As with a lot of business owners, Artie Praino faced a problem when he was opening his latest venture, Gino’s Parlor of Sandy Hook. But in Praino’s case, it wasn’t the uncertainty of opening a restaurant in the midst of a still-active pandemic or lacking the wherewithal to get it off the ground: It was an unexpected shortage of available employees.

“We were supposed to open Aug. 2,” he told the Business Journal during a visit to Gino’s, at 102 Church Hill Road in Newtown’s Sandy Hook section. “But we couldn’t find enough cooks, so we ended up stretching it out another month.”