WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — When David McInnis was a young man working in the kitchens of upscale Boston hotels, he taught himself how to cook hog roasts for his friends and family using tutorials on YouTube.
That passion for low-and-slow smoking would later evolve into a food truck, after McInnis relocated to the Upper Valley in 2007, and then a brick-and-mortar restaurant, a decade later.
Situated near the entrance of I-91 South in White River Junction, Wicked Awesome BBQ incorporated the various styles McInnis had picked up throughout his self-taught education as pitmaster. His sauces married the vinegar notes of North Carolina’s east side roasts with the tomato flavor of Kansas City, plus his own spin on the craft: basting the meat in root beer to help seal in a smokey flavor.
“Basically the food here is what I like,” McInnis told the Valley News last year.
McInnis was doing what he cared about, but that didn’t mean running Wicked Awesome was easy. Narrow margins, staffing issues and a laundry list of responsibilities were all added stressors, yet between sales from the restaurant and the business’ catering service, he was able to make it work.
That all changed during COVID-19, when prices shot up, foot traffic slowed and staff became harder to come by. Some restaurants, such as Skinny Pancake in Hanover, closed early on.
McInnis toughed it out for several years, but even after restrictions lifted, business never snapped back, and he struggled to find employees. Ultimately, McInnis decided to shutter Wicked Awesome earlier this winter.
“Restaurants are still coming out of the financial catastrophe of the pandemic,” Upper Valley restaurateur Jim Reiman said in an interview. “(You) can’t disregard the impact on restaurant closure.”
Already thin margins have become even smaller post-pandemic. As of January, wholesale food prices were 31% higher than they were in February 2020, the National Restaurant Association, a food service trade organization headquartered in Washington D.C., reported last month.
The pandemic has also had a lasting effect on the industry’s workforce. While staff shortages have declined 13% since 2024, 49% of operators are still experiencing some level of staffing insufficiency, the James Beard Foundation’s 2026 Independent Restaurant Industry Report found.
At the end of 2025, the Twin States had not yet bounced back to their pre-pandemic restaurant employment rates, with Vermont 2.4% below and New Hampshire 1.9% below its 2019 rate, the National Restaurant Association reported.
In the Upper Valley, the high cost of living and a small pool of trained restaurant workers compared to urban areas makes finding adequate staff even harder.
That’s been Austin Junker’s experience trying to staff the kitchen at Casa Brava Tapas, the small plates restaurant inside Hanover’s Six South Street Hotel.
Yet in spite of those challenges, new restaurants continue to emerge, willed into existence by the tenacity and vision of their owners.
Change of pace
By the time the pandemic hit, Ian Rose was ready to get out of the restaurant industry. At the time he was the director of southern operations for Skinny Pancake, the creperie chain with locations across Massachusetts, New York and Vermont.
Part of his job included overseeing the Skinny Pancake in Hanover, which was a constant exercise in looking for staff, Rose said.
Even though the town is teeming with Dartmouth College students, they often weren’t able to commit as many hours to the restaurant as they’d originally said.
“It was always a struggle. We were always hiring,” Rose, who lives in Claremont, said.
Long hours kept him away from his family, and he didn’t have much time to spend with his kids, now ages 13 and 10.
As the Hanover Skinny Pancake closed its doors in 2020, Rose took the opportunity to find new work.
“I love the food world. I love food people,” said Rose, who’s worked in the industry since his youth. “But I was tired of running restaurants.”
Though the Hanover location closed, the Skinny Pancake on Woodstock Road in Quechee remains open.
After leaving Skinny Pancake, Rose tried a few different jobs before becoming general manager of the Springfield Co-op in Springfield, Vt., in 2023.
In some ways, working at the co-op was just as stressful as restaurant life.
“It’s a tough business, and that sized store is kind of like in the middle where it’s not big enough to have the resources that something that diverse requires but obviously has the needs of it,” Rose said.
Sometimes working at the co-op was also unsafe, Rose said, recalling one experience when someone threatened him with a gun while he was on shift.
Ready for something new, he took up the role of director of food services for Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union.
Now in his second year in the position, Rose oversees the dining operations for four schools within the supervisory union, which involves working with Vermont farmers to provide students and employees with healthy meals while staying within budget.
“It’s a fun challenge,” Rose said.
A couple weeks ago tacos were on the menu at the Windsor School, and the kitchen crew spent the morning roasting trays of corn and fish sticks in the industrial ovens, and stocking great silver bowls with pickled red onions and salsa.
Many of them had worked there for a couple years or more, and they moved quickly and methodically to be ready in time for the first wave of hungry students.
The job’s hours roughly mirror those of the school day, meaning Rose is done with work by 2:30 p.m., leaving the rest of the day — plus weekends and school holidays — to spend with his kids.
Then there’s the health insurance, including vision and dental, and the school pension, all of which were harder to come by when Rose was working in the restaurant industry.
The rhythm is also far less capricious than a night of dinner service.
“You know exactly when things are going to happen. There’s not a lot of mystery,” Rose said. “It’s a breath of fresh air.”
Many of Rose’s dozen or so cooks are also former chefs or restaurateurs looking for a change of pace.
Greg Hamel, of Newport, ran a breakfast and lunch spot called Blackwater Junction Restaurant for 19 years out of Andover, N.H., before closing the eatery for a year and a half after the building was destroyed in a fire in 2017.
“Everything was a challenge,” said Hamel, who would wake up at 2:30 a.m. to start preparing for the day’s work and wouldn’t get home until 7 p.m.
“You’re married to a restaurant,” he said.
But business was strong, which made the long hours more tolerable. “It just becomes a way of life,” he said.
His son and daughter both worked at the restaurant, as did his nieces and nephews, so time at work was also family time.
“You certainly rely on your family,” Hamel said.
Tough search
Like Rose did at Skinny Pancake, Austin Junker also grapples with finding enough people to staff Casa Brava inside Six South Street Hotel in Hanover.
Finding people to work front of house hasn’t been too difficult, but sourcing kitchen staff has been another story.
Junker rarely receives an application for a kitchen position, and when he does the applicant often has little to no experience.
“Nobody wants to work in kitchens anymore,” he said.
Staffing was never such an issue when he was working in Denver or Florida, he said.
He has a solid kitchen team of four at the moment, but if one of them gets sick or decides to leave, he’ll have to step in to help out.
While staffing is a stressor, there are aspects of running Casa Brava out of the hotel that make things easier. Every month Junker pays a flat fee that incorporates utilities, and he’s also able to rely on hotel guests as a built-in customer base, on top of patrons from outside the hotel.
Junker, a White River Junction resident, bought the restaurant from founders James Van Kirk and Martin Murphy about a year ago. At 36, this is his first time owning a restaurant, though he’s worked in the food industry since he was 14, when he got a job busing tables at a Chinese Buffet in south Florida.
At first it was just a way to earn extra money, but he soon “fell in love” with restaurant life, he said.
Year by year he worked up the food chain, taking a particular interest to bartending and mixology.
He relishes in the industry’s quick pace, and that there are always new problems to tackle.
Twice, he pivoted to something new, working at Best Buy and at Starbucks. But the restaurant world soon called him back.
Those other two jobs were just “not fast enough for me,” he said.
Stretched thin
In the right doses, the stress of running a restaurant can be energizing, but taken to the extreme it can extinguish an owner’s passion for the work.
Budgeting for the high cost of ingredients and keeping up with the endless search for capable employees weighed heavily on McInnis while he was running Wicked Awesome, especially after the pandemic when prices spiked and staff became harder to find.
Before COVID, McInnis was paying about $3.69 for a pound of beef. By the time Wicked Awesome closed he was paying roughly double that. And considering all the fat that needs to be trimmed away before the beef before is ready to be served, he was “putting in a lot for a little meat,” he said.
Even before COVID, finding the right staff was never easy. In Boston, there were “a lot more trained people, more culinary school people,” said McInnis, who lives in Sharon.
The Upper Valley was a different kettle of fish, and it proved difficult to find people who were the right fit for a fast-paced restaurant environment.
Instead, he often ended up with staff who couldn’t be counted on to show up for work, either because they were abusing drugs, or for other reasons.
The employment pool further dwindled after the pandemic, and when McInnis decided to shutter Wicked Awesome he had about four staff members, half the optimal number for the winter season.
He was also competing with the McDonald’s drive-thru next door, which was “offering $18 an hour and benefits and stuff,” he said.
Wicked Awesome paid about the same pay (plus tips), but McInnis couldn’t afford to offer benefits such as health insurance.
“You can’t keep up with corporate businesses,” he said.
At the same time, he also was grappling with the loss of his stepson, who died suddenly in 2021 at age 29.
The grief put a strain on McInnis’ relationship with his wife, and the two separated a few years ago.
McInnis was in pain, but he couldn’t slow down; the restaurant needed him.
“To me, I had no choice. He passed away in June and that’s when our summer season starts,” he said. “What are you going to do? I can’t tell a bride that I can’t do your wedding.”
Fewer employees meant he was back to working long hours in the kitchen. Now 55, he wasn’t as spry as he used to be and he dealt with back and knee pain, and arthritis in his hands.
But some part of him felt like it was his duty to push down the grief and discomfort and keep working.
“I have to be a man,” he thought at the time. “I have to take care of my family, take care of the business.”
Stressed and worn out, McInnis’ enthusiasm for the job began to morph into dread.
There were “days I would catch myself going into work just hating it,” he said. “That was really painful because this is my passion; this is my love.”
When Wicked Awesome was on its last legs, McInnis’ ex-wife, Deborah Fennelly, stepped in to help him keep the doors open. The two are on better terms in the years since the divorce, McInnis said.
Still it all became too much to handle. Eventually, he made the decision to break his lease and close the restaurant. Fennelly helped him pack up.
McInnis declined to discuss the financial consequences of breaking the lease.
Since closing Wicked Awesome, he’s been getting by on unemployment benefits. Because of his health problems, he’s not sure what kind of work would best suit him next.
“I’m not in a hurry to jump into anything right now,” he said.
One upside of closing the restaurant has been all the time he has to spend with his grandkids.
On the day of a recent interview with the Valley News, he was getting ready to take his 6-year-old grandson to a trampoline park.
“I wouldn’t be able to do that today if the restaurant was open,” he said.
Undeterred
Even as a post-pandemic economy has placed added burdens on owners and some employees are seeking a less hectic work environment with better benefits, restaurateurs are still willing to stick their necks out to realize their vision.
“They want to be creative,” Reiman said.
Burgeoning restaurant owner Nora Rice has had her hands full the past six weeks running Seasoned Skillet Restaurant, her farm-to-table eatery that opened on Randolph’s North Main Street in February.
A trained chef who grew up in the agricultural community Cobb Hill in Hartland, Rice, recently co-authored “The Vermont Farm to Table Cookbook” with her sister Jenna Rice.
Seasoned Skillet’s offering incorporate recipes from the book, along with dishes Rice has developed from her time training and working as chef in the UK and elsewhere.
Cider-braised pork shoulder appears on the menu alongside a spiced beef kofta and a butternut sage gratin appetizer lifted from the sisters’ cookbook.
Rice, who’s 25, decided to keep the restaurant’s staff to a minimum to start, with one person working the dining room while she handled all the cooking.
She worried that if she hired too many people from the outset and business was slow, she wouldn’t be able to compensate them.
Instead the opposite’s been true.
“It’s been way busier than expected, which honestly is a good problem to have,” she said in a phone interview.
Getting the restaurant off the ground has meant long hours, and on the days that it’s open —Thursday through Sunday — Rice spends 12 to 16 hours on her feet, arriving early in the morning to prepare for service at 4:30 p.m., then working through dinner.
When the restaurant is closed, she tackles administrative tasks and unloads deliveries.
She’s been so busy that she hasn’t had a chance to search for additional help, but she knows that “when you don’t have a big staff to fall back on, you’re very vulnerable,” she said.
Last month she came down with the flu and had to close the restaurant for the week while she recovered.
Like McInnis and Hamel, she’s leaned on family for extra pairs of hands. Her dad’s been prepping in the kitchen with her, while her sister has taken on organizing the restaurant’s live music. Her boyfriend used a recent week off from work to help fix things around the restaurant, and her mom’s “been the emotional support,” Rice said.
“They’ve all been great.”
She acknowledges that it’s a tough time to open a food business. Just a few weeks ago, Chef’s Market, a deli and natural food store in Randolph announced it would be closing its doors after almost two decades in business.
Nevertheless, she’s undeterred. “I’m just kind of a ‘why not’ person,” she said.
“Once I get an idea in my head it’s like, I’m going to do it no matter how hard it is.”