Businesses across the Limestone Coast hospitality sector have reported a staff shortage in the industry, especially for chefs.

Regional Development Australia Limestone Coast, which advertise most job vacancies across the region, currently have nine chef, cook and baker jobs advertised with a total of 52 vacancies in those occupations just this year.

Metro Bakery and Café is one of the many local businesses affected by the chef shortage.

Metro Bakery Café and Bakery owner Toni Vorenas shared a post to Facebook last week informing the community the business would be unable to open its kitchen Monday and Tuesday due to the ongoing issue.

Ms Vorenas said she was inundated with responses and received around 40 resumes for the advertised position as well as a rotating roster of chefs willing to temporarily fill the role as a result.

“We posted that we were hiring a chef, looking for a chef and got a little bit of response but not much,” she said.

“We then posted that on Mondays and Tuesdays we would not be able to cook from our kitchen … and we had a huge response, huge, it was amazing.

“This is an amazing community we live in and I think the response was very typical of our community, our Mount Gambier community here, people jump in and help each other out no matter what.

“We virtually have a roster of chefs from outside of our own place who were willing to come in on Mondays and Tuesdays just to give us a hand to be able keep our kitchen going.

“It is a huge relief, it means we did not have to close our kitchen Monday and Tuesday, it just gives us breathing room to be able to find a chef, to be able to work through all our resumes that we have gotten.

“I think it says a lot about people who are in the industry, anyone in the industry has a total understanding of what it’s like and complete empathy for another place.

“I am so eternally grateful.”

Ms Vorenas said it was difficult for all businesses to find staff across the hospitality industry.

“We have been really lucky, we have been really well staffed with a fantastic team and then as per coincidence has it we lost two chefs virtually in the same week,” she said.

“In our café kitchen it is just difficult to find experienced chefs like we have lots of great local apprentices but you also need chefs with experience to teach your apprentices and really bring fresh and new skills into the area.

“It is very, very difficult and I think it is difficult too because everybody is looking for chefs, it is really competitive to find a chef.

“It does not matter where you go and it does not matter who you speak to, it’s the same story.

“Even to find a barista or a front of house, it is still difficult.

“It is a horrifying thing to have to do, to close, you have got other staff that are reliant on you being open and you need that money to be able to pay your bills, to be able to pay your staff.”

Ms Vorenas said the industry has been suffering with shortages significantly since the pandemic.

“I think the hospitality industry, it was a perfect storm before Covid, it was just waiting for something like Covid to happen.

“It was the perfect storm – razor thin profit margins, lots of casual staffing.

“The lack of security in a job in hospitality that happened over Covid, I think all of that pushed people to maybe look for something else.”

Ms Vorenas said she filled a vacancy for a pastry chef in May but had the job advertised for nearly a year.

“I think it was always difficult really to find chefs that were willing to come regional especially in the bakery to find pastry chefs that have the skills to do the job,” she said.

“It has always been like that even pre Covid, post Covid the situation just amplified, and I think because it was difficult to get people in on visas, all of those rules changed so we have been waiting for a pastry chef since June last year.

“We are still in that wait queue so the queues are really long, the time frames are really long.

“You need to advertise for a month in Australia, if you do not get any suitable applicants after that one month then you can bring someone in on a visa but then you go into a wait queue.

“Recently in May this year we were really lucky enough to find a pastry chef who was willing to locate from Adelaide here, it is a very rare thing to find someone that is willing to relocate.

“There’s a lot of places that are looking for bakers, I think bakers and pastry chefs are rarer to find then chefs.”