeschi said. “It’s going to be on social media because we don’t have enough infrastructure and service. We don’t have it in our restaurants. We don’t have it in the service industry for how many people visit us. I will definitely say I feel a little bit for the tourists. The visitors are going to have less choices and less places to choose from. There will be longer wait times. They are not going to get the service they deserve for what it is going to cost to come visit here.” Tedeschi said staff housing has become his bigger concern. He has gone from having forty-five beds in 2019 to eighteen beds this year. A majority of his beds were lost after one of the buildings was sold this past year during the island’s most hectic real estate year to date, eclipsing $2.3 billion in sales. Tedeschi said he has considered shipping staff to and from the island to combat this loss of housing. “What you can pay to rent a place here you can probably pay to buy something on the other side,” Tedeschi said. “I have already coined it the fireman shift. You come on-island, work all night and all the next morning, and then the next crew comes on opposite of you. I could keep a rotating crew. They stay in the housing that I have here and the other half are over there. It would be a constant flow of people. It isn’t out of the question.”

Kari Harvey’s family owns the Nantucket SeaGrille, which is entering its thirty-first year. The restaurant opened when Harvey was five. She has been working there since she was thirteen. Harvey, who is now the SeaGrille’s manager, called the state of the island’s restaurant scene “wild” and believes the closures of The Boarding House and The Pearl are a huge loss for the island. “It is going to be insane, and while it may sound silly to say losing those two restaurants will be a huge loss, it forces more people to scramble to find a place to go,” Harvey said. “People can get pretty aggressive and upset too simply because they can’t get into places because there is a lack of these restaurants these days.”

Harvey said the island fever has become so hot that they have even begun receiving the occasional phone calls in April and May from parties looking to book reservations for Christmas Stroll. “I have to stop and ask them to be sure that they aren’t talking about Memorial Day weekend,” she said. “The demand is crazy. Even in the shoulder seasons we will have groups of people waiting to get seats at the bar. There just isn’t as much of an offseason anymore. September and October of last year were wild. Staffing at restaurants across the island continues to become a bigger and bigger problem as we get more and more busy.”

Debba Pitcock, the general manager of The Rose & Crown since 1990, can speak to the demand for reservations on the island. Even though they do not take reservations, they still deal with requests. “Every day we get people calling. Every single day,” she said. “We get people calling for a party of six, party of eight. The amount of time I would waste on tables being empty waiting on people to come, it doesn’t make sense to me.”

Slip 14 takes reservations thirty days out. Brennen Connor and Timmy Farley, Slip 14’s general managers, said that they can peak at 180-200 reservations per night in July and August with wait lists that run as long as 130-140 reservations deep. “You have to prepare for battle every day whether it is Tuesday or Saturday. It doesn’t matter because every day is Saturday here,” Connor said. “It’s fun but not easy.”

Farley said another issue is tourists who book more than one reservation per night. “We get a lot of people who may book multiple reservations on the same night at different restaurants because of the demand, which can be frustrating because it isn’t very fair to the restaurants who are preserving that table,” he said. “If people cancel, we can fill it right back up with last-minute parties, but it can be an inconvenience.”

Getter said he has more than thirty Craigslist ads running throughout the country and five online ads on culinary recruiting websites. He said the listings make it clear he provides housing with signing bonuses and additional bonuses throughout the year. “The work is too hard and pay is too low,” he said. “Today’s generation, kids aren’t into it.” Getter said this chef shortage may force him to close once per week to provide relief to his staff. “You only have a short period of time to make your money for the winter so if myself or anyone else has to close for a day, that is a big problem,” he said. “I am definitely concerned about that.”

When they are open, Getter isn’t worried about being overwhelmed. “Restaurants can only do what restaurants can do,” he said. “Last year was the busiest year we had. You can only do so many dinners in July or August. You only have so many seats. When it comes to losing places like Pearl and the Boarding House, yeah, there are going to be more people looking for places to go, but maybe they will take the 5:30 or 10 o’clock reservation because there is nowhere else to go. I do think getting reservations on the island will become a problem, but we can only do what we can do.”

Farley and Connor said Slip 14 has had similar challenges to Getter when it comes to chefs. They said they have a full staff up front of waiters and servers, and while they entered the summer with two open beds reserved for chefs and/or kitchen staff they hope will walk through the door, they are hopeful they can still open all seven nights and six days of the week after being forced to close for two nights and two days last summer. “A lot of our resumes are older chefs who have been doing it for a long time,” Farley said. “If we had kids coming out of culinary school, we could bring them in on a three- or four-year plan and they could grow with us. We want to bring in younger people who will be around for a long time and can build with us.”

Farley said another potential obstacle for restaurants to overcome is the return of large parties. “We have had a lot of large party requests,” he said. “Last year it had to be a party of six or split up. They were also less common because maybe with some lingering COVID concerns, people were traveling in smaller groups. This year we are getting calls about coming in with thirty people for lunch. We don’t take reservations for lunch but try to figure it out.”

Pitcock and Tedeschi both expressed concerns about food costs as well. They both said that they had no choice but to raise their costs in order to operate and warned people to be prepared for changes. “I am concerned that the pricing could scare people away but we aren’t being greedy,” Pitcock said. “We are being operators who have to operate their business in a certain manner. Luke and I are kind of in the same price point and clientele base so I am concerned about that as well as he is.”

“Food costs are going way up and I had to choke when I wrote my menu this year,” Tedeschi said. “But I did it on percentages and so they always say numbers don’t lie. If you don’t adjust your menu to rising food costs, you’re going to be running in the red. There are going to be some shocking menu prices out there.”

The signs were already there that people were preparing to flock to the island in high quantities. Harvey spoke to the fact that their phone was ringing off the hook with summer regulars and other tourists calling ahead to book out tables for each of their scheduled summer trips to the island. The Steamship Authority is booked through August and has so little room available that UPS is shipping trucks over on a barge after failing to lock up their reservations in a timely manner this winter. All six of these restaurant managers and/ or owners agree that last year was the busiest summer they have experienced and don’t see an end in sight, so could this summer be busier? “I don’t know how much busier it could possibly get than it was last year,” Harvey said. “But I have also been saying that since 2019 so who knows. We will have to wait and see, but I’d buckle up. It is going to be a wild few months.”