FOIE GRAS

Fellowship of International Excellence. Gastronomy: Restaurants And Service.

Hospitality is the industry I keep coming back to. Not as a line on a slide: as the thing I actually enjoy. The table, the room, and the people who make a living out of other people having a good time.

FOIE GRAS is where I want to put that. A fellowship for the people who run restaurants, hotels and hospitality businesses, and who care about running them properly.

About the name

Foie Gras sits at the rich end of the table, and elevation is the entire point of this: taking the standard up, not the cost down. That is the play, and it is deliberate.

It’s also personal, and I won’t apologise for it. I love foie gras. I make a terrine myself, and it’s a bloody good one. I have eaten foie gras across most continents and in most of the ways it’s served: fried with a balsamic reduction, sometimes a truffle sauce, as a carpaccio over homemade tagliatelle, to name a few. Those are the meals you remember. To borrow from Thoreau, it’s how sucking the marrow out of life tastes. Or at least one of the ways. If the name puts someone off, that’s useful information for both of us.

Where I work, and why

Something has happened to hospitality that mirrors what has happened everywhere else: the middle has been hollowed out. Rents up, cost of living up, ingredients up again, and half the lunch trade now working from a spare room in another postcode. The family-run restaurant. The boutique hotel. The place with a proprietor rather than a regional manager. Some survive. Most have not. I do not think that happened by accident, but that is an argument for another page.

What replaced them thrives: productised, scaled, food, beverage, accommodation, and service all engineered to hit a price rather than a standard, the same room in forty towns. That is a market I purposefully avoid, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

The top of the market is thriving too, on an entirely different model. The same ingredient costs as everyone else, a structure built to carry them, and people who still walk through the door intending to spend properly on something worth having. That is where most of the work is now, largely because the middle is no longer there to do it in.

But the line I actually care about is not the size of the business. It’s whether the ambition is to be good, or only to be just good enough. In business generally, most people do not do their job; they only do enough to keep it, which is not the same thing and never has been. Within hospitality, the same room in forty towns mostly mirrors the latter.

The best rooms at the top and the best of what is left in the middle hold the same standard, and both are usually superb at the thing they actually do. Some have already built everything around it: the numbers, the systems, the multi-site machine, the hard yards long done. Others are excellent at the work and have never had reason to build the rest, the part that turns a business into an asset rather than a job the owner can’t leave. Both belong here. The ones still building learn fastest from the ones who already have, which is rather the point of a fellowship.

On pleasure and profit

I’ve never accepted that pleasure, passion and purpose pull against profit. Hospitality is the industry that proves they don’t: the places that are a genuine pleasure to walk into are usually the ones being run well.

What it’s built around

Hospitality was my first industry. It’s the only industry I have ever held a job in, and I held two. My first business was in hospitality as well. The nearly four decades in private equity and venture capital followed directly from that, and taught me how businesses are really built, bought and sold. Hospitality is still where I most enjoy putting that to work.

• Operations that hold. Efficiency the guest can feel, not just efficiency the P&L can see.
• Growth worth having. Getting bigger without diluting whatever made the place worth visiting.
• The memorable bit, on purpose. Experience designed in rather than hoped for, and built around people.
• Rooms of your peers. Operators working through the same problems, in the same room.
• One to one, where it’s warranted. For the calls that don’t belong in a group.

Where it’s up to

Early, honestly. FOIE GRAS is being built rather than launched. Where it gathers, what it includes and what it costs to be part of it are still being settled, and I’d rather say so than put up a button that goes nowhere.

In the meantime there’s InnSight, which I already write on the business of exceptional hospitality, because exceptional hospitality isn’t an accident. It’s built. That’s the same thinking this fellowship will be made of, and you can read it today.

If you run a hospitality business and this sounds like your kind of room, it’s coming. It will be announced here and on the usual channels when it opens, and until then you can get in touch if you want a hand in shaping it.