Inspirational Stories From Hospitality During Lockdown

Timothy R Andrews
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Hello, everybody. This is Tim Andrews and Sarah Kettel and we're delighted to present you with our very first podcast.

Sarah Kettel
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Morning, Tim.

Timothy R Andrews
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Morning, Sarah. How are you?

Sarah Kettel
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I'm alright, how are you doing?

Timothy R Andrews
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All good, thank you very much.

I'm working on a number of projects, government projects related to building a hospitality academy and also working in the recruitment and consultancy industry.

Sarah Kettel
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A little bit about me. I'm a chef who has been working in restaurant management for the last sort of eight, nine months. Got out of the kitchen for a bit.

I got various specialties. One of them is gluten free food and food for people with food allergies, which has been weird when no one's been eating out.

So, yeah, that's kind of where I am right now. I'm furloughed, which is a word no one had heard of at the start of this year.

And I'm constantly hearing people asking me if I've been furlonged, which is great fun, like I'm some kind of racehorse.

Timothy R Andrews
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Why the long face, Sarah?

Sarah Kettel
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But I'm just going to talk to you today about hospitality. What's going on in hospitality? We've got a lot to talk about, haven't we?

Timothy R Andrews
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We have, yeah.

Sarah Kettel
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And I haven't seen you in, I'm gonna say three months.

Timothy R Andrews
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Three months. It's been quite a while, hasn't it?

Sarah Kettel
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I think the last time I saw you, we were still allowed to go out and go to establishments that served us food and drink.

Timothy R Andrews
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I certainly remember the second bit.

Sarah Kettel
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Yeah. Oh, do you remember that? Going out. Wasn't that lovely? 2020. What happened? What happened? Just the phrase the rug pulled from under our feet.

Doesn't even get close, does it?

Timothy R Andrews
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No, not at all. Did lockdown affect you?

Sarah Kettel
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So literally we were open for business one week and we were not two weeks later, the week in between because we didn't have any customers, no one was going out. We served mainly people who work in office complexes and things, so no one was going to work. Everyone was working from home.

We switched the business in 24 hours to being an online ordering service for food that you could reheat at home, which I'm actually quite proud of my team for doing that because we literally had a phone call and said, this is what we've got to do if we're going to stay open. And at the time we didn't know that we would be completely closed and that it wouldn't be worth it, but we had to give it a try. So, yeah.

So one day we were fully functioning restaurant with its Doors closed. The next day we were a fully functioning restaurant which was doing food that people could pick up or we were doing deliveries ourselves.

A lot of them were on foot. We had one person in the car and we were selling out online.

We did fairly small numbers, but we were amazed at how quickly our customers responded and said, yeah, we do love your food and we will have it at home. So we sold out.

We did so two weeks of that and realized that none of us really lived near the restaurant and coming to work wasn't really safe anymore. We all took the tube. None of us were particularly local. For me it would have been an hour, hour and 25 minutes walk, which wasn't really up for.

And I didn't have a bike, so it's not like I could cycle. People who were cycling were telling me, ah, the cyclists are too close to each other.

You stop at a junction, everyone's breathing on each other and we're all a bit scared to, to be near anyone, really.

Timothy R Andrews
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Yeah.

Sarah Kettel
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So we decided at that point to close and the restaurant owner said, don't worry, we can use the furlough scheme and we will just close until further notice. And then that was it.

I was on lockdown and it was very, I think for the first four weeks I sort of compared it to almost a grieving process actually, because when you work in hospitality, you're working with people every day and your very reason for going into work is to interact and when you get that taken away from you, Netflix can't replace that. It's very odd. Very odd.

Timothy R Andrews
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It is very, very strange. It is a difficult situation. I think we go into hospitality because we're essentially people people.

Sarah Kettel
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Yeah.

Timothy R Andrews
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And I have found that over, particularly over the last three months, a lot, a lot of hospitality professionals have really, really struggled with being unable to meet people to go out.

And you know, and also part of, part of it is serving and creating and seeing, you know, and making people leave after good customer service or great food. And that's part of the joy that people have in there in their role and they're not able to provide it.

Sarah Kettel
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And you can't do that digitally either.

You know, even though, you know, most people have zoom or House party, you know, if I meet other people with drinks or they come round, you know, there's food on the table and share stuff and when that's taken away, it's so, it's just, so I want to say blank, but it's just one sided, you know. Yeah, there's nothing. It's like someone took the 3D out my life. It's very weird.

Timothy R Andrews
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It is. It's a bit like the colors gone. And I think the other thing is with the furloughing, it was very hard for people as well because I think by.

In hospitality, by its very nature, you're very busy. You are constantly busy. You know, you're always doing something, there's always something to do.

And being furloughed, from being very busy to not being busy was hard for a lot of people to adjust. And then there's the fear factor of will there be a business to come back to?

Sarah Kettel
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There is that. Yeah.

And I think as well, you know, with people worrying about their jobs, even though I suppose some people got mortgage holidays, the rent holiday, which doesn't help anyone because you still owe the money.

Timothy R Andrews
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I think what we have seen though is I have seen quite a few, you know, inspiring stories. You've got a story actually that's quite inspiring of hospitality people and how they've responded to the situation. So, for example.

Sarah Kettel
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Absolutely.

Timothy R Andrews
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You know, and I think that for me has been very joyful and it illustrates just how creative the hospitality industry is and the drive that a lot of people within it have. A prime example was there was charity, St Mungo's charity, homeless charity.

And they had to provide food for something like 3,000 people within hotels and then 3,000 homes separately. Now they are a charity, they are not a food production company.

Sarah Kettel
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Yeah.

Timothy R Andrews
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And suddenly they had to go to all these 15 GLA funded hotels and make sure there's hot food provided for homeless people within those hotels. Because obviously the hotels didn't have their own catering team. They were all furloughed.

And of course there aren't cooking facilities within a vast majority of hospitals of hotel rooms.

Sarah Kettel
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That's right. There'll be a minibar if that, maybe a kettle if you're lucky.

Timothy R Andrews
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Yeah, exactly. So they worked. So they put to tender this issue and some of the larger companies, I won't name any that you would know them, didn't get the contract.

But who did was a stage TV location catering company.

Sarah Kettel
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Right. Yes.

Timothy R Andrews
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And yeah. And they were geared for working at different locations all the time.

Sarah Kettel
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Yeah.

Timothy R Andrews
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So they won the contract with St Mungo's to deliver this food and they have been doing it successfully ever since. They've done such a great job.

And you hear these things and you hear, I think it's Islington Borough Council have used an ice rink in order to keep food fresh.

Sarah Kettel
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I love that story. That was one of my favorite stories.

I mean I think the thing that you've said about hospitality, bouncing back and being adaptable is that one thing that people don't realize is that skilled people in hospitality probably haven't just done that one job.

We've all worked, you know, probably since we were young, across all areas of hospitality and have the biggest pool of transferable skills, I think, in any industry. And that's never really been acknowledged until now, until we have to step up and be the backbone to get people fed.

And it wasn't just people like you and me who work in restaurants or any of the service sectors. It's also the people behind the scenes who work in distribution.

I would, you know, I do count people who work in supermarkets as my colleagues in hospitality. No one thinks of that as hospitality, but, you know, you have to go up to a customer service counter and exchange food.

So that's, you know, that is hospitality. Any of those kind of people skills are people who work in airlines, for instance.

I heard so many furloughed cabin crew were easily transferable into supermarket work, frontline food, because they are frontline anyway, and they can just do it. And I think the skills pool that we've got has never been appreciated as it is now. And I'm really grateful for that.

That's one of the good things that come out of this.

Timothy R Andrews
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Yeah, I totally agree.

I mean, a huge number of people that joined some of the frontline services, whether it was reserve police officers or to help out on the front line when they were doing tests. And so, you know, I think we need to recognize this. There's this.

You're right, the people within hospitality, some, I think previously and still are maybe underestimated. But as somebody who.

Whose whole career is essentially from hospitality, I'm so grateful to all the people that have stepped up and shown, you know, shown willing, really, and gone into other areas and contributed.

Sarah Kettel
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Certainly hundreds of thousands of people from our industry have done that.

And I have had, you know, I've not really spoken a lot about what I've been doing during lockdown because, you know, being a typical hospitality person, I just get on with it. I just get stuff done. You know, we don't ask for thanks for it. That's not why we do it.

But I've been sort of quite humbled by the amount of people who've come to me when they found out what I've been doing and said thank you. And I've been very taken aback by it because I don't see it as something that needs thanks.

It was Just people needed food so we got it to them, you know, it was, it didn't cross my mind that I should even think twice about just doing it, so. And I knew the only one.

Timothy R Andrews
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Do you want to expand on what it is you've been doing just for the list?

Sarah Kettel
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Yeah. I should probably stop being cryptic and actually explain what I'm talking about.

So at the start of lockdown, a friend of mine who's local to me in southwest London runs a charity that's always used surplus food to do community meals and I volunteered with her quite a bit and with food Cycle, back in the day when we had a food cycle here, so they used to run a community meal out of a church on a Friday afternoon.

People could just rock down, get a free three course meal, sit on shared tables with their community and it brought together people who needed to come and eat, people who might have been socially isolated anyway before this happened and didn't really get much social interaction. And it was, it was a great thing. And people volunteered their time to cook and to serve and to sit together and just chat and it was really lovely.

Great bit of community cohesion. So when lockdown happened and all the churches had to shut, the community wasn't an option anymore.

And so what happened was that it went to a delivery service. A lot of the people who used the service were vulnerable and needed to be reached out to get food to them.

They opened up their books for self referral for people who couldn't get food, couldn't go out to get food and needed a delivery.

And that delivery would include a box of fresh produce which was all surplus and donated, and there would be a hot meal in there for everyone in the household who needed one as well. And we did the hot meals.

Timothy R Andrews
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Amazing.

Sarah Kettel
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Yeah. So we started off at a church, the usual church, where the meal was.

It's quite small, it's got a very small kitchen, just me and our furloughed head chef. And we started off doing 25 meals a week. And by week three the requests have gone up to 150 week. We couldn't produce enough meals in that kitchen.

So I put out an email to pretty much every SHUT restaurant and pub that had a kitchen where I live, knowing full well that I'd get responses.

And a pub local to me called the Rose and Crown in Tooting, back right on the common, emailed straight away from their head office of their chain of pubs and said, we want to help. Within a week we were in the publisher, which, you know, no one's Been to a pub for a while, but I have, albeit, a very different experience.

They gave us our kitchen. They said, all we've got is pizza ovens, we've got refrigeration, we've got storage for you. It was all we needed.

And we collected food every week that was surplus. We took it to the kitchen, we banged out 100 meals at a time, twice a week.

And then the pub landlord, who was amazing, got in his car, delivered them back to the delivery point, and team of volunteers all came together, got in their own cars, took them out on these lists of big maps of where people were going. It was a really good opportunity. Yeah, it really worked. And we.

Even now, when we've had to leave the pub kitchen just at the end of last week, because obviously they're reopening and they're actually redecorating before they reopen, we've been offered another kitchen immediately. I've just chanced meeting with someone else in hospitality during all of this, who donated some food, said, I've got a kitchen for you.

When you need it, ring me. I called him last week. We're in there this week. People are really, really stepping up and it's quite amazing. So we're on.

I think we're probably up to about 1500 meals now this week that we've provided.

Timothy R Andrews
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That is just fantastic, isn't it?

Sarah Kettel
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Yeah. And it's been good for me, really good for me. It's shown a lot of people, even within the industry, it's made us all think more about sustainability.

You know, we've managed to do this and keep our suppliers open. So our suppliers, who aren't geared up to do domestic delivery, have gone to domestic delivery.

Surplus that they've had, which may or may not have gone to landfill, is being used to feed people. The cycle of food is actually working. You know, it is becoming more circular.

We are becoming a little bit more sustainable within our own country, rather than relying on imports and exports and waste. And it's really opened everyone's eyes to that, I think.

Timothy R Andrews
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I mean, I think sustainability is a good thing and it is going to be one of the future things that people are going to be looking at when they visit a restaurant.

Sarah Kettel
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Absolutely.

Timothy R Andrews
00:15:15.299 - 00:15:34.503
Which leads us quite nicely, I think, as to what might happen in the future. And that will be the topic of next week's episode. We'd like to thank the listeners for joining us today and hope you'll join us again next week.

Sarah, wonderful speaking to you and to you always. I look forward to speaking to you this time next week.

Sarah Kettel
00:15:34.639 - 00:15:38.395
Yay. Have a good one. Bye. Bye.