Staff meals should be an antidote to industry-wide staff retention issues. Instead, says Marina Rabin, the paltry provisions on offer are leaving servers and chefs with food poisoning, hypoglycaemia, and anaphylactic shock.
“Family eats first!” head chef Carmy calls across the menagerie of staff sitting down for their pre-service meal. Shoulder to shoulder at the family table sit all the odds and ends of the restaurant’s roster for a moment of calm. Seconds before, they’d been ready to come at each other with a freshly sharpened Wusthof knife.
But this is The Bear, a show about a fictitious restaurant with fictitious pipe dreams of a workplace oiled by team cohesion founded on familial love. These idyllic depictions of the family staff meal are, in reality, becoming a dwindling luxury within a trade currently squeezed from every direction. Restaurants in the UK are at a crisis point, barely treading water as they crunch costs from every corner. Since January 2024, a restaurant closure has been announced in the UK almost every week. Rising rent and unsustainable trading costs have left the UK haemorrhaging its restaurant talent. Within this bind, staff food costs are relegated to the bottom of the priority list.
For those working in restaurants, already battling against waning morale within the industry, the provision of staff food can be a lifeline, a means to refresh optimism among staff, and in turn, keep businesses afloat.
Yet, in September 2023, the hospitality community platform Countertalk launched a poll on Instagram to gauge the numbers of hospitality businesses providing staff food in their current desperate financial climate. Their findings showed that 21 per cent of their respondents reported no provision of staff food at work.
In restaurants that do provide staff food, constraints placed by head chefs and diminutive budgets stifle any intentions they may have for putting on a full spread laced with care. This is usually whittled down to a simple protein, normally chicken or tinned tuna, and a carb to fill people up in the most cost-effective manner. The result is that the food presented to staff behind closed doors is a far cry from the standard being served to customers.
“We were given a budget for staff food and we weren’t allowed to exceed that in any way, so it would often be pretty bland,” says chef Rosie Burnett. Describing two top-level London restaurants in which she previously worked, she says: “We weren’t allowed to use leftovers from the restaurant, so it’d often be just a massive vat of pasta, containing one tin of tomatoes and a bunch of spaghetti, meant to feed 50-odd people.”
Being assigned the task of cooking staff food within these parameters is often an extra burden for chefs. Pushed to make an appetising meal out of a few simple ingredients in a short amount of time, in addition to their usual mid-service workload, staff food becomes a task which chefs resent being allocated. “I just find it stressful cooking for loads of people and not always knowing what can and can’t be used in the fridge,” says Harry Hannan, chef de partie at Wright Brothers.
Chefs are also constantly surrounded by food, tasting, testing, probing, and nibbling throughout their working day, so they’re often not totally enthused by the thought of eating a full meal when the time to make and eat staff food comes.
“Having to constantly work with food just makes it quite unappealing to eat. Most shifts, I tend to eat a super small bowl of food – more because I know I need it, rather than want it,” Hannan adds, whereas “the front-of-house are literally always hungry and I assume it’s because they aren’t dealing with the food the whole time.”
In my own experience working front-of-house, the quality of food provision has sometimes felt like a power play, a means for the kitchen to assert their dominance over those with less agency in the restaurant. I’ve experienced a full scope of attitudes towards staff food provision, or lack thereof. I’ve had countless bouts of food poisoning after being fed yesterday’s (or probably the-day-before… or before that’s) unsold soup, then having to grimace through the next eight hours of the shift. I’ve seen diabetic colleagues enter hypoglycemia after being forced to go too long without eating. In one job, the staff food to fuel us for the rest of our 13-hour shift was, more than once, a bowl of Coco Pops and a banana.
Most often, though, I’ve seen chefs who, given the choice between eating a proper meal (rather than the offcuts of food they’re plating) or having a cigarette in the five-minute break they’re given in their 12-hour shift, will usually opt for the latter. No matter the calibre of the restaurant or the number of Michelin stars it boasts, cigarettes are the cornerstone of the hospitality worker’s diet.
Someone who is well-versed in the staff meal is Henry Hargreaves, who set up Staff Meals of the World, a website-come-archive documentation of staff meals in restaurants globally. Hargreaves started the project after being commissioned to profile the staff food in a Japanese restaurant in Brooklyn. He wanted to show that staff food can be more than ascetic, bland fuel, but rather, a chance for staff to care for one another.
“We weren’t allowed to use leftovers from the restaurant, so it’d often be just a massive vat of pasta, containing one tin of tomatoes and a bunch of spaghetti, meant to feed 50-odd people”
Rosie Burnett
“I wanted to show the culture in this moment, that restaurants have an opportunity to do something special for their staff,” Hargreaves says. The act of sitting together can play a powerful role in dissolving hierarchies among staff which restaurants operate under for the rest of the day.
Restaurants are intrinsically undemocratic spaces which, for the rest of the day, operate with strict pecking orders. Combined with the constant high-pressure and adrenaline-sustaining staff, this leaves little time for overtly amicable interactions. Hargreaves noticed this in his visits around the world’s restaurants, saying: “When you’re working, so many people are siloed, in their little space, and there isn’t that interaction. And suddenly, you’ve got managers sitting next to kitchen porters […] there was a much stronger camaraderie.”
This resonates with Burnett. In her current job, sharing meals is important in showing staff in other sections of the restaurant that she is not a snarling, temperamental beast dressed in whites, but rather someone just doing a job in demanding circumstances. “I think it’s good to build a rapport with different sections of the restaurant so it doesn’t seem to them that the chefs are cliquey or unapproachable,” she says. “I think it’s good to have that fluidity through all areas of the restaurant and that everybody feels comfortable taking a seat next to you.”
Hargreaves also noticed over the course of documenting staff meals that just as the better the staff meal, the better the team cohesion, the better the overall quality of restaurant performance.
One restaurant operator in the US told Hargreaves that once they moved beyond the simple protein-and-carb approach, instead allowing staff to order modified menu items, the fiscal returns they got far outweighed the cost incurred.
“The average server’s sales went up by $60 a shift, the average time the front-of-house staff started staying in the jobs was 50 per cent longer, and the communication really improved between staff members,” recalls Hargreaves. This was from “sitting together to eat, rather than just grabbing something and chowing it in the corner”.
This may just be the saving grace for hospitality in the UK, where the staff turnover rate is the highest of any sector, at 30 per cent – double the national average. Of that, 42 per cent of hospitality workers reportedly leave their jobs within the first 30 days.
So, while the quality of food being plated for customers continues to be epochs away from what is hurriedly scoffed behind the scenes, the restaurant industry has no hopes of leaving the dire straits it’s in. Perhaps the answer lies instead in exactly the business of hospitality they’re in: feed your staff well, and the rest will take care of itself.