On Wednesday Bob Bob Ricard, a high end restaurant in London’s Soho district posted a job listing on caterer.com for a head chef position with a salary of £91,000. Before Covid the average Head Chef salary in London was reported on website PayScale.com as £35,000 a year. As hospitality gears up for a bumper summer as restrictions are lifted in the UK it seems that demand for highly skilled chefs is vastly outstripping supply. Is the UK in the grips of the worst Chef recruitment crisis its ever seen?

At Gourmet Recruitment we have seen many luxury hotels and restaurants struggle to fill regular roles such as Chef De Partie, Sous Chef and Head Chef. From contact with our clients we can see most Executive Chef and Executive Pastry Chefs have stayed in their positions and commercial demand is slightly lower in these areas. Its the junior kitchen roles that are cause for concern in restaurant and hotel kitchens up and down the country.

The combination of Covid-19 and Brexit exposed an issue that has been around in restaurant kitchens since the days of Ritz and Escoffier; long hours, low pay and tough working conditions. Many operators in the UK are aware that the Covid Pandemic could not have come at a worse time. Following almost immediately after Brexit where employment laws changed, it seems a large proportion of EU workers chose to collect their furlough pay and take the opportunity to return to their homeland and have not since returned to the UK. A large slice of F&B workers in the UK simply vanished.

So what has the government done to help hospitality with the Chef crisis?

In short, not a lot. In October Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced The Kickstart scheme would be extended by three months into 2022. The Kickstart Scheme encourages young people aged 16 to 24 years old currently claiming Universal Credit to take on a job and regular recruitment fairs are held to connect apprentices with employers. Under the scheme the Department for Work and Pensions funds 100% of the age-relevant National Minimum Wage, national insurance and pension contributions for 25 hours a week over a six-month period. An added incentive for Restaurants is that they’re eligible for a £1,500 Government grant each apprentice enrolled as a Kickstart placement. The UK government has also added an apprentice scheme which offers a £3000 payment for anyone aged 16-18 hired as an apprentice (and can be hired after using the Kickstart scheme).

But as most restaurant and hotel operators know, you can’t train an attitude and star chefs such as Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White were never signed up to any government incentive schemes to start their careers. The government schemes might change but the characteristics for success in any working kitchen don’t.

Our conclusion at Gourmet Recruitment.

The UK is in the grip off a very real hospitality labour crisis. A highly charged cocktail of a demanding time-intensive industry, Covid lockdowns and the furlough scheme (putting money in peoples pockets) meant that many chefs and hospitality workers either had time to reflect on their career and choose to retrain into a different industry as a choice or by need started working in a different sector while restaurants were closed and never returned.

Because of this shrinking pool of chefs in the UK, restaurants and hotels now have no choice but to pay higher salaries to experienced hospitality workers who can train the lower ranks. Its vital for restaurants and hotels to use this period to build solid future-proof training platforms and procedures to ensure their staffing is bulletproof for the future. Many further obstacles await F&B operator’s in the UK with rising a minimum wage and VAT rates. Conversely its never been a better time to be a Chef with rising salaries (we have seen a growing number of Executive Chefs sign packages for over 100K USD) as global tourism is set to bounce back with Airlines expecting a record summer in 2022. Good luck to all!