The start of the summer was the beginning of the end of Amara Sylvester’s time working at a fine dining restaurant in the French Quarter. As a server, she relied on tips to make money at work. But instead of waiting on tables, she was often sent home early because business was slow.
With 12 years of experience working in hospitality in New Orleans, she knows slowdowns in the summertime will happen. But this summer felt different. When she took home an $87 paycheck for a week of work. At another point, her water got shut off at home because she couldn’t afford the bill.
“Me and my family are going to be on the street if I continue to work here,” she recalled thinking at the time.
She got a second job at another French Quarter restaurant earning an hourly wage working in the kitchen. Things weren’t better there. She could only get weekend shifts because business was slow. Her weekly paychecks never reached $400, she said.
“I was going through a real hard time, especially when I was working both, and I still wasn’t even able to pay my bills because that’s how slow it was,” Sylvester said.
It’s a reality that countless hospitality workers endure every year during a period known as the “summer slump.” This is when tourism slows — generally attributed to sweltering heat and a decrease in conferences, conventions and other special events that are foundational to the local tourism economy.
As tourism drops off, so does business at the city’s restaurants and bars. Each year from June through September, hospitality workers in New Orleans have to cope with less tips, fewer shifts or even layoffs as their employer tries to keep the business afloat. According to some who spoke with Verite News, this summer was harder than usual to weather financially.
In the third quarter of 2025 (July through September), food and beverage workers in Orleans Parish earned an average of $580 weekly, the lowest of all four quarters, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wages peaked in the fourth quarter, when workers earned an average of $650. Third quarter data is not yet published for 2026.
Walter Leger, president and CEO of tourism marketing agency New Orleans & Company, said the summer slump has posed a challenge in New Orleans for more than 40 years.
“I think the sophisticated nature of the workers in this field is that they recognize some of these months are not as ideal as others. For them to have to plan accordingly is something that I think they’ve grown accustomed to,” Leger said.
Despite New Orleans’ hospitality scene being a major draw for tourism, it’s among the lowest paying industries in the region. The New Orleans metro area’s 50,000 food prep and serving-related workers — which includes all food and beverage workers — earned an annual median wage of $26,000 in 2025, according to the BLS. This includes tips.
For Kamari Stevens, a bartender at a Mid-City bar, prepping for this summer meant picking up extra shifts in April and May. When he talked to Verite News in early September, he was working three days a week at the bar with shifts ranging from eight to 12 hours. He said he knows bartenders in the Central Business District and French Quarter whose jobs only schedule them one day a week this time of year because business is so slow.
“You just learn. I’ve heard my elder New Orleanians be like, ‘Alright, the summer’s going to be slow. So prepare, tighten your belts,’” Stevens said.
But Stevens said his paychecks aren’t going as far as they used to due to economic inflation. According to the BLS Consumer Price Index, the cost of consumer goods rose 3.4% during the 12 month period ending in August 2026, led by a surge in energy costs. Uncertainty around tariffs has also troubled the industry since the Trump administration first enacted new tariffs in April 2025.
“As the cost of things start to rise, it’s hard because you don’t want to pass those costs along to your customers, but you also do want to give your employees raises because you know that their cost of living is increasing,” said Mara Baumgarten Force, a professor of finance at Tulane University and a member of the city’s revenue estimating committee. Force is also a member of the Verite News Board of Advisers.
Due to a lag in when tourism data is published, it’s unclear if data aligns with anecdotal accounts from hospitality workers who say this summer is the worst they’ve worked through.
June hotel occupancy hovered around 55%, as presented by the New Orleans Convention Center at its August board of commissions meeting. That’s slightly higher but nearly on par with June 2025.
New Orleans & Company shared data with Verite News showing that “out of market” visitation to downtown from June through August of 2026 increased by 5.4% year-over-year. The data was pulled from Placer, an AI-powered tool that analyzes foot traffic.
“Anecdotally, I spoke to some folks just last week who were so pleased with how strong July was for them this year,” Leger said in an August interview with Verite News. “But I also hear anecdotally from people who are saying this is the most challenging year they’ve had.”
In the summertime, New Orleans has historically enjoyed a boost in international tourism. But workers say there’s a noticeable drop in international guests they’ve served this year.
Recent data from the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport seems to match this. In its May 2026 report, the most recent at the time of publication, the airport reported that about 6,100 passengers got off of international flights at Armstrong. That’s a 44.9% decrease from May 2025, when about 11,100 passengers got off of planes coming to New Orleans from out of the country. This data also includes U.S. citizens returning to the country.
Aaron Knecht is a bar manager in the French Quarter. The veteran bartender said he’s worked in more than 40 bars in his career, and that French Quarter establishments are the hardest hit during the summer slump.
“Right now, it’s almost like every business and every bartender in the general area is behind on a poker machine they’re really sure is going to pay out,” Knecht said.
For tipped workers like bartenders, foot traffic is critical to earning sufficient wages. But the reality, he said, is that some workers don’t make a living during the summer.
“It’s really, really hard for morale when somebody comes in and works an eight hour shift and barely makes enough to cover the Uber back and forth because it was slow,” he said.
A new, unanticipated factor made an already challenging summer “infinitely worse,” he said. The bar was one of dozens of businesses on upper Decatur Street where construction fencing for a Sewerage & Water Board project has blocked roads for a year. Fencing in front of the bar was removed in mid August, though some obstructions still remain on nearby blocks.
Regarding the officials in charge of construction and those organizing relief to businesses, Knecht said they’ve shown “blatant disrespect” for service industry workers by not being more considerate of the year-long financial hardship it has caused them.
Workers caught in the middle
JD Eubanks has worked in the restaurant industry for 30 years and his recent jobs have been as an executive chef at fine dining restaurants in the French Quarter. He called this summer “brutal,” and said he’s observed employers “aggressively” reducing labor costs in order to turn a profit.
Businesses drastically cutting workers’ hours — or laying off staff only to refill those positions in the fall — is common, he said. He sees these business practices every summer in New Orleans, especially in the French Quarter.
When it comes to cuts and layoffs, hourly staff like cooks are vulnerable because they’re more expensive to retain than staff making a tipped wage, like servers. The minimum wage for tipped employees in Louisiana is $2.13.
“The quality of guest experience goes down, the quality of food goes down because they’re still wanting the same results with less people,” Eubanks said.
For restaurants, labor management also includes delegating tables to servers — directly impacting how much in tips a server will make. Restaurant workers have told Verite News that toxic workplace politics can result in problematic decision making by managers. Eubanks said this can bleed into selecting staff for shift cuts and layoffs, too.
What a business might see as a short-term solution to save on costs during the summer can have life altering effects on a worker.
“Saving money causes [workers] mental health issues and it also is costing people broken hearts, broken homes, lost assets, lost income,” Eubanks said.
For Sylvester, working two jobs didn’t provide her the stability she needed to take care of her family. There were times she was sent home early from her serving job due to a lack of patrons. And at her kitchen job, she said the $17.50 hourly pay wasn’t high enough given her responsibilities as a fry cook.
Her wife works in restaurants too, which doubled the uncertainty that they’d be able to support their two kids and dog.
“I feel like I can’t perform my job if I’m under so much stress. I still go to work but I don’t feel like I give my best,” Sylvester said.
She left both jobs for what she hopes are greener pastures as the summer winds down, working as a server assistant at a French Quarter restaurant hotel.
Robert LeBlanc is the founder and CEO of the LeBLANC+SMITH hospitality group made up of bars, restaurants and hotels. LeBlanc said last summer was tougher financially than this summer on his businesses.
He gave credit to New Orleans & Company for promoting programs like COOLinary and Tales of the Cocktail to drive business. But he still has to strategize for the summer. He said that at his restaurants, some employees’ schedules get reduced from a 40 hour week down to 32 or 33 at worst, and he doesn’t do summer layoffs or temporarily close his businesses, a common practice for New Orleans restaurants.
“These people are important to us and we would rather incur a bit more labor cost when it’s really slow to reinvest in the people who allow us to do really well when it’s busy,” LeBlanc said.
It’s the type of people-focused approach that Eubanks wants to see more of in New Orleans restaurants.
“We have to be fiscally responsible, but we also have to be physically responsible for human beings. I think that’s the piece that’s really missing in the city,” Eubanks said.