Cook

Work description

Pine Stump Junction CE LLC, doing business as Pine Stump Cook Shack and Drinkery ("Pine Stump" or the "Employer"), operates a full-service restaurant and bar in Michigan's eastern Upper Peninsula at 23583 County Road 407, Newberry. A restaurant and refueling stop has operated for about 75 years at this location, about twenty miles north of the Village of Newberry, at the junction of the state-designated snowmobile trail system and the county off-road vehicle trails. The Employer has operated the restaurant there since 2020, preparing pizzas, burgers, smoked pulled pork and brisket, sandwiches, fries, wings, and soups from scratch on-site. The location is remote. Newberry, twenty miles south and the nearest community of any size, has a population of 1,446 and is the nearest place we can recruit a cook. Pine Stump operates year-round. The kitchen is open to guests seven days a week from 11:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., and our cooks work shifts from about 10:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. to cover opening preparation and closing cleanup. Those are our regular hours when the kitchen is adequately staffed; in previous years we were forced to curtail those hours for lack of cooks. We have employed between two and four permanent cooks in every month of 2024, 2025, and 2026 to date. Because those cooks work part-time schedules, that headcount amounts to only 0.8 to 2.4 full-time equivalents (FTE) at forty hours per week, depending on the month. See Exhibit A, monthly payroll reports for 2024, 2025, and 2026. Our volume follows the recreation traffic that reaches this crossroads, and it peaks twice a year. Snowmobile traffic drives our winter peak from mid-November through March. Off-road vehicle riders, anglers, hikers, waterfall visitors, and autumn color travelers drive our summer peak from mid-June through October. Two windows between those peaks are the slowest of our year: April 1 through June 14, and November 1 through November 14. Sales follow the same pattern. January and February were our two strongest months in both years, at $156,617 and $125,341 in 2025 and $115,048 and $115,290 in 2026. April and November were the weakest, bottoming at $24,303 in April 2026. The swing is severe: January 2025 brought $156,617 while November 2025 brought only $28,836, and April 2026 at $24,303 was less than a quarter of either January or February of that year. See Exhibit B, monthly sales reports for 2025 and 2026. This application is for our winter peak, which begins on November 15, 2026, and ends on March 31, 2027. Accordingly, we have a temporary, peakload need during that period for five workers in the position of Cook, with the SOC classification of Cooks, Restaurant (SOC 35-2014). A. Period of Need Under the H-2B regulations, an employer establishes a peakload need by showing that it "regularly employs permanent workers to perform the services or labor at the place of employment," that it "needs to supplement its permanent staff at the place of employment on a temporary basis due to a seasonal or short-term demand," and that "the temporary additions to staff will not become a part of the petitioner's regular operation." See 8 C.F.R. 214.2(h)(6)(ii)(B)(3); see also 20 C.F.R. 655.6(b). We satisfy each element. We regularly employ permanent cooks at this location year-round, and twice each year customer demand rises above what our permanent kitchen staff can cover, so we must supplement that staff on a temporary basis. The additional cooks will not become part of our regular operation, and their employment ends when the peak ends. Our peakload need begins on November 15, 2026, and ends on March 31, 2027. Two dates fixed by the State define this period: (1) Michigan's regular firearm deer season opens statewide on November 15 and runs through November 30, drawing hunters into Luce County; and (2) the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) opens the State-designated trails on December 1 and closes them on March 31. (Continue in Addendum.)

View the official U.S. Department of Labor source

Last updated: October 7, 2026