The chairman of the Jaks group has stated there is a ‘massive’ shortage of chefs in the Isle of Man.

This comes after Jaks Bar and Smokehouse, located on Douglas Promenade, announced last week that it would be reducing its lunch opening hours to just Friday to Sunday, with the eatery being closed at lunchtime for four days of the week.

Andrew Gibbs told Manx Radio that the company has lost chefs over the last few months and have found it hard to replace them.

‘There’s a massive chef shortage,’ he said. ‘We've got in the region of 25 to 28 chefs in the group, and we're probably short of five or six.

‘In Ramsey (Barbary North Coast), we're having to close two days of the week completely, because we just haven't got the chefs.

‘We’re still open for lunch at Jaks for the busiest days of the week. It's a bit upsetting when people do come to you for something to eat, and we want all the business we can get, but there's just no way I can do it to the chefs. Otherwise, I'll just lose more of them.’

Mr Gibbs added that restrictions on advertising chef roles off-island has made things harder.

‘It was always a long and drawn-out process,’ he added. ‘These new regulations [visa changes] were just dumped on us and there was no consultation or anything.

‘We can still recruit chefs, but they’ve put a restriction on them now. If they stay here after a year, which most of them do once they've settled, they like to bring their wife and their children over, but with this new regulation they're not allowed to do that.

‘You would think with all the pub closures in the UK, that you'd get lots of applications from chefs across, but it's just impossible. We've been advertising since before Christmas.’