People Don’t Get Poached

What we get wrong about kitchens, loyalty, and leadership

People don’t get poached. They leave.

I keep circling that sentence because the industry still treats it like heresy. Poaching sounds criminal. It implies an ambush. A rival sliding into DMs, waving money, nicking your best chef while your back is turned. It’s a comforting story, but it means the problem lives elsewhere.

It’s hard to steal happy staff. When someone leaves, it’s rarely the offer. It’s the slow accumulation of small cuts, and the offer just arrives last. The leaving started months earlier, in moments that don’t make the highlight reel. The eye contact that lingers a second too long after being shouted at. The apology that never comes. The rota that keeps eating birthdays and weekends with military efficiency. The sense that you’re tolerated, not developed. By the time another restaurant calls, the decision is already rehearsed.

We still cling to the shouty-chef defence because it flatters the kitchen’s mythology, the lazy maths of it all. Pressure equals standards. Anger equals passion. If someone breaks under it, that’s weakness, not evidence. But kitchens aren’t selection trials for suffering. They’re workplaces. Brutal ones sometimes, yes, but still places where humans show up day after day and give something physical, emotional, and irreplaceable. Calling abuse “old school” doesn’t make it noble, it just dates you.

The people who leave first are usually the best ones. The curious ones. The ones with options. The ones who realise that there are other ways to cook good food without feeling small. The ones who realise that being shouted at isn’t a rite of passage, it’s just someone else’s unresolved shit spilling over the pass. What’s left behind gets misread as loyalty. It isn’t. It’s inertia.

Owners then talk about retention as if it’s a contractual problem. Longer notice periods. Training agreements. Loyalty schemes dressed up as care. As if tightening the grip stops people wanting to wriggle free. But retention is culture, not policy. You don’t keep people by making it harder to leave. You keep them by making the room bearable, sometimes even good.

Some of our team at our staff party earlier this month. (Please excuse my face, no idea what was going on there)

Calm leadership is wildly underrated in this business. So is predictability. So is a head chef who corrects without performing. So is praise that lands publicly, not just criticism. None of this is soft, it’s efficient. Fear burns energy, respect concentrates it.

One night, in the pub after service, Jack told me he’d been offered a job, and I felt the knot before the details. Jack had joined us from day one as Head Chef. Two years later, he’d earned equity in Bank. By that point, we weren’t just colleagues, we were business partners. Another restaurant had approached him. Properly courted him. Big budget. Big promises. The salary alone was eye-watering, around a 70% pay rise. Enough money to make anyone pause. Naturally, he went to have a look.

What he found was familiar. A classic Head Chef pitch. Impressive numbers. Vague hours. No paid overtime. All the confidence in the world that the workload would be ‘manageable’. From experience, he could already see the shape of it. Ninety-hour weeks hiding behind a glossy job ad. Pressure sold as prestige. Toxicity dressed up as ambition.

When he told me why he’d said no, it stuck. Faced with a huge pay bump, he realised he liked what he already had. A forty-hour contract. Overtime paid when things spilled over, with a shared effort not to let that become normal. A rota shaped so he could do the school run on weekdays. He was happy, and more money with a worse life wasn’t going to improve that.

Another time, one of our chefs took a job at another restaurant in Bristol. When I next saw the owner, he apologised to me, almost sheepish. He said he hadn’t realised the chef had come from us. He said he never would have hired him if he’d known. I stopped him straight away. There was nothing to apologise for. That chef had already decided to leave. He wasn’t being smuggled out in the dead of night. He’d handed in his notice of his own accord. In fact, when he told me he was weighing up two offers, I told him which one I thought would be best for him and his career. It wasn’t the one that benefited me. It was the one that made sense for his life.

That exchange made me feel slightly nauseous. The absolution some owners want. The little confessional ritual that lets them feel blameless. I didn’t mean to. I wouldn’t have. As if hiring someone who’s already leaving is some kind of moral trespass.

I take real pride in building a good place to work, but that doesn’t mean we’re perfect. And it doesn’t mean we’ll be right for everyone, forever. Staff aren’t “yours”. They can’t be stolen. They make a choice, and sometimes the choice is simply to go.

I’ve watched kitchens haemorrhage talent while insisting nothing is wrong. I’ve watched the same operators complain about “this generation” while refusing to change anything about how power is used. I’ve also watched good people stay, for years, through chaos and thin margins, because the environment felt fair. Not easy, just fair.

The market has shifted, whether we like it or not. Kitchens talk now. Group chats exist. Instagram shows the inside of other rooms. People can see who laughs together after service and who limps to the pub in silence. The mystique has worn thin.

So when someone leaves, maybe the question isn’t who tempted them away. Maybe it’s what made them start imagining somewhere else in the first place. If your staff keep leaving, they’re not being stolen. They’re voting. And I’m not sure the industry is ready to read the ballot paper.