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New grant program hopes to raise wages for Prince George's County restaurant workers

A grant from One Fair Wage will allow a few restaurants to raise their minimum wage to $15 per hour.

DISTRICT HEIGHTS, Md. — Inside the restaurant Bistro 64 in District Heights, Maryland two brothers are hard at work. Bradley and Brian Williams stand behind the bar and go over the receipts from a busy past few weeks.

“In the restaurant business, you don’t want to have too many slow days in a row,” Bradley said.

Bistro 64 opened along Marlboro Pike a few months ago. The combined goal of the brothers to bring a piece of their home to Prince George’s County.

“The idea originally was Caribbean food, because our family has Jamaican roots,” Bradley said. “But, we ended up intertwining American food with Caribbean food.”

RELATED: Majority of DC restaurants will add surcharges, fees to bills in response to tipped wage initiative

They’ve worked on this plan for years. Bradley oversees the business and entertainment side and Brian takes care of the cooking. After a few years of pandemic hiccups, they opened this year. The only thing that hit a snag was hiring workers.

“We didn’t have the capital to give them a high wage, wages that people who have families can live off,” Bradley explained.

This is a common problem across the DMV. Bradley and Brian have heard it many times before: restaurant wages after the pandemic are too low for people to pursue a job or career in this business.

“We want to take the steps D.C. has to raise the wages of tipped workers,” Wala Blegay, Vice chair of the Prince George’s County Council said.

Blegay points out the problem is balancing raising wages for workers, but not saddling restaurants with costs that force them to close.

That is where a third party jumped in. This year, the nonprofit One Fair Wage approached the county with a grant proposal: One Fair Wage and its partners will pay 20 businesses to raise their workers’ wages to $15 per hour.

“This is a way to start working on this to see how the restaurants feel about it or what they need to raise wages in the future,” Blegay explained.

“I was speaking to somebody in the county, and they said, ‘hey, you should apply for this grant,” Bradley said back at Bistro 64

So far, the county has selected four restaurants to receive up to $7,500. You guessed it, Bradley and Brian’s restaurant Bistro 64 is one of them.

Both brothers admit they want the business to make money. But, Bradley sees paying workers higher wages as a crucial step to creating a successful business.

“If you take care of people, they will take care of you,” Bradley said.

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