Who’s Serving You?

How the pandemic, Brexit and a quiet visa change rewrote who staffs our restaurants — and what got lost in the middle.

A shift you can see from the table

Have you noticed the shift in who's serving you over the last few years? Much younger. Often graduate-level. More often than not, South Asian.

Pre-Lahpet I was in recruitment – eight years at Odgers in executive search. When we opened in our London Fields warehouse in 2017, I started recruiting my own team in a completely different market, but the fundamentals carried over. What I didn't know then however, was how unrecognisable the market I was fishing in was about to become.

The market we used to have

Pre-pandemic London was the food capital of the world, and arguably still is. Hospitality was the third-largest employer in the country, and remains so. A free Indeed post would bring in a flood of applicants for any role: runner, sous chef, reservations manager. Some excellent, many average, some pretty poor. But always something – and that sheer volume always produced a result.

When we opened in Shoreditch in 2018 I had to build a team almost from scratch – everyone from assistant manager and sous chef down. It seemed like a mountain to climb in a very short space of time, but the free job post and a simple advert on our hoarding delivered candidates to start interviewing within a day or two. With the benefit of hindsight, it was an absolute breeze.

Then two things happened at once, but we barely noticed the second.

Two shifts in two months

Covid sent a huge part of our workforce home to the EU, mostly to be with family. The more senior end – those who had citizenship – largely stayed or would return. So did people from places too far or too dangerous to return to: the kitchen porters, runners, commis, many with leave to remain but at the lower end of the pay spectrum. Everyone else left, and with no end of the pandemic in sight, there they stayed.

The thing nobody talks about is the timing. We formally left the EU on 31 January 2020, just weeks before the first lockdown – but free movement technically continued through the transition period until 31 December the same year. So while our teams were heading home in the spring, the door behind them was still ajar, but by the time it shut at the end of the year, most of them were settled back in their home countries and the route back to us had quietly closed. Remember Eat Out to Help Out, that August? Big sales, big struggle. God knows how we got through it on the staffing we already didn't have. Two seismic shifts to the labour market inside a single year, and the second was almost invisible – because we were too busy panicking about whether we'd have a business at all to notice.

By the time we could properly reopen in February 2022, over a year later, the people we needed couldn't come back without navigating a wall of red tape. Most didn't bother.

The hollowed-out market

When demand returned – properly, with no more lockdowns hanging over us – the recruitment market had been hollowed out. Even in London, applications hadn't picked up. Experienced candidates seemed to have vanished. I can only imagine how much worse it was outside the M25. ONS data showed hospitality vacancies hit 147,000 by the end of 2022, up from 89,000 pre-pandemic – a 65% jump.

We'd been fitting out our second, West End, flagship site through most of 2021, and it was on track to be ready to open just in time for unrestricted demand to return. The recruitment exercise started five months in advance and ran across every paid and free channel I knew. It was one of the most stressful things I've been through as an operator. No team, no launch – and with it the whole PR exercise built around the opening, not to mention the cash burn. Somehow, we got there in the end – but compared to the Shoreditch team I'd built in a month or so in 2018, the team we opened with was skew-whiff to say the least, with no real middle layer to hold service together and lacking the depth of technical hospitality knowhow we needed. We had no choice though and had to take who we could get at what we could afford, train them hard, and just make sure everyone was happy to be there, and that it showed.

The visa nobody talked about

Quietly in the background it seemed the government had clocked the problem. A new Graduate Route visa had actually launched in summer 2021 but went largely under the radar of operators – a two-year post-study work visa (three for PhDs) that allowed international graduates of UK universities to work in any role, at any level, without their employer needing a sponsor licence. Once travel restrictions lifted in the eligible countries, the floodgates opened. By the end of 2022, the strain on hiring had started to ease.

But not for every role. What we got was a market full of graduate-level South Asians – mostly Indian and Bangladeshi, with some Burmese wealthy enough to get out; educated, hard-working and keen to earn. What we didn't get, and still don't have three years later, is the middle.

The reality at Lahpet became a hybrid. Junior hires we could take on straight off the Graduate Route, no sponsorship required. For more senior or technical roles – and especially chefs with even a year under their belt, who were the hardest to get – we sponsored under the Skilled Worker visa. It was costly and admin-heavy, but it worked - a route to retaining the chefs we most needed to keep, and later a handful of front-of-house and management hires who'd come through their studies, wanted to stay in hospitality, and stay with us.

I only sponsored the ones I saw real potential in. The cost and admin of sponsorship, even with an immigration lawyer supporting, is significant – you don't take it on lightly, and I wouldn't again without an HR function behind me. It has however been one of the best calls I made. We now have mid-level and management staff across the business who I first hired as runners during their studies, who now hold sponsored roles. That's the kind of progression hospitality used to be famous for, and the kind the industry has been quietly losing for years.

The missing middle

Prep chef? Doable. Junior chef, also doable but rarely straightforward, and often requiring sponsorship these days. Bar manager? Easier. Host? Fairly straightforward. GM? Plenty around but finding the right fit is the challenge. The real gap is everything in between: floor managers or supervisor, more senior chefs, AGMs. The roles that need a particular depth of experience and the leadership instincts that only come from years on the floor or behind the pass. That talent is still scarce.

Why mid-management specifically? My theory is that this was the band most disproportionately weighted toward EU nationals – people in their late twenties and early thirties who'd come over young, built up five or six years of experience, and had, or were ready, to step up. They were the easiest cohort to lose and the hardest to replace, because their replacements have to be grown, not hired. You can import a head chef, which I did, but you cannot import six years of muscle memory on a busy London floor.

What the visa changed for Lahpet

Beyond the progression story, the Graduate Route changed something else for us specifically. As a Burmese restaurant, we could, for the first time in our existence, hire Burmese people easily. SOAS had Lahpet on an internal job board, so by mid-2023 we were receiving weekly applications from Burmese students keen to join a business that represented their heritage and served the food they knew best. Very few had hospitality experience but that became a secondary requirement as long as we had an opening on the team and they seemed switched on and warm enough.

What that's meant inside the building is harder to put into words but easier to feel – more Burmese spoken across the business and a more authentic feel to the way we serve. Back in 2019, customer reviews sometimes asked where all the Burmese staff were. Nobody could say the same now – and we're proud of that.

What gets lost, and what survives

As a diner, I see it every time I eat out these days. The gap in experience and care is visible. The most you can usually hope for is a genuine sense of hospitality from your server – which, honestly, overrides almost any shortcoming in technique. Hospitality at its core is a human quality, not a trained one. The training is what gets you the upsell, the perfect pour, and the timed clearance – the warmth is what makes you book again. We're running an industry on the second of those, and most nights it's enough.

The EU talent pool is now almost invisible at our end of the market. What's left of it has been absorbed by the top hotels and the premium end of the market that can pay for it. I don't think any government policy can reverse this now – only time will allow the professional development and growth of our workforce to fill the void. It could be another five to ten years before we recover the depth of skill and experience we once had, and it's certainly not a skill set AI will be replicating any time soon – thank god.

Once by accident, once on purpose

In its ambition to curb immigration, the government has now reversed the visa – or rather, surrounded it on every side. From January 2027 the Graduate Route shortens from two years to eighteen months. The Skilled Worker route has been pulled back to graduate-level roles only, cutting hospitality out of sponsorship for most of the roles we'd actually want to fill – chefs, gone. And the route to indefinite leave to remain has doubled from five years to ten.

Read together, these aren't tweaks – they're a wall. Every lever that made hiring through the visa system viable for a business like mine has been pulled in the wrong direction at the same time. The runner I hire today couldn't be sponsored in two years even if I wanted to. The progression story I described earlier – runner-to-manager, student-to-sponsored – is no longer a route I could replicate for someone starting now. The door is shutting on the very thing that was working.

Twice in five years, the labour market that built modern British hospitality has been broken by government policy. Once by accident. Once on purpose.

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