Why award-winning Harrogate cafe-bar owner is offering £500 reward to recruit staff

Director Simon Midgley of Starling Independent Bar Cafe Kitchen, which won Team of the Year at this year's Harrogate Hospitality Awards, said the situation for staffing was now so bad he had been forced to work in the kitchen himself.

"We are a well-regarded and award winning local independent which has been successfully trading on Oxford Street for more than five years now," said Mr Midgely.

"The last couple of years have presented the whole hospitality industry with plenty of well publicised challenges but we still managed to trade strongly. But finding and keeping a customer focussed team of staff is proving harder than ever for Harrogate’s hospitality venues.

"There have been several local businesses who had had to close their doors for short spells as they have been unable to recruit or keep a stable team of chefs. Through no fault of our own we currently have only one permanent fulltime chef out of our usual team of four full timers.

"My general manager and I are having to pick up the majority of the slack. We are offering a finders reward of a £500 gift voucher to spend at Starling for anyone introducing either themselves or someone else to us to fill our experienced Sous Chef vacancy."

Major staffing problems in Harrogate's hospitality sector combined with the cost of living, rising inflation and the cost of doing business were already impacting on the town’s traders, added Mr Midgely who laid bare the issues facing even a successful company like his own.

And, he added, the soaring energy price cap this winter threatened to be the final straw.

Mr Midgley added: “Starling is on a fixed deal for our energy which ends early next year. Our current annual bill is around £13,000 and I was recently contacted by our broker about committing to another fixed deal once the current one ends. The best they could offer was £24,000 a year on the same usage basis.

"This is not a level we can absorb so I have left it for now hoping things will improve or some kind of business cap is put in place by the new Prime Minister before we come to the end of our current fixed contract.”

Mr Midgley offered his views on some of the causes of the perfect storm of problems the food and drink sector is facing on staffing.

"The hospitality recruitment market has got worse than ever over the past few years due to various reasons,” he said. ”I think it’s a combination of factors: some leaving careers in hospitality during Covid lockdowns who for whatever reason simply haven’t come back. Also Brexit meaning less European workers feeling welcome to come to the UK to work in our hospitality businesses.

"In Harrogate, specifically, I think there is a supply and demand issue driven by the sheer number of hospitality venues in our town for the size of it’s population.”

Mr Midgely said he agreed with recent comments from celebrity chef Tom Kerridge that business owners in the hospitality trade faced a lose-lose situation because of the current crisis with potential customers stuck in the same boat.

"Spiraling food and energy costs are squeezing margins directly and indirectly,” Mr Midgely said. "This is leaving operators with the difficult decision of whether to raise prices to protect margins and profits at a time when everyone is feeling the pinch already. No one likes to see menu prices going up but, with food and drink cost prices rising so significantly, we have to react.

"Margins are difficult to maintain in this industry anyway and we are faced with the choice of passing on the majority of those cost increases by either increasing menu prices or reducing portion sizes which in most cases we didn’t want to do.

"The worry is our customers are already feeling the pinch on their domestic budgets for the same reasons and so may visit us less or spend less while they are here. Food costs for businesses like Starling are not immune to the food price hikes we are seeing in many of our supermarkets.

“We are seeing significant cost increases across the board, even for basics like milk which has gone up almost 100% in a year – and we can sell around 1,000 coffees per week. That is a big impact for us to absorb. Brexit and the huge rise in fuel costs have also seen large cost price increases on imported foods. We make all our own dough in house with authentic Italian ingredients.

"The Italian wholesaler we use for most of our pizza ingredients has had to increase prices significantly over the past six months. Rising fuel costs are not just hitting local business indirectly through supplier cost increases.

"Heat, light and power bills have skyrocketed the same way as our domestic bills but, unlike the domestic market which is protected to a certain extent by the price cap, there is no cap for business use.

"Tom Kerridge, the celebrity chef, revealed that the annual energy bill for his pubs had soared from £60,000 to £420,000 and warned that “ludicrous” price rises left the hospitality sector facing a “terrifying landscape”.