As of the beginning of August, the national unemployment rate in the United States is 4.3%, and the restaurant industry has been one of the hardest hit by labor shortages, a lack of skilled workers, and trouble with employee retention.
But what if there was a solution to this problem by hiring people from a group that faces much, much higher unemployment rates—those with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs)—a population that has closer to 80% shut out of work?
Mark Cartier, co-founder of No Limits Café in Red Bank, New Jersey, is familiar with this problem on a personal level as his 25-year-old daughter Katie has Down Syndrome. “When she was about 16-17, we started thinking ahead to what kind of job would she be able to get when she finished school,” he says, noting that those with IDDs usually attend school until they are 21. This establishes certainty and routine, but when school ends, members of this population often experience what’s referred to as “falling off the cliff” due to the lack of structure and certainty in the next part of their lives.
Ultimately, Cartier and his wife, Stephanie, were able to find Katie a job, but the experience made them wonder about solutions for others in the same situation.
They decided to open a business that would hire adults with IDDs, and they settled on the idea of a restaurant after seeing a 2017 NBC Nightly News special about Hugs Café, a restaurant in Texas that hires adults with disabilities. “We reached out to the founder and ended up going out there in July 2017," says Cartier. "We saw what it was, and we said, ‘You know what? We can do this.’”
Cartier, who comes from finance, nor his wife, had any experience in the restaurant industry, so the process was a learning curve. They found a location and got to work renovating it in 2019. They opened on March 1, 2020—just in time for the world to shut down due to COVID-19 two weeks later. (Note: It was the employees who led the charge for Mark to reopen, with updated health and safety protocols.)
The restaurant was named No Limits Café, a nod to a popular refrain on a documentary about Down Syndrome, Born This Way, which was, “don’t limit me.”
It’s an ethos that the restaurant tries to live everyday when training and working with its employees. “We make everything that we can from scratch; we like to say we make the jobs as difficult as possible, so that employees learn as much as possible,” says Cartier, who notes the employees work in every single position that any typical restaurant would have, including hosts, servers, bussers, line cooks, dishwashers, etc.
Before opening, Cartier and his wife laid out the framework of what they wanted the menu to look like, and they worked with their first chef to come up with different ideas. It was important the food tasted good and wasn’t an afterthought to the mission. “People come to you once or twice for the mission, but you won't have any repeat customers unless the food's really good,” he says, noting that customers are often “surprised” that the food is good when they visit the restaurant. “I’ve come to realize that's their eyes opening. On an individual level, you're changing perceptions.”
No Limits Café offers a variety of lunch options made from scratch, including chili, salads, butternut squash soup, tomato soup, grilled cheeses, Reubens, Cubans, and other sandwiches with fillings like turkey, grilled chicken, and steak.
In addition to confirming that the food was good, Cartier and his team also paid close attention to how the recipes were put together, ensuring that the employees would be able to make everything on their own.
No major modifications were needed to teach the employees how to make the meals; Cartier just focused on breaking down the recipe into parts of a whole. The restaurant has recipe books that can be hung over where an employee is working, and it will list the ingredients to gather, the steps to follow to make the recipe, etc.
Cartier says his team is hyper aware of not limiting the employees due to preconceived notions about what they can or cannot do. He calls it the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” “When they come to us, they all have some form of learned helplessness, and it's one of the things that we look to reverse,” says Cartier, who explains that throughout their entire lives, well-meaning people have reached out to help them avoid failure or frustration. “But eventually what they learn is that if they stand there, you'll do it for them.
“What if you give them that dignity of risk and give them the opportunity to try? Because when someone overcomes an obstacle, that's empowering.”
Since opening, No Limits Café has also introduced a food truck, which is staffed by the employees of the restaurant. “We do fairs, festivals, private events, those kinds of things,” explains Cartier. One employee at the restaurant was even promoted and serves as the food truck manager. “He has taken this bull by the horns, and he's done a great job. Before every event, he prepares the menu, the inventory—what we need to bring, how much we're taking—and he works with the kitchen.”
The food truck helps to spread the mission of No Limits Café beyond the brick-and-mortar restaurant, making the success of the employees visible to others.
In an effort to spread that success even further, No Limits Café established a training program in the fall of 2022. “We can only employ so many people, and when you love your job, you don't want to leave,” says Cartier, noting he receives phone calls every day from someone looking for employment. “There's two ways that we increase awareness. One, is to get people coming into the café. The other is to train people and send them out to work at other foodservice establishments in the area. You have the general public come in and see someone with autism or someone with Down syndrome, working side by side with their normal, typical peer.”
The training is a 10-week, paid program that covers 100 hours. It’s run a few times a year with five to six students at a time. The program teaches students everything from communication, collaboration, and advocating for yourself, to being on time, interview skills, and resume writing. In the first few weeks, trainees will work in the front and the back-of-the-house, and then they will spend the remaining weeks in the area of their choice.
“What's worked really nicely with the program is the employees who've been at the restaurant since we opened in 2020 are now actually doing a peer-to-peer training,” says Cartier. “It's just fantastic the way that it's helped our existing employees grow also. To see somebody like you who's doing the job and succeeding at it, that's inspiring.”
Cartier says they’ve currently placed 25 people outside the café and 100% of them are still employed. As a result of the training program, 80% of participants are now employed—the exact opposite of the unemployed statistic quoted at the start of this article. Students are placed through a combination of relationships with other eateries in the area as well as by responding to openings and calls for new hires.
Once the employee is placed, No Limits Café’s training program stays in touch with the establishment and the employee to ensure a smooth transition. “For a lot of employers, it's the first time that they've hired somebody who's neurodiverse,” says Cartier. “So offering that support to employers for one year gives them the confidence that they have somebody they can lean on if anything arises, and it makes them a lot more comfortable.”
He says many of the employers he’s worked with have asked for more referrals from the training program because the employees are hardworking, trustworthy, show up on time, do what is asked, and don’t call out.
“When I talk to people in the restaurant business, the common refrain is, ‘Can you get me people that'll show up on time? And that will work hard. And that won’t call out all the time. And who I can trust,'” says Cartier. “Based on individual experience and the reported experience of those who have hired adults with intellectual disabilities, the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action. Your business will grow when your customers see employees happy at their jobs. Your staff will have greater engagement, and while that does not have a numerical yield, it has a personal yield. I cannot think of another business where a happy and engaged work force is of more value than in a restaurant!
“It’s not just about return on investment; it is about reward on investment!”
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