When I spoke with Damien Bastiat, he was general manager of Ballyfin Demesne in Ireland. The book notes that he has since become General Manager of Domaine des Étangs, Auberge Collection, in France.
Bastiat speaks to the calling, and his version of it is more winding than most. He spent a summer working in a restaurant at fifteen. While studying hotel management he served as a chef under Denis Moureau at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Either of those could have been the moment, and neither was. The click came later, behind the bar at the Savoy Hotel in London, watching the general manager, Willy Bauer, walk the floor and speak with guests and staff. What Bastiat recognized in that moment was specific. He had cooked and he was tending bar, and the role he wanted was the one Bauer was performing in front of him: the man who walks the floor. In our conversation he put it in a single sentence, and the sentence has stayed with me because so many of the people in this book describe the same thing: a long run of plausible beginnings, and then one scene in which the work suddenly has a shape.
“I realized that’s what I wanted to do” Damien Bastiat, then general manager, Ballyfin Demesne
In the book, Damien Bastiat appears in Chapter 1, The Calling, where his story is one of the accounts of recognition the chapter gathers from hoteliers and chefs. The chapter is interested in the difference between the first exposure to the work and the moment the work becomes a vocation, and Bastiat’s account separates the two more cleanly than most. The summer at fifteen and the kitchen under Moureau were exposure and training. The Savoy was the calling, and what made it a calling was that it had a face and a job title attached: a general manager, on the floor, in conversation with guests and staff. His later career at Ballyfin, and now in France, is the role he watched Willy Bauer perform from behind the bar.