For the right person it is one of the most durable careers available. The hoteliers and chefs I interviewed have spent thirty and forty years in the work and describe those years as the most clarifying of their lives. For someone without the temperament the work asks for, the same job becomes a long grind.
The honest answer is that hospitality is an excellent career for a particular kind of person and a punishing one for everyone else. The eighty hoteliers and chefs I interviewed are evidence of the first half. Aaron Kaupp started by serving breakfast at the Golden Tulip Hotel and now oversees Raffles properties across Dubai, the Seychelles and Bahrain, with forty years of luxury hospitality behind him. George Cozonis went from picking up trash in his parents’ restaurant parking lot at seven to running The Plaza Hotel in New York. These are long careers, and nobody I spoke with described regret.
What makes the career good for these people is the same thing that makes it hard for others. Serious hospitality asks for close, unwavering attention to another human being’s experience, sustained for years, under pressure and through fatigue, across time zones. The craft runs on a particular nervous system. The people who have it discover, usually early, that the attention costs them very little. They do not run out. The noticing does not tire. Everyone else does the same job for the same hours and experiences it as tedium interrupted by stressful encounters.
James Low saw the appeal before he had worked a single shift. On a school field trip to a premier hotel in Kuala Lumpur he walked into the lobby, took in the decor and the glamorous restaurants, and dropped his plan to work in a bank. He went on to lead the COMO properties in Bhutan for a decade.
“I quietly told myself that this is the environment I want to be in.” James Low, then general manager of COMO Uma Paro and COMO Uma Punakha, Bhutan
A good career also has to survive change, and the stories in this chapter show how adaptable the work can be. Sven Elverfeld began as a confectioner in a small German bakery because he wanted a profession that combined craftsmanship with creativity. When his superior warned him that confectionery was going to contract economically and told him to broaden his horizons, Elverfeld added a chef’s apprenticeship. The career at Aqua followed.
“I am still very grateful for his advice.” Sven Elverfeld, chef of Aqua at The Ritz-Carlton, Wolfsburg
There is one more thing worth saying plainly about this career, because the romantic version obscures it. The door is easy and the room on the other side is hard. A calling places a person in the building. It does not teach them the work. For that, they have to find a master willing to take them on and then serve, for years, inside a craft whose demands will exceed their ability to meet them. That is the part of the career that sorts people. Yet of all the operators I interviewed, none described those early years as anything other than the most clarifying of their lives.
The useful question is whether hospitality is a good career for you. The industry does not need to recruit the right people. It needs only to put them in the building long enough to notice what they feel there. If you are one of them, you will know within weeks, and the career that follows can last four decades.
Chapter 1, The Calling, sets out how these careers begin and why the people who last are the people the work already suited. The chapter that follows takes up the apprenticeship years that turn a calling into a profession.