He hasn’t found takers in over a year of running “help wanted” ads, so he’s made do by working extra shifts in the kitchen and paring back the menu.
Could it be that the offered wages are too low? Over a year and no takers says something about you not the workforce. But hey, kids can be payed even less, so let's make it possible to put them to work serving adult beverages. And after that we can let the be farmhands on a pot farm.
Not every employer can afford to pay more. Restaurants in particular operate on very thin margins. If the minimum wage, whether natural or legal, goes above what they can afford, the outcome isn't restaurants that pay more, it's fewer restaurant jobs.
This is just one of the many reasons why people who actually care about the poor, working or otherwise, should be transitioning away from a massive package of subsidies and entitlements that separately target an innumerable number of groups that need some kind of help (including workers whose wages are insufficient to live) and toward a single Basic Income program. In addition to being much cheaper to administer and much easier to access, it would also allow us to put the burden on those privileged individuals and entities that can actually afford to bear the burden, rather than putting up a sign that says "your business must be at least this profitable to operate".
If your business cannot afford to pay its workers a living wage and instead relies on exploitation, then your business model sucks and deserves to fail.
"Business" isn't all evil coproate entities sucking at the teat of other peoples work. It's also small operators who put in a lot of time for not very much money. As a pest control technician, I've seen how the rich live from the outside. But I've also seen how small business operators (my bosses, in some cases) live. They weren't doing much better than my middle management father, and putting in a lot more man-hours to get it.
There are a few different things touched on in your comment, and I'll try to respond to them all, sorry if I miss any.
Losing jobs with no demand is not a bad thing. If you list a job, and nobody will take it for a year, then the market doesn't want that job. There is an tendency to obsess over the number of jobs as a marker of economic health, but it's a correlation at best.
The restaurant industry specifically is hugely over saturated, plenty of restaurants succeed paying a living wage, if you can't then you need to make adjustments (e.g. change menu, move to a different location, etc).
A restaurant which can't turn a profit is a hobby, not a business.
I imagine that at some point a UBI will be necessary, due to the lack of jobs lost to automation, but the purpose of UBI should never be to support the exploitation of workers. In fact it's thought processes like that which make people argue against implementing UBI "Well if my landlord knows I get 1000 a month from UBI he will just charge me 1000 more for rent" or "If my boss knows I get 1000 a month from UBI then he'll drop my salary by 1000 a month".