Hire kitchen staff in Stockholm

Lessons from our restaurant assignment in Stockholm

Talea employees are working as kitchen assistants and kitchen porters in a Stockholm restaurant right now, and that assignment has shown us what makes hired-in kitchen staff work from the first week. Continuity comes first. A kitchen that sees a new face every shift has to explain again and again where the gastronorm containers, spices and detergents are kept, while someone who has done a handful of shifts starts to anticipate what the chef needs next. We therefore prefer a small, fixed group of people who rotate through the schedule rather than filling each gap with whoever happens to be free. The second lesson is that one person in the kitchen should own the induction and give direct feedback early, before small misunderstandings about stations or closing routines harden into habits that are hard to change later.

The roles themselves overlap. A kitchen porter keeps the dish area moving, deals with pots and trays, empties bins and cleans floors and equipment at closing. A kitchen assistant does prep such as washing and cutting vegetables, portioning, cold dishes and refilling buffets, and may cook simpler items under a chef's direction. In a small inner-city kitchen one person often switches between all of these in a single evening. Schedules deserve a closer look as well. Many Stockholm restaurants run a lunch service, a short break and then evening à la carte, and it is easy to order one long shift when the real need is two peaks. Tell us your covers hour by hour and we can suggest shift lengths that fit. Cooks with a particular background take longer to place than assistants and porters, and we say so up front.

Different kitchens across the county

Stockholm's kitchens vary a great deal, and experience from one type does not automatically carry over to another. Restaurants in Östermalm, Södermalm, Vasastan and Gamla stan often have compact kitchens and busy evenings with tight bookings. Staff canteens in office districts such as Kista, Arenastaden in Solna and Hagastaden work the other way round, serving large volumes in a short lunch window with early starts and set menus. Hotel and conference kitchens peak at the breakfast buffet and around events, and when major fairs are held at Stockholmsmässan, kitchens in the south of the city get busier for a few days. Summer moves part of the trade to outdoor terraces and seasonal restaurants in the archipelago, while December brings the Christmas buffet season. Tell us which of these describes your kitchen, and we match our employees to it.

Late closing times raise a practical question that is easy to miss: how the employee gets home. Most of our employees commute on SL. The metro runs all night only between Friday and Saturday and between Saturday and Sunday, so on other nights the metro stops for a few hours from around one in the morning, and night buses can take far longer. A Tuesday evening shift that ends with cleaning down at half past one in a kitchen in Täby or Södertälje therefore needs the journey planned when the order is placed. Tell us if your kitchen is some distance from the rail network or if closing often runs late, and we will staff the shift with people living nearby or suggest an end time that holds up over months rather than a couple of weeks.

Food safety, the personnel ledger and responsibility

In the City of Stockholm, food control of restaurants and other food businesses is carried out by the Environment and Health Administration (miljöförvaltningen), while the other municipalities in the county have their own control authorities. Whichever applies, you as the food business operator must ensure that everyone handling food has the hygiene knowledge their tasks require. No statutory certificate exists for kitchen assistants, so an inspection looks at your self-checks rather than at who employs the staff. For a hired-in employee, the induction should cover the parts of your self-check programme that concern them: temperature logs, cooling, keeping raw and cooked food apart, labelling opened packaging and cleaning routines. Allergens deserve their own moment. A guest asking about nuts or gluten should never get a guess from someone who has been in the kitchen for three days; the question goes to the chef.

Restaurants are one of the industries where a personnel ledger is mandatory, and hired-in staff must be recorded in it too. As the business operator, you record our employees when their shift starts and ends, just as you do your own staff, so settle the routine before the first shift, because the Swedish Tax Agency makes unannounced visits to restaurants. The work environment in the kitchen is also yours to manage when staff are hired in. Knives, combi ovens, deep fryers, steam, wet floors and heavy lifting belong in your risk assessment, and our employees should receive the same protective equipment and instructions as your own staff. Talea handles the employment, wages under the collective agreement, insurance, sick leave and follow-up. We check in with the head chef after the first few weeks instead of waiting for problems, and we want to hear from you directly if a work environment issue comes up.