HAMBURG, N.Y. — As the owner of a restaurant and brewery, Jimmy Butera does it all. 

"You’re wearing many hats,” said Butera, owner of Butera's Craft Beer and Craft Pizza in Hamburg. “Whether you’re cooking, plumbing, electrician, Human Resources. Just owning a restaurant in itself is a tasking job.”

It’s a job made tougher when you don’t have enough help.

"Oh, it’s difficult,” he said. “Busy nights, we’ve got one person behind the bar when we should have two.”

Butera has been struggling to find employees during the pandemic. He has a staff of about 38, but could use another seven or so. 

"It’s been the most impossible to find workers throughout the pandemic,” he said. “February to August I had ads out, I put posts out and I didn’t get any applicants.”

Stimulus checks and extra unemployment benefits are a couple of the reasons he believes people were slow to come on board. With the enhanced unemployment ending last month, he was hopeful more would be ready to join his staff, but that just hasn’t been the case.

"The restaurant industry isn’t the only industry affected by this,” he said. “I have friends that work in different industries. They’re all suffering from the same thing, so I don’t know what’s going on.”

Butera has seen an uptick in applications lately, but that hasn’t resulted in getting more workers hired for various reasons. Some of his vendors are short on supplies and employees too. So for now, he’s doing all he can to keep up.

"Our goal in restaurants is to make sure our customers are happy and when you have to work three times harder to accomplish that goal, it adds more stress," he said.