Time to end the amateurs' hour
Some 20 years ago, when I first joined Caterer & Hotelkeeper, hoteliers and restaurateurs used to take great pleasure in saying: "We're a funny industry, you know."
They were half joking and half proud of the odd set-up to which they were introducing a gauche newcomer. I didn't believe them. But now I think I know what they meant.
Let's start with terminology. What are you going to be when you grow up? A hotelier, a restaurateur, or a hosp…?
There's no word to describe someone in the hospitality industry. Should we invent one? With due apologies to the Académie Française, logic seems to lead us to "hospitalier".
It doesn't quite work in French where it describes someone who works in a hospice. It's also been mistaken for a job description in our management-heavy health service! It serves us right for taking on a term that suggests something freely given, rather than offered commercially.
Yet it is hard to think of a better umbrella word to describe someone with an abiding professional interest in all, or part, of our vast and complex industry.
If you have read this far, the chances are that you yourself, deserve to be called a hospitalier or a hospitaliäre. Well done. You are a professional. Or are you?
As a hospitalier or hospitaèlire you might be in a position to explain what must still puzzle a lot of people. Why are so many in the hospitality industry largely untrained and unqualified, except by experience?
Two names at the top of the profession spring immediately to mind. Raymond Blanc, chef-patron of Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, has had no formal training either as a chef, a hotelier or as the brilliant communicator which he is turning out to be.
Nor did Nico Ladenis, who so deservedly achieved his third Michelin star last month, attend catering college or, indeed, work long hours as an apprentice at the Connaught.
Some might argue that both are the better for being self-taught. But no surgeon or architect could boast, as they can, of a similar absence of any formal training.
There is no doubt that, formal training or not, they rank among the best chef-patrons in our industry. That, unfortunately, provides nothing. Further down, there are scores of people who leap to run pubs, bars, restaurants and hotels without so much as a basic City & Guilds, an HCIMA qualification, a National Vocational Qualification or a diploma from the Academy of Wine and Food Service. The majority, sad to say, are neither Blancs nor Ladenises.
How many restaurateurs know how to cut the lead capsule cleanly and in the right place when opening a wine bottle, or know how to describe wine usefully and correctly on a wine list? How many take the trouble to offer a clean glass when presenting a second bottle of wine to be approved, or bother to seek approval for it? Any random general survey outside the network of restaurants that get into the food guides, will show a pitiful scarcity of professionals where the service of drinks is concerned.
The same goes for the standard of cooking and food service in many pubs and restaurants. Short-cuts are common. Fish described as "grilled" is, for example, often cooked and held in the oven and finished off under the grill, resulting in dry and tasteless flotsam.
In service at table there are infuriating and meaningless habits such as the pepper-grinder being proffered before a customer has tasted his food. Italian restaurants in this country seem to be to blame for this practice, yet you do not find the macho pepper-grinder syndrome in Italy. And then there's that terrible phrase: "Is everything alright?".
That is not to forget that some of the best international hotel chains are UK-owned. Or that London is arguably among the three or four most exciting restaurant cities in the world. Or that our country house hotels are unequalled anywhere.
It is the vast gulf between the outstandingly professional and the mediocre run-of-the-mill, that earns us an undeserved, bad reputation.
