Staff at this Michelin-starred restaurant in Scotland only work four-day weeks to ‘fuel creative flare’

A Michelin-starred restaurant in Edinburgh is trailing a four-day working week for its staff to improve their creativity and promote a healthy work-life balance.

Chef Paul Kitching’s 21212, part of the 21212 Hotel on London Road, will launch the new schedule in November 2018. Staff will still recieve the same wages as before.

Kitching, who opened the restaurant with his partner Katie O’Brien in 2009, said that the change will “fuel the team’s creative flare”, allowing the team to “push the menu and dishes to another level.”

Kitching’s restaurant earned its first — and so far only — Michelin star in 2010, and has held onto the accolade for the past nine years.

The chef hopes introducing a shorter working week will allow staff to recharge and redouble their efforts, allowing them to “produce dishes better than ever before.”

“This is a tough industry and we thrive on the energy and passion behind our chefs,” he told SWNS.

‘We are about constant innovation and re-invention of dishes and the creativity needed for this is incredibly important.

‘We believe that by reducing our days that this creativity will grow and we will be able to push our menu and dishes to another level.”

The restaurant will open from Wednesday to Saturday, but the hotel will stay open throughout the week.

“I am really looking forward to the future and to see how this change is going to see our restaurant flourish further.”

Kitchin is not the only restaurateur to offer staff more time off to improve their work life balance. Martin Williams, managing director of the M Restaurant Group, launched a new scheme in August whereby full-time employees at the chain’s three sites will be given four additional days of holiday, and encouraged to use them as mental health days which can be taken throughout the year,