Why I Teach
I didn’t set out to be an educator. But somewhere between my first shift in Paris and where I am now, I started noticing a gap: between what hospitality programmes teach and what the industry actually demands.
The programmes are good at theory. Guest relations, food and beverage management, front office operations. What they can’t fully prepare you for is the feeling of a dining room turning against you at 8pm on a Friday, or the moment a long-time regular is disappointed and you have to handle it in front of a full floor.
That’s the knowledge I try to pass on. Not the curriculum, but the undercurrent.
Who I Teach
Hotel management diploma students and fresh graduates, mostly people in the early stages of figuring out what kind of hospitality professional they want to become. People who are talented and motivated, but who haven’t yet had enough service hours to know how to trust their instincts.
I also work with young team members at Bread and Brew, treating every service as a teaching environment. The debrief after a difficult night is often worth more than a formal session.
What I Actually Teach
The difference between service and hospitality. Service is what you do. Hospitality is how people feel when you do it. You can execute a technically perfect service and still leave a guest feeling uncared for. The goal is never the task. It’s the person.
How to read a room. This sounds vague until you’ve done it enough times. It’s the skill of knowing, without being told, where the friction is: which table is about to need something, which colleague is overwhelmed, where the evening is heading if nothing changes in the next ten minutes.
Communication under pressure. When things are moving fast, most people talk more and communicate less. The teams that function well under pressure have a shared shorthand: a language built from repetition and trust that lets them stay calm and clear when the floor is full.
How to handle what goes wrong. Because something always goes wrong. And the way you handle it (the composure, the ownership, the recovery) is usually what the guest remembers more than the problem itself.
What I’m Working Toward
Teaching, for me, is inseparable from this platform. Eventually, what I share in person with a handful of students should be accessible to anyone in the industry who needs it, wherever they are, whatever stage they’re at.
That’s the longer vision: a community and resource centre where hospitality professionals learn from each other’s real experience, not just from textbooks. We’re building toward that.