Last Christmas, Stuart Ralston, chef-owner at Edinburgh’s highly rated Aizle, had a revelation: he was exhausted. After two decades of 15-hour days and three years at his first solo venture, the 35-year-old was physically and mentally spent. “And that’s not where I wanted to be for the next 20 years,” he says.

Acutely aware that, in particular, he was not spending enough time with his young son, Ralston began to question the damaging chefs’ bravado he had bought into. “When I was coming through, Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White were idols. It was a badge of honour to say I’ve worked this-many-days-in-a-row or so many hours. In places I trained, I don’t remember owners ever caring how many hours the staff worked or whether a chef had done 20 days straight.”

How do chefs cope with that? Often, after their final shift each week, they get smashed, sleep all the next day, then go straight back to work. It is a cycle of pressure, sleep deprivation, punishing 80-hour weeks and temporary release in booze (or drugs) – all within a dysfunctional cocoon where making time to see friends, exercise or eat properly is derided as weakness. Many older chefs end up divorced or battling addiction and mental and physical health problems. “I know how that story ends,” says Ralston. “I don’t want to die from a stroke at 59.”

Ralston’s crisis occurred after Restaurant Sat Bains and the Raby Hunt, both two-Michelin-star restaurants, axed midweek lunches and moved to a four-day week, cutting staff hours but keeping them on the same salaries. Inspired, Ralston started crunching the numbers and, in January, Aizle reopened as a four-day-on, three-days-off, dinner-only operation.

You could describe this as enlightened self-interest. There is a dire shortage of skilled chefs; according to the skills agency People 1st, 19,000 leave the industry annually. To recruit and retain the best (given that chefs could often earn more in bigger commercial environments), small high-end restaurants need to provide their staff with a superior work-life balance.

Stuart Ralston: ‘I don’t want to die from a stroke at 59.’ Photograph: Sally Jubb

“I don’t want to train a sous chef for two years for them to go and work somewhere else,” Ralston says. Equally, however, he rapidly became convinced that this step-change would create the perfect virtuous circle. He feels a moral duty to look after his staff; he wants to produce incredible food; he cannot do that with half-dead chefs. A shorter working week, therefore, seems like a no-brainer.

Small restaurants such as Aizle run on tight margins. They are passion projects, rather than big moneyspinners. So Ralston has had to box clever. The restaurant was reconfigured to add four extra seats, the price went up £10, to £55 a head, and Aizle now opens from 5pm rather than 6pm. With extra Sunday services during the Edinburgh festival and in December, it is averaging 200 covers a week – 20 more than it was doing previously.

Aizle’s kitchen staff still work long hours, 8.30am until just gone midnight. But, says Ralston: “They’re not dying on their arse. We have a good lunch together, cooked from scratch – that’s a big thing for me because I’ve often been in places where staff meals are fried leftovers – then, hopefully, service isn’t too stressful because I limit the covers to 45. We could do faster turnarounds, but that’s comfortable. Saturday night, we clean down and go home feeling like normal people.”

Slowly, the four-day week is gaining traction in hospitality. For instance, the Hand-Picked Hotels group is trialling it and Paul Kitching, who opened the 21212 restaurant in 2009, announced last week that he would be introducing a four-day week for his staff without decreasing their salaries. Others are taking more radical steps. Last month, Checkers, in Montgomery, announced that, after seven years of holding a Michelin star, it will relaunch in November as the daytime-only Checker’s Pantry.

Kathryn Francis, the restaurant’s manager and co-owner, is adamant that Michelin stardom did not add undue pressure. But, she says, the arrival of children makes the balance more difficult to maintain. “When you’re young, you can push and push and it doesn’t matter if you’re ratty and knackered, because you haven’t got kids. But when you have, you put them first. Work is important, but you have to enjoy other aspects of life.”

That is a mantra of which, unlike their parents’ generation, younger staff are fully in favour. “The workforce is changing and millennials aren’t up for crazy hours,” says Tom Tanner, spokesperson for the Sustainable Restaurant Association. Instead, to recruit good people, growing chains such as the Breakfast Club and bar group the Alchemist are offering staff paid time off to volunteer with community groups, a perk for principled millennials. The Breakfast Club’s holiday allowance is generous (for instance, head-office staff and general managers get 40 days a year), and it allows staff paid time off to train for company fitness challenges, such as a marathon in the Arctic Circle.

Kathryn Francis: ‘Work is important, but you have to enjoy other aspects of life.’

Fitter staff have fewer sick days so, again, there is a clear business motive there. Beyond pay and hours, however, a growing minority of restaurant owners comprehensively reject the almost military hierarchy, discipline and brutality of old-school restaurants. Sam Buckley, the owner of Stockport’s Where the Light Gets In, has turned a potential private dining room into a staff library, to spur their creativity (the staff also take yoga sessions together). At the Gallivant hotel in East Sussex, owner Harry Cragoe, who made his money in fruit smoothies, has not just upped pay and reduced hours, but introduced new uniforms and better staff food. He also encourages his staff to stay healthy, using inducements such as subsidised gym memberships and free flu jabs.

Late last year, Asimakis Chaniotis, the new chef at Pied à Terre in central London, banned swearing in an attempt to curb aggressive behaviour in the kitchen. There is a long way to go (Code’s recent Happiness in Hospitality survey found that 90% of London hospitality workers had witnessed co-workers being physically or verbally abused), but things are changing. In 2015, after writing a landmark confessional for the US magazine Lucky Peach, Noma’s chef-owner Rene Redzepi (“I’ve been a bully for a large part of my career. I’ve yelled and pushed people”) sought to affect a profound cultural change in how his kitchen staff interact.

Simon Martin, 28, worked at Noma during that process and it has visibly influenced his new Manchester restaurant, Mana. It opens for four dinner services plus Saturday lunch. There are 14 chefs in the kitchen, which is a lot for a 28-cover restaurant and, rather than imprison those chefs in “the usual stainless-steel cage [or] windowless metal basement”, Martin spent £300,000 on a beautiful open kitchen.

“It’s well known that drug and alcohol addictions are widespread within the catering industry, and that’s down to the conditions people are working in, along with the long, long hours. We’re trying to [create] a comfortable environment,” he explained in a press release.

If not, they will walk. Chefs are in demand. They have options. Mark Hill, the owner of food truck Street Cleaver and York’s Born to Lose burger kitchen, found his escape route in street food. “I could earn more as a head chef,” says the 31-year-old. “But what’s the point if you never see your partner, friends, family, and it’s just making you miserable? I’m running a kitchen in a new way with freedom and respect so people can have better lives, me included. People just need to have some fun again.”

Restaurants are not life or death. Eating out is a frivolous leisure activity. No one should be suffering to feed us.