The realities of London restaurant recruitment in 2026
An interview with Lauren Linford, founder Home Hospitality
Viewpoint sat down with one of the leading specialist hospitality industry recruiters to learn more about the current state of the labour market in London restaurants — how it works, who they work with, and ultimately to hear from someone on the frontline about what works in this current moment.
Viewpoint: Hi Lauren, first off – tell us a bit about how you started in this industry.
Lauren Linford: I started in 2018 and did about three or four years alone, until post Covid, when I brought one person on and now there are six of us in total. We’re still small compared to some of the bigger recruitment agencies, but still a lot bigger than just me.
V: How do you recruit: is it staff coming to you trying to find positions? Or restaurant owners or operators coming to you trying to get the right person for the role that they have?
LL: Both. They both come together. And we turn down business most days – 10 or so a week, people that are just either too big or have a bad rep or aren't necessarily the kind of businesses that people are looking for. The team are out there talking to everyone looking for those who are job hunting. And then I am talking to owners that want to work with us, just to check in on a few things before we say, ‘Yes, we're up for it.’
V: So we should speak about people with bad reps. How does that reputation come to be known? Is it all anecdotal, from the grapevine, so to speak, or are you asking people that you speak to, that you're placing, when they may have worked somewhere else (that you might already have an inkling about)?
LL: Essentially, it's over time, over eight years of talking to people, patterns emerge and the same names come up. And it's like, ‘oh, you know.’ And you see brilliant people [going to certain places] and thinking, ‘God, that's not going to work.’ And it doesn't work.
There are some people that need to do that that are not our cup of tea, but are perfectly fine, and we probably couldn't stand working with them. But actually they're all right [and you have to move on]. And then there are fundamentally bad owners that don't learn from any mistakes and have really high turnover of teams and don't care and just keep replacing them and not making any learnings.
V: Are they more common than most people might think?
LL: I think so. It's mad, isn't it? That's still a reality in the industry. You think there would be nowhere to hide from that kind of behaviour nowadays, but it just seems like I talk to people and I'm amazed that there still seems to be so many assholes about.
V: How exactly do you navigate that when it’s still so common?
LL: It takes us ages. Sometimes we don't write someone off on one bad thing – that's really important to say – because I mean, if we did that, it would just be chaos. You know, the first is interesting, the second is something, and then a third person saying the same thing is... Also, it really helps if we get an account from over different periods of time. Otherwise, there's just a group of friends that are all saying the same thing about someone. It doesn't mean as much.
A lot of the times, you'll find someone that comes from another industry into hospitality and thinks that they're shit hot and that everyone wants to work for them. And initially they do, but over time, they get found out. So there are still a lot [of bad actors], but there's also a lot of people that have changed because they have to; not because they want to have made the adjustments. They say all the right things but are really virtue signalling and don't actually want to be making those changes. They don't believe in them. They still overwork people.
But the industry has changed: when people come to us for jobs, they have seven or eight to choose from, and it's up to the business to impress them. And I think a lot of the time, that hasn't quite caught up with a lot of owners. They still think they're in the driver's seat, but they're not. Some are still working in a pre-Covid way, which is a mentality of ‘everyone should want this job, right?’
V: Can you tell us a little more about the relationship between supply and demand in the industry right now?
LL: Well, the standard of knowledge and genuine experience is different for each level. Now, what you get for your money, essentially, is different. And so is there enough? Are there enough people? There aren't enough experienced people at each level. So, you'll be paying.
People often say commis chefs don't exist anymore. Because what used to be a commis chef was someone who was just learning, just coming into it. Now, that same chef will say, ‘I need £38K a year and I'm a chef de partie (CDP). I'm ready to be a CDP.’ So the standard at each level has dropped. You have to pay a premium for somebody who will work in service: someone who's willing to work Friday, Saturday and Sunday, most weeks until one in the morning. Like a ‘normal hospitality job’. You have to pay a premium to get the right people at that level, because it used to be that you'd turn 35 and you'd say, ‘Do you know what? I think I'm bit done with this’. But now people are turning 25 and saying, ‘you know, I can't do much; I just want a better work life balance, or I've had enough, or I want out of service.’
It’s now the case that if you have jobs that are out of service — an ops manager position, which is above the General Manager (GM), you can pay way, way, way less than even the GM. You’ll now find that the GM, or the head chef, is the star of the pay show, and then the supporting acts are all paid [well]. Those are the roles that have taken the hit, but people are willing to be paid less in order to get off of the floor.
V: What changes have you noticed over the last few years in terms of recruitment – from restaurants, what they need? You talked about the demands of staff already, but what has changed in terms of what restaurants need since you started out?
LL: Well, I work with a lot of pizza. I've always worked in pizza. I worked for Pizza Express for 10 years in management. I was head of ops at Everyman Cinemas for a long time, where we were heavy on pizza. I've always worked in that world, and I feel like specific cuisines like that are suffering so much from a lack of European people trade — freedom of freedom movement in Europe. So those kind of chefs that would deliver a high volume product like pizza… all the chefs were Italian.
So what is happening is that people are having to rely on less ‘skill’, [or specific training in an are]. Chefs are not coming to a job with a specific background. They can often just deliver something, providing the spec is delivered to them perfectly.
I was talking to the owner of Ida, the pasta restaurant in Queen's Park — a traditional family run Italian. They have absolutely no chance of finding any good chefs. They're just open in the evenings and weekends and that's it. And they're struggling beyond belief.
V: So where does that leave creative chefs and the demand for them?
LL: There's no choice for owners. The demand for creative is definitely there. But if you think about the brilliant chefs that were cooking in restaurants in 2018 and 2019 is — that was a massively talented pool of chefs. They've all gone on to be development chefs or gone to work for butchers or they don't want to do the grind anymore. I think the head chefs of that time have moved on. The sous chefs of that time have moved on to go and do something else or something more balanced. And then there isn't necessarily, I don't think, a huge amount of talent coming through underneath them.
V: Why is that? And what's the deal there?
LL: Everybody's looking for balance because they've been burnt from being overworked. There are still brilliant chefs around. But also restaurants want to market their restaurants under their brand name, and don't want to push the chef name as much anymore, because it's a risk, because chefs don't stick around or they're problematic, and they don't want to be associated with them, because it’s problematic from a PR perspective.
In 2020/21 around the time of Covid, it would always be restaurants coming to me saying, ‘I need a chef. I need a brilliant chef. I want to PR them.’ And then after the third time of PR and another chef, they're like, ‘oh, you know, there's too much movement.’ People aren't sticking around for a long period of time. So instead, it's just better to market the restaurant. Then, having a really cool chef would have been something that would have been at the forefront of your strategy for marketing, and now it's, ‘let's just market the restaurant and its offering,’ unless you're the chef-owner, then great, you're not going anywhere. But if it's an employee, owners will now normally wait a considerable amount of time before they put them on Instagram.
V: What would you say are the biggest challenges for restaurants and their employees at the moment?
LL: The challenge for owners is keeping hold of people long term because you can't recruit as many people to do the same job as you used to. Especially given the fact that the starting pay is so high.
It's definitely about bringing people in and developing them more. Bubala have done a great thing. Now, they have a vegetarian offering, which has got a much better margin – so just in its very nature, it's more profitable than most other restaurants. But they also look after people really well in a warm, fuzzy sense — like a lot of career development, a lot of focus on diversity in every sense, and a lot of well being perks. And then also, rather than constantly looking for head chefs, every time they open a new site, they're always working on a pipeline, thinking ‘how can we train this person to just take on this new challenge?’ And you know, there's a lot of noise about them being the best, and having worked with them for a long time, I think there's quite a lot in it, really. They have such amazing length of service, despite the fact they're actually a branded chain now, which is really hard to retain people in. So I think a lot can be taken from that: internal development, and not always striving for more. A lot of people are like, ‘I just need someone bigger and better and more experienced.’ But actually they come in and rock the boat beyond belief and piss everyone off a lot of the time. So it's like working with who you have and giving them extra support and training is something that I think is a good idea.
V: What about wages at the moment – it feels as if operators, on top of cost pressures everywhere, are struggling with that too?
LL: Basically, the whole argument about hospitality being underpaid right now feels dead in the water.
V: That's because of minimum wage and because of the way the tronc system works, both of those, plus demand outstripping supply?
LL: I'm not saying that every business is the same, but if you look at our average head chef or GM pay — it’s like £60K-plus, minimum. No one's getting a head chef job, even in a small restaurant, for less than £55–60K and for that you can literally have never done it before; you can just be kind of the vibe, and you'll get it. A chef de partie (CDP) is £38K now and that's no management responsibility, really it’s just come in and run your section at a minimum of £38K, if not more. It’s brilliant. I'm really pleased to be saying that. Unlike in 2019 when we couldn't say that, when overworking was a huge problem.
V: So in 2019, what was the CDP getting? If they're getting £38K now, what were they getting then, by way of direct comparison?
LL: When we set up Actually Good Chef Jobs in 2020, for a CDP it was £27 or £28K, so it's exactly £10K more for the same job. Bloody hell.
V: You’ve said there's a shortage of chefs, in particular. What about front-of-house?
LL: There is a shortage of everything. So it's not a lack of applications, but it's most certainly a lack of suitable applications. You know, most people might not have ever had any experience, and they just worked in, say, a nail bar for a bit, and they'll just go to apply to be an assistant restaurant manager somewhere.
It’s the same everywhere at all levels, that people punch above their station because they might get a chance. We might even send what we call a ‘Hear me out application’ where we're like, ‘this person hasn't necessarily got all the experience, but is a completely perfect culture fit’ or whatever. But often the level of what you'll get applications for is completely way off of what you've posted about.
V: Finally, how do you view the future of the restaurant industry right now?
LL: More closures, obviously. More neighbourhoods, smaller closures, restaurants that can't necessarily maintain their costs. I think that's quite inevitable, really. But again, I think the trend just shows people upping sticks and moving. For example, Kudu [from Peckham to Marylebone]. Moving to a high foot full area, and upping the spend at the same time and opening more services at the same time. The message is: ‘We’re open, come in anytime. Spend loads of money, we'll be ready to take it.’ That's clearly a trend, and I expect to see more of that. And then I expect to see more recruitment happening under the radar and the PR being more focused on the restaurant and the offering than the person or the people behind it. V
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
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