Farewell, Harvest: Gainesville tapas restaurant in its final days of service due to staffing shortage, catering influx

Aug. 25—When Harvest Kitchen opened its doors in August 2020, its mission was twofold: To cultivate an environment staff enjoy coming to work in and, by extension, house "an atmosphere of peace and safety" for those gathered around the table.

"We wanted a place where people could come and spend hours around the table and it feel like minutes," catering director Julia Still said. "Time around the table is really important and really sacred."

In the last two years, guests have gathered for anywhere from an hour to three, savoring some of the restaurant's best-selling tapas, like crispy Brussels sprouts, table steak, paparruchas and brunch fare.

On Sunday, Sept. 4, the restaurant will serve slow-paced Spanish cuisine for the final time due to persisting labor shortages, supply chain issues and an upswing in bookings on the catering side of the business, which will continue to operate out of Harvest's facility on South Enota Drive.

"Food costs have gone through the roof," Still said. "Every week we're just scrambling to find specific products; our rep can't get them, distributors don't have them. ... There is a labor crisis, and it is dramatically impacting all industries, but specifically the food service industry. Everywhere you go, everybody is hiring. It's been a challenge from day one."

The decision to close wasn't an easy one to make, according to executive chef Myles Willman, and comes with a deep sense of grief.

"It hurts a lot," Willman said. "Through all of this, it's been hard. There's been a lot of times where we weren't sure if we were going to be able to staff it, where prices of things had gone up so much the conversations had to be on the table of 'Can we keep doing this?' And we've always found a way. But it does hurt, hitting the point where there just didn't seem to be a way out of it."

"I'm going to miss walking in and seeing our friends," Still said through tears. "It's just as much a shock and grief to us as anyone else in the community. We were hoping to be able to have a little bit longer of a run."

The restaurant has "never not been hiring" from the time it opened, both Still and Willman said.

"We've been looking constantly," Willman said.

A month ago, the kitchen was fully staffed with five chefs. Now, it's down to two and, prior to making the decision Aug. 19 to close, the restaurant was facing a week with just one.

"We can't pull it off," Still said. "We can't keep the doors open. At the end of the day, we just don't have the staff to move forward. There's just no way. I still have five shifts in the next two weeks that are open and I need to fill."

Willman often stands in to fill staffing gaps in the restaurant, but the trouble is he's also Harvest's only catering chef.

"He can't be in two places at once," Still said. "We took a really earnest look at our schedule and the actual gaps that we had to fill, and it's just not feasible. Either we close the restaurant or the restaurant closes itself."

"And the people we do have would be worked to death in the process," Willman added. "Our staff has been so loyal and has stuck with us and this vision. (They've) worked so hard and sacrificed a lot to keep this going this long."

With the restaurant closing, the owners have the capacity to further expand the catering side of the business, which Still said "has been growing like weeds" in recent months, while giving part-time work to some of the restaurant's employees, who would otherwise be laid off.

"And it solves the major issues — dramatically — of labor and supply chain," Still said.

Harvest Catering Co. is primarily geared toward weddings and corporate events.

Pop-up dinners and events in the dining room are definitely on the table, Still said. She and Willman will be making those decisions early next year.

The two aren't closed off to reopening the restaurant at some point down the road, either, but Willman emphasized they'd "have to know we could do it well with enough space for both companies and we wouldn't end up in the same situation where everybody's grinding it out."

Opening a restaurant in 2020 gave Still and Willman a unique advantage in the sense that they've never known restaurant ownership outside of a pandemic, they said, making the "unprecedented challenges" they've faced along the way seem relatively normal.

They likely won't miss those aspects of business when the doors close for good next Sunday. What they will miss, though, are the people, and the opportunity to impact their lives for good.

"There's really cool stories that have come out of our servers just being really intentional with our guests and being present with the person in front of them," Still said. "Being so close to the hospital, we get a lot of people in really tragic situations who happen to come here because it's the closest restaurant, and we get to just love on them for 30 minutes while they eat their lunch."