“We are completely f***ed for sous chefs. We’ve been f***ed for so long that it’s just become the new normal…This isn’t really a job advert. It’s a shameless cry for help.”
That’s how Craig Gordon opened the Facebook job advert Home SW15 posted in June. What followed was just as blunt. He skipped the usual “competitive salary” language, stated the wage outright (£40,000 a year, justified openly by the restaurant’s average weekly takings of around £25,000), and admitted most of the applicants coming through agencies weren’t good enough. By the end, he was joking that finding a sous chef felt about as likely as England winning the World Cup.
The post went viral within the restaurant industry for its honesty. One reply, from a head chef of 25 years now running his own restaurant, said the tone alone made him want to help, and offered to pass the post on to other chefs he knew.
He had spent months failing to hire a sous chef the normal way. The ad worked where nothing else had: 623 reactions, 289 comments, 49 shares, and two candidates messaging Home SW15 directly. Both have been taken on. One did his trial shift, a “cook-off” in the kitchen, the day before this interview. The other starts next week.
“This is what the job is,” Gordon says of the ad. “We are honest people, straight up about what the job is. If you live in this area, I think it’s a really good job for somebody that doesn’t have to travel to central London.”
Why honesty worked when nothing else did
Gordon, who co-owns Home SW15 with restaurateur Rebecca Mascarenhas, has been trying to hire a sous chef for months against a hospitality-wide staffing squeeze he thinks is structural, not seasonal.
His own theory: the pandemic pushed restaurants to promote junior chefs faster than they were ready for, breaking the normal step-by-step route from kitchen porter to head chef. At the same time, ambitious young cooks are drawn to flashier central London kitchens for the CV credit, leaving neighbourhood restaurants short of chefs who can cook fundamentals from scratch.
“There comes a point where you just can’t keep promoting people so quickly,” he says. “We’ve kind of got ourselves to a stage now where there is just a lack of really good senior people.”
His answer, where he can, is to grow his own. Chris, now a senior chef at Home SW15, started as the restaurant’s kitchen porter and has worked his way up over seven years. It is the kind of route Gordon thinks the industry has quietly stopped offering.
On how people should be treated once they’re through the door, he’s blunt. When a customer once refused to accept that a member of staff was genuinely the manager on duty, demanding “the real manager” instead, Gordon backed his team without hesitation. “That was absolutely the right thing,” he says. “We will not tolerate that behaviour here.”
“Just because you may have had a bad day at work doesn’t mean that you get to give our guys a bad night at work,” he adds. “Whatever stuff that you’re going through, you best sort that out.”
Nine years, and still not sure what he does
Gordon is disarmingly honest about his own limitations. “I’m not a chef by trade, I’m not a bartender by trade. I’m terrible at both,” he says, recalling a recent night when he was pulled out front to make cocktails for a table of ten because his bar was short-staffed. “Not even sure what it is that I do,” he says. “But I’d just love to create communities, build a team.” His job title suggests how he’s done it – with a combination of focus and fun. It’s Director of Croquettes & Chaos and Chief Babyccino Officer.
His path here was via Bistro Union, chef Adam Byatt’s neighbourhood bistro in Clapham’s Abbeville Village, and before that Charlotte’s Group in Chiswick and Ealing. Home SW15 opened in 2018. Nine years on, Gordon still talks about the restaurant in terms of community rather than covers.
The loyalty shows. One family has been coming to Home SW15 since their daughter was 14 or 15; they were back this month for her 24th birthday. During Covid, when the restaurant was struggling to survive, regulars bought personalised bricks for a wall inside to help keep it afloat. Some of the same names are still on the books today.
The Sunday Times gave Home SW15 four stars in a review last year that Gordon calls “a total game changer,” with a next-day sales bump and a lasting rise in average wine spend. He’s glad it wasn’t five. “It wasn’t like, you know, five stars,” he says. “It was just a restaurant that you want as your local.” Home has also made the Good Food Guide’s 100 Best Local Restaurants list three years running, landing at No.49 out of 100 in the 2026 edition, the list’s first year with a numbered ranking.
It’s not hard to tell why. A great local restaurant is a complicated combination of quality and comfort and Home SW15 has it in spades. A warm interior, not too fussy but then not rundown either; relaxed, friendly but professional staff; and, of course, food that is a touch above – something for everyone in the family, with all leaving happy with their choice. “There are special occasion restaurants, then there are restaurants which try and make every occasion special,” is its online pitch.
Craig recommends the trout: harissa glazed, summer tomatoes and chickpeas. It’s the best thing I’d eaten all week: a hint of heat, melt-in-mouth fish and a tower of textures from the soft through to bite.
What it actually costs to keep a neighbourhood restaurant open
Home recently opened a second restaurant in Barnes, with the expansion paid for with an online fundraiser – people effectively paying for their meals in advance, raising an extraordinary £125,000 off the back of its reputation in Putney.
The team have found their own version of what a great local restaurant means in SW13: it has dropped the brunch offering that works so well in Putney on Saturdays, reflecting an older local clientele, and runs a “1986 menu”: three courses of throwback classical cooking for £19.86, a nod to the earlier restaurant that once stood on the site. Gordon’s ambition is to eventually reach four sites in total.
The economics behind all of this are tighter than most diners assume. “If we can make five to six pence out of a pound, that’s a good time,” Gordon says. Home SW15 has moved away from opening all day, instead running set brunch, lunch and dinner sessions, partly because staffing an empty room at 3.30pm makes no financial sense, and partly because fixed hours are better for morale.
The clearest illustration is Scrap-Eat, a Monday-night tradition every August and January where the kitchen turns the previous week’s leftovers into a mystery five-course menu for £25 a head, wine pushing the average spend to £40 to £42. A good Scrap-Eat Monday in August can take around £5,000; an ordinary Monday in the same month is closer to £1,200 or £1,500. Gordon has deliberately kept Home SW15 off Deliveroo and Uber Eats, worried that delivery apps risk devaluing the restaurant’s positioning for short-term cash.
He’s warm, too, about newer arrivals nearby, including Ruth’s, further down the road on Lower Richmond Road, even though he admits he hasn’t made it there himself yet.
The last thing you did to make someone happy
Asked what more people in Putney could do to help restaurants like his, Gordon’s answer is simple: use them, and say so when you have a good experience, not just when something goes wrong.
That philosophy shows up in a small, distinctive detail at Home SW15. The feedback cards that come with the bill no longer ask diners to rate their meal. Instead, they ask a different question: what was the last thing you did to make somebody happy?
“It’s been glorious,” Gordon says. “People just write it, and it’s like, people are kind of forced at the end to stop and think. It costs nothing, and it isn’t really about the restaurant at all, which might be exactly the point.”
