‘You can’t run a team on empty’: how the restaurant staff meal is changing

Restaurant workers once lived on coffee and cigarettes. Now more chefs are cooking for one other, making food good enough to end up on the menu

Naturally, you would assume chefs eat well at work. These are food lovers surrounded by great produce doing long hours at weird times. Surely rustling up tasty staff meals is an established perk of the job? And in that assumption you would be wrong.

When Sam Grainger, chef-owner of Belzan in Liverpool, started cooking 15 years ago, staff meals were “non-existent. You heard of it in hotels and Michelin kitchens that didn’t open until 6pm. But in full-on, city-centre, 11-to-11 places, you often didn’t have time. If you said, ‘I’m taking my break,’ you might be shunned for leaving someone else in a mess. Chefs lived on coffee, energy drinks, cigarettes.”