Too few cooks spoil the broth: Margaret’s Neil Perry, Lucas Restaurants’ Chris Lucas suffer in staff crisis

As diners miss out on seats at Australia’s top restaurants, their owners are calling for an urgent change in attitude to migration.

Chef Neil Perry at Margaret in Double Bay. Picture: John Appleyard

As diners miss out on seats at Australia’s top restaurants, their owners see no end in sight to a staffing crisis that is forcing them to shut on some days and cap table numbers on others.

And eating at Australia’s most sought-after restaurants will become increasingly difficult, say top chefs in Sydney and Melbourne.

They are pleading for the government to rethink a “righteous” assumption that people will come flooding back to work here, and do more to entice migrants to the country.

“Australia is now seen as a difficult country to do business with,” says Melbourne restaurateur Chris Lucas. “There was significant brand damage done during Covid. Australia locked its doors to the world and employees have found other markets.”

There are more than 100,000 unfilled job vacancies in the hospitality industry and skilled migrant visas are taking more than seven months to process, with fees of up to $12,000 associated with getting the paperwork done.

“We can’t keep fooling ourselves,” says Lucas. “We are competing in a global market and it’s very tight. We shouldn’t have the righteous view that people will want to queue up to come back to Australia because it’s just not the case anymore.”

The country needs a “depoliticised” pivot from thinking it’s the lucky country to facing the reality that its global reputation was badly damaged by its Covid response, say industry leaders, who stress that the slow response is affecting our economic growth.

It is estimated Australia lost more than 200,000 foreign workers in hospitality after the government told them to leave and prevented those who remained from receiving furlough payments.

Restaurateur Neil Perry, who opened the award-nominated Margaret in the upmarket suburb of Double Bay last year, says staffing is his biggest challenge.

Perry employs 90 people at Margaret and needs an extra 12 to man Baker Bleu, his new bakery joint venture with Mike and Mia Russell, and 30 to work in his new bar which will open alongside the restaurant and bakery early next month.

“The only thing keeping me awake at night is how I’m going to staff it,” says Perry. “I’m not worried about customers, I’m not worried about turnover, I’m not worried about anything. I’m just worried sick about getting staff.”

Margaret, which is full for each of its lunch and dinner services, was initially going to be open seven days a week, but Perry had to settle on five because he could not find enough experienced staff.

Sommeliers are in particularly short supply, he says, with the restaurant having to manage with three or four but ideally having five per night.

“Everybody’s just screaming for staff across the board, and most restaurants have had to do what I’ve done, which is close on a Monday and Tuesday,” Perry says. “If you want to go out on a Monday it’s really hard to find a place that’s open anymore.”

The iconic Cafe Sydney has taken a different approach and remains open seven days per week but with capped numbers of customers and an increasingly over-tired workforce.

“We are all at the risk of unravelling and our people are exhausted,” says Jan McKenzie, chief executive of Cafe Sydney, which employs about 125 people and needs about 40 more.

“This Monday we turned over 100 reservations away because we don’t have enough staff,” McKenzie says. “We are having to cap levels at every lunch and dinner sitting because we just don’t have the manpower to look after any more people.”

McKenzie was upset to read a recent review of Cafe Sydney where the customer complimented the food and views but said the staff looked overworked and questioned why they wouldn’t hire more. “I just couldn’t respond,” McKenzie says. “It’s having a major impact on us. It’s really significant.”

Having to shutter restaurants and cap numbers is bad for the economy, warns the industry, which is the country’s biggest employer by numbers.

“This is an economy-wide issue and it’s undermining our ability to help to grow our economy,” says Lucas. “We are well behind the eight ball.”

Belinda Clarke from the Restaurant & Catering Industry Association of Australia (RCA) says that compared with countries like Canada, where skilled migrant visas can sometimes be processed in a day, in Australia it’s seven months and counting.

“It’s a complex process that needs to be changed. There is no point just putting out videos on kangaroos and the Great Barrier Reef if it’s so hard to come here.

The process of bringing in a skilled migrant can cost the employer about $12,000 in fees, with the person’s life effectively on hold while they wait.

“We need a concierge-style system to support them,” says Clarke, adding that “Australia has been referred to as jail island, with heightened fear of lockdowns”.

The industry is looking for 102,000 vacancies and only chefs meet the threshold for a skilled migrant visa. Clarke says this needs to be changed to include front-of-house – where there are currently 10,000 vacancies, as well as sommeliers, and cooks.

The RCA was not given a seat at the table at the recent Skills and Jobs Summit in Canberra, and Clarke, who voiced her concerns about this with both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers, says she came away thinking they already knew the outcomes they wanted to achieve.

Perry and others say the visa process needs a complete overhaul. Perry points to an example he has of a chef that worked for him at Rockpool and also for Merivale and was in the process of applying for permanent residency when Covid-19 hit and he had to leave.

Perry says that even a letter of support from former foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop has not been enough to get the chef’s visa – lodged back in February – processed so he can return.

“This is a person who has leading chefs supporting him, and the industry is on its knees. I would have thought they would send the cavalry in, but the trouble is we will be dead by the time any of these people get here, the way things are going.”

Perry believes Australia needs to take a “post-war-time approach” to bring in skilled and unskilled workers and says that after having high hopes for the Albanese government, he has been disappointed with the “slow response”.

“I have just lost faith that they have any idea about what they’re doing,” Perry says. “I don’t think anyone’s recognising what a handbrake this is to the economy and the people that are working within Australia already. We really need help.”

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil says she does recognise that “for the first time in our history, Australia is not the destination of choice for many of the world’s skilled migrants”.

Ms O’Neil strongly disputes the lack of awareness about the need for more skilled migrants and says her government is working furiously to clear a backlog of almost one million visa applications inherited from the previous government.

“The current system is fiendishly complex, with more than 70 unique visa programs, each with their own criteria and subcategories, and an outdated visa processing system that is anything but fit for purpose,” says O’Neil.

In the next few weeks the Labor government will put together a committee to reconsider how the country should approach immigration program in Australia’s national interest, with their findings to be due in the first half of next year.

O’Neil says the government is urgently prioritising 60,000 visa applications for people based overseas, including overseas skilled hospitality workers such as chefs.

While Perry has seen no change to the slow process for his outstanding visa application, Lucas has seen a difference in the past few weeks. “Now it looks like there is movement at the station,” Lucas says.