The staffing cliff: why there are no chefs left, and what to do about it

The shortage of chefs and front-of-house staff is structural, not seasonal, and waiting for it to pass is not a plan. The answer is to design the business around the people you can actually recruit and keep: a menu your team can cook well, opening hours that pay their way, technology that removes repetitive work, rotas and rules that keep people, and prices that reflect what labour really costs.

A better number that hides a worse story

UK hospitality vacancies have fallen to about 69,000, from a peak of around 177,000 in 2022. That looks like an improvement until you notice what went with the vacancies: trading hours, shifts, and sometimes whole venues. Many operators have not filled the jobs they advertised. They have stopped advertising, cut the rota, or decided a session is no longer affordable.

The workforce itself has changed. The experienced chef who left during the pandemic has not necessarily come back. The young worker who might once have taken a tough first job now has other options, or cannot afford to live nearby. Chef job postings were up by more than 80% year on year in the second quarter of 2026, according to the Craft Guild of Chefs. The sector is losing both ends of the ladder: experienced people are hard to keep, and new people are expensive to train.

I have watched owners spend months rewriting job adverts and paying agency fees, hoping the next applicant will solve it. Sometimes they find someone. More often, they just get more tired. There is no wave of chefs waiting over the horizon.

What a thin team costs the guest

A short-staffed floor does more than slow the service. It changes what the service is. A stretched server stops reading the table and starts taking orders. They wait until the glass is dry to offer another, because they have no time to notice it is nearly empty. The guest does not see a staffing crisis. They see a place that no longer seems to care.

That is why the answer is not to ask the same people to do more. It is to build a business that a smaller team can run well.

Five ways to run well with fewer people

1. Design the menu around the team you have

A long à la carte menu may make sense on a Saturday night. On a Tuesday, with two cooks and one still learning, it is an expensive vanity. Your menu decides how many prep hours you need, how many stations must be staffed, how long a new starter takes to be useful, and how much complexity reaches the pass.

Look for dishes that share prep, equipment, and skills. Drop the ones that rarely sell but create a lot of work. Consider a shorter menu for quiet sessions. Your menu should serve the business you can run, not the one you imagine having one day.

2. Be honest about your opening hours

Opening hours are often treated as a badge of ambition. In reality, a session that loses money drains the team and weakens the next service. Look at each one on its own: sales by hour, the labour it costs, average spend, and what it does to the following day.

If Tuesday lunch loses money every week, closing it may be the responsible decision. A shorter week, properly staffed, can be more profitable than seven thinly covered days.

3. Use technology to remove repetitive work

Technology will not replace a good chef. Used properly, it removes a great deal of repetitive work: till reports by session and dish, booking systems that plan the tables, kitchen screens that make the tickets clear, and stock tools that reduce counting. The test is not the feature list. It is whether the system gives a small team more control on a real service.

4. Keep people before you recruit more

Recruitment is expensive because it repeats: hire, train, cover the mistakes, and start again when someone leaves. Keeping people is a series of practical decisions:

• Publish rotas with reasonable notice, and keep start and finish times believable.
• Train people for more than one station, and show them how they can progress.
• Give honest feedback before a problem becomes a resignation.
• Make your tipping policy clear and fair, in writing.
• Protect proper breaks, and notice reliable work without making a performance of it.

People do not need a perfect workplace. They do need to believe the rules are applied fairly.

5. Price labour honestly

The National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour. That is not what your business pays. Once employer's National Insurance, holiday pay, and pension are added, an entry-level adult costs about £16.50 an hour, before recruitment, training, uniforms, and cover for absence.

That figure should shape your menu prices, your service charge, your opening hours, and whether a dish, a lunch, or a late night earns its place. And work it out on sales before VAT: turnover that includes VAT is not money you can pay wages with.

The question that matters

A staffing crisis tempts owners into heroics: longer hours, more personal cover, another temporary fix. I understand the instinct. I have worked in kitchens and bars where the only answer seemed to be putting on another apron. But heroics are not an operating model.

The useful question is no longer "where are all the workers?" It is "what can this business deliver well, every time, with the people we can attract, train, and keep?"

If you would like help rebuilding the rota, the menu, and the hours around that answer, Run does exactly that.