Hardly any cooks, no waiters: how restaurants still survive

Berlin How many people work for him? Alexander Slobine has to think about that for a moment. His “The Catch Family Holding” runs two restaurants in Berlin and four in Riga.

“I think over 200 people, I would say around 40 in Berlin.” Slobine, green hooded sweatshirt, gray plastic glasses, is sitting in the “November” in Prenzlauer Berg, a new corner restaurant in warm wood and beige tones that he almost bought couldn’t have opened at all. At least not yet.

Then there would be no Japanese ricotta pancakes in the morning, no carpaccio of tuna belly with dashi jelly in the evening and not even a coffee on the terrace in between. “We’d probably still be looking for staff,” Slobine suspects.

He has been in the industry for 20 years. There are always complaints about staff shortages, he says, but the situation has never been as bad as it is now. According to the hotel and restaurant association Dehoga, 66 percent of the companies complain about an acute shortage of staff.