Rent a Restaurant Helper Is Catching On in Chicago

Henry Norton, owner of the bustling Chicago Chop House in, yes, Chicago, has 65 employees and no employee problems.

He doesn’t worry about how well the folks who work for him are trained, or how responsibly they may have dealt with the niceties of immigration into the United States. He hardly bats an eye if one of them calls in sick and has to be temporarily replaced, or if one deserves the boot. He doesn’t fiddle with payroll. “I just get a printout twice a month and issue a few checks,” he says, “and that’s the end of it.”

Henry Norton has no employee problems because, with the exception of a bookkeeper and a few managerial types, his employees don’t work for him directly. They work for a firm called Heatherton Staff Leasing, also Chicago-based. Norton in effect rents them from Heatherton. “This system is absolutely a joy,” he says. “I keep trying to figure out what the disadvantages are, and the fact is there aren’t any. I don’t know if I’m saving money doing it this way or not, but I know I’m saving time and plenty of heartache.”

“As a matter of fact,” maintains Heatherton President Becky Outlaw, “the restaurants we work for do save money--approximately 2% annually on their total gross payroll, even with our fees figured in.” Outlaw is herself a veteran of the restaurant business: She and her husband, she says, ran seven food service operations of various kinds in Louisville before moving to Chicago.

When she opened her employment agency in the latter city about three years ago, her clients were mostly banks and manufacturing firms. Last year, though, it occurred to her that restaurants might benefit equally from her services. In August, she signed up the first one--the Chicago Chop House. Others have followed, including Ditka’s (owned by Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka) and the six-unit French Bakery chain. “Fast-food people are getting interested too,” says Outlaw. “We’re talking to Wendy’s and Burger King, among others.”

Heatherton screens its employees carefully. References are checked; applicants are tested (“bartenders, for instance, have to answer three pages of questions to prove they know what they’re doing,” says Outlaw); the company even maintains a 2,000-square-foot restaurant-style training room “where bus boys actually bus tables and so on.” Outlaw notes that, as far as she knows, hers is the only operation of this type in the country (as far as this column knows, she is correct)--but she is considering expanding, possibly on a franchise basis, to Florida, Kentucky, Detroit, Philadelphia and, of course, Los Angeles.

NEW YORK NOTES: Wolfgang Puck alumnus Richard Krause, who was (among other things) the original head chef at Chinois on Main and who then defected to Manhattan to run the kitchen at that city’s California-style (and now-defunct) Batons, has just opened his own New York establishment--which bears the distinctly L.A.-sounding name of Melrose--to considerable critical acclaim. . . . Other hot new places in Gotham this winter include Akvavit, a cool, contemporary Swedish restaurant, complete with water-wall and slender seven-story atrium, located in the West 54th Street building in which Nelson Rockefeller worked; and, speaking of Rocky, Joe Baum’s luxurious, meticulously crafted reconstruction of that 1934-vintage restaurant/nightclub masterpiece, the Rainbow Room, on the 65th floor of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. . . . Restaurateur/designer Adam Tihany, whose Venetian-Italian Remi was an instant star upon its opening last spring, told Nation’s Restaurant News recently that receiving a two-star “very good” rating from critic Bryan Miller in the New York Times last fall will mean an estimated $500,000 in additional revenue in the coming year. Talk about the power of the press. . . . Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s office has filed suit in Manhattan asking for control of the city’s landmark billion-dollar-a-year Fulton Fish Market, claiming that “the Genovese crime family” runs the market and its principal labor organization, Local 359 of the United Seafood Workers Union, for its own profit. Seafood Leader, a prominent trade publication, quotes assistant New York FBI director Thomas Sheer as saying that, with actions of this kind, the government hopes to “return our economy and its society to its legitimate citizens and leave the Mafia like a fish out of the water, flopping on the shore.”

WHAT’S COOKIN’: Rembrandt’s Beautiful Food in Placentia has rung a change on the usual order of things by reopening under the old management. Former Rembrandt’s proprietor Bernie Gordon, it seems, sold the restaurant a few years back--but has now taken it over again. . . . Emilio’s in Hollywood has started offering a low-fat, low-salt, low-calorie “Italian Light Menu” based on recipes from author Elisa Celli’s book, “Italian Light Cooking.” . . . Dominick’s has just reopened after several years as a vacated building in Beverly Hills. New chefs Francis Bey and Eric Cuenin, formerly cooks on the Orient Express (yes, the train), promise a new menu of America Riviera fish dishes, as well as keeping the steakhouse fare of the old Dominick’s.