Get honest exposure to the work and pay attention to how you feel inside it. The people who belong in hospitality notice that attending to other people does not tire them. If a season on a hotel floor or in a kitchen leaves you rehearsing guest conversations the next morning, you have your answer.
None of the people I interviewed found out by taking a test or consulting a career counselor. They found out by being inside the work and noticing what it did to them. Hospitality at a serious level asks for close, unwavering attention to another person’s experience, kept up for years under pressure and fatigue. Most people find that this attention runs out. A few discover it does not. The ones who go on to run the great hotels and kitchens of the world are, almost without exception, the ones for whom the noticing never tires.
The practical test is exposure. The front desk rotation in a hotelier’s first year is, for the people who belong in the industry, an intoxicating education in reading human beings quickly and responding with grace. For the people who do not belong, it is a year of tedium punctuated by stressful interactions. Both groups do the same job for the same hours. The difference shows up the next morning, when one of them is still turning over a conversation with a guest in the shower and the other is not. That difference is the answer, and it does not need to be announced.
Sometimes the signal is specific about what role fits. Damien Bastiat had spent a summer in a restaurant at fifteen and cooked under Denis Moureau at a Michelin-starred restaurant while studying hotel management. The moment that settled it came later, behind the bar at the Savoy in London, watching general manager Willy Bauer walk the floor and speak with guests and staff.
“I realized that’s what I wanted to do.” Damien Bastiat, then general manager of Ballyfin Demesne, Ireland
What Bastiat recognized was precise. It was the man who walks the floor, rather than the cook or the bartender. Paying attention to which part of the work pulls at you is as useful as noticing that the work pulls at all.
You should also know that the answer can arrive late, and against your own plans. Albert Adrià entered the kitchen at El Bulli at fifteen with no interest in cooking, because his brother Ferran needed hands. He worked, ate and slept at the restaurant for two years, moved from station to station, and ended up in the bakery, drawn to the knowledge and technique a good baker requires. The fit was there before any decision was.
“I had no idea what cooking was or what being a cook entailed.” Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group, Barcelona
Alex Atala tells a similar story. He was in and out of kitchens for years for reasons that had little to do with food, and then one day he was not out anymore. People who resist the work and keep returning to it are receiving the same information as the person who knew at twenty, only on a longer timeline. Each return is a little more adhered than the last.
If you are trying to decide, do what the better schools and kitchens do by design. Put yourself in the environment without too much dressing up and without too much protection, and stay long enough to notice what you feel there. Culinary schools and hotel schools do not teach the love of the work. They create a controlled setting in which a student can find out whether it is there. The students who are going to be drawn in are drawn within weeks. If that is you, the attention will feel effortless in a way it plainly does not for the people around you. If it is not, no amount of persuasion will change that, and it is far better to find out in the first year than in the tenth.
Chapter 1, The Calling, lays out this question of fit in full, from the sudden recognitions to the people who resisted the work for a decade before it claimed them.