Something has been bothering me a lot in recent months. As I get older and wiser, with more hospitality years under my belt now than legal ones, my thoughts turn to legacy and the next generation of little me’s. Here I am, working with a handful of professionals; we’ve been a team for more than a decade - almost two in a couple of cases. We joke about working it with the same panache when we’re 80. At this point in time, we may well be - because new blood is not running through the veins of UK hospitality.

I have written, spoken and generally banged on about the reasons for this until I risk being caricatured as an old colonel, mistily eulogising the golden period between 2004 and 2016 when we could take our pick of the clever, chic Europeans who wanted to work in hotels and bars over here and perfect their English. We’re past that now; that die is cast, and it was only a short period, anyway. The underlying malaise remains: why do we have such an ambivalent attitude to hospitality on this island?

In France, Italy, Greece - you’ve seen for yourself this summer - hospitality is a profession. You see older workers, small business owners, sexy Gen-Z serving you with pride and passion. Yes: even those waiters in Paris who looked at you *in that way* were doing so out of pride in their job, albeit with distain for your accent or attire.

Over here: with honourable exceptions of course, there’s a numbness about waiting staff in bars and restaurants, hotel receptions. At best they get the job done, and the customer is left feeling vaguely sad without quite knowing why.

I’m working on a theory that our cultural distain for hospitality (I mean the delivery end; we so much love to be sharp on the receiving end, as I shall get to later on) is entirely due to the fact that we have never had a proper revolution. The class system here is ingrained in our psyche. Rip-roaring costume dramas don’t help with the notion that looking after people is a valid career choice. Much as I love Downton Abbey it ain’t real, and times have moved on. We don’t do this because we have no choice, because our parents did, because we have nowhere to live - we do this because we can make a decent living from giving people a lovely experience.

Now to the receiving end: because hospitality is so close to life - our aim, after all, is to create a special environment for stuff that you would otherwise do anyway - some people feel that they already know how to do this. They have a home, they have four walls, they eat, they drink - what’s so hard about what we do, then? There’s something about payment for food, bed, four walls and wifi that disrupts normal social boundaries: at some level it might be that you even resent it. There’s a part of us that needs to establish hierarchy, and when you’re paying money for something - that’s an obvious power-position.

One of the fundamental tenets of hospitality is the lovely phrase ‘mi casa es tu casa’. I resist this: what we provide specifically isn’t your house - it’s something fashioned to give you a break from your house.

And yet: the exchange of money for hospitality is a muddy area. Yes: you are capable of making a bed, cooking breakfast, pouring a glass of wine. Yes: you have chosen to put yourself in the hands of someone who done this, professionally, for the last 10 years. 

Are you one of those are people who don’t ‘see’ what we do as a profession at all, even when you are literally standing within or it in front of them, because it’s just the stuff of day to day life? Because that’s why your children aren’t looking at hospitality as a valid and dynamic career choice, where the opportunities are there for the taking, there’s a dusting of magic and the prospects are so much better than WFH waiting for AI to come knocking on the door.