Along the way, said Sam Toia of the Illinois Restaurant Association, there has been a significant increase in chef-driven restaurants, the sort of establishments whose chefs would sooner cut out their tongues than outsource their dessert offerings.

“I don’t think any self-respecting place does that,” said John Shields, the executive chef and, with his wife, proprietor of Smyth and The Loyalist, a pair of restaurants they opened this summer.

And yet Mr. Shields’s case illustrates how restaurants have managed to keep salaries in check. Instead of hiring a pastry chef who spent years honing her skills, he chose to hire a pair of sous-chefs in their mid-20s for each restaurant. He pays them about $35,000 a year. Mr. Shields, a longtime savory chef who did a tour at the famed Chicago restaurant Alinea, and his wife and business partner, Karen Urie Shields, a former executive pastry chef at another noted Chicago eatery, Charlie Trotter’s, conceptualize the desserts. The two younger chefs execute them.

Mr. Shields and other restaurateurs say there is a strong economic imperative at work. In a low-margin service business like food, it is difficult to pay high salaries to a worker who is involved in only a limited aspect of the restaurant’s menu. “Paying someone $55,000 per year is a big venture,” he said. (For the Shieldses, the rationale is even more creative than it is economic: Their pastry vision could clash with that of a more experienced chef.)

Although both of Mr. Shields’s young pastry chefs have committed to staying for two years, the pay means that the Shieldses may not be able to keep them for much longer. “Everyone is looking for somebody,” he said. “Someone might say, ‘Why do I want to make $35,000 at this place when I could go make $75,000 working for Whole Foods?’ ” (A Whole Foods spokeswoman said the company generally paid salaries in that range only for those who oversaw desserts across multiple stores.)

Many restaurateurs have adopted some variation of the Shieldses’ strategy, meeting their pastry needs by throwing younger and less experienced people at the job. In an extreme case, they simply pull a cook off the savory line and rechristen him the pastry chef.