Our guest this month has been described as “hospitality personified”.
Sam Ward is the managing director of the Umbel Restaurant Group — a collection of restaurants launched by chef Simon Rogan, who’s widely considered one of the pioneers of the ‘farm-to-fork’ movement in the UK.
The group’s holdings include one restaurant in London, three in Hong Kong, and three in the Lake District village of Cartmel — including the group’s flagship restaurant L’Enclume, which turned 20 earlier this year.
Named the UK’s top restaurant for four years in a row by the Good Food Guide, L’Enclume won a third Michelin star in February — making it the only restaurant north of London to receive that accolade.
And it’s fair to say that Sam has been integral to the group’s success.
Born and raised a few miles from Cartmel, he worked at Rogan and Co — the group’s more casual eatery — in his early twenties, before moving to London and working at The Ritz hotel as a sommelier.
He returned to Cartmel in 2012 to head up L’Enclume's FOH team, helping it become a culinary destination on a par with the likes of Noma or Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Following a stint as the group’s operations manager, he became its managing director in January 2020.
Sam gives us the lowdown on his career so far, sharing what he's learned about good service from his local pub, The Ritz, and L'Enclume alike.
He also discusses Simon Rogan's expansion to Hong Kong, the group’s "nimble" response to the pandemic, the ongoing popularity of its home meal kits, and what winning a third Michelin star means for everyone at L'Enclume, as well as for its future.
Sam Ward: “The price of what a diner pays has been subsidised by the personal sacrifice of the people that work — and when you really think about that, that's messed the entire market of fine-dining pricing up. People genuinely think you can go to a fine-dining restaurant and get three courses for 35 pounds. Are you insane?”
Hello and welcome to The Recipe — a podcast about the new generation of restaurants and the people behind them.
My name’s James Clasper and in this episode, I’m going to be talking to a fellow Brit who’s been described as “hospitality personified”.
Sam Ward is the managing director of the Umbel Restaurant Group — a collection of restaurants launched by chef Simon Rogan, who’s considered one of the pioneers of the ‘farm-to-table’ movement in the UK.
The group’s holdings include one restaurant in London, three in Hong Kong, and three in the Lake District village of Cartmel — including the group’s flagship restaurant L’Enclume, which turned 20 earlier this year.
Named the UK’s top restaurant for four years in a row by the Good Food Guide, L’Enclume won a third Michelin star in February — making it the only restaurant north of London to receive that rare accolade.
And it’s fair to say that Sam Ward has been integral to the group’s success. Born and raised a few miles from Cartmel, he worked at Rogan and Co — the group’s more casual eatery — in his early twenties before moving to London and working at The Ritz hotel as a sommelier.
He returned to Cartmel in 2012 to head up the front-of-house team at L’Enclume helping it become a culinary destination on a par with the likes of Noma in Copenhagen or Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York. Following a stint as the group’s operations manager, he became its managing director in January 2020.
Understandably, then, there was plenty to talk about when I called Sam recently. But I began by asking him how he got into hospitality and why he stayed.
Sam Ward: My mum used to give me 30 pounds a month pocket money, which when I was 12 was a good whack. The trouble was my transport to and from school was 32 pounds a month. So she went into the village and I was very excited because I thought, she's going to the bank, she’s going to sort out a little bit more pocket money. How much are we going to get? Lovely-jubbly. She came back with a job. So at 12 years old, I was polishing cutlery and pot watching. And that was great, you know, and I started learning to work very early on and did all sorts of jobs between the age of 12 and 18 in various pubs, cafes, catering events, that kind of thing. And I learnt some really interesting lessons early on that I didn’t realise were going to be valuable.
I worked in a pub in Grange called the Commodore Inn. It’s not a high-end, fine-dining establishment, it’s a local pub. But I worked with a guy there called “Ez”, John Errington, he’s still a really close friend to this day. And he used to do this thing where, when you were walking into the pub, you walked past the windows, kind of in front of the bar, and he would stand on the bar, and he’d look and he’d see who was walking down. He had a ten-second heads-up on who was walking in, right? And he’d be like, “Oh, it's Paul”. And he just started pouring a pint of John Smith’s. And when Paul got to the bar: “There you go Paul”. And that was it, no more conversation right, done. And then “John’s here, lovely” — “Kronenbourg? There you go.”
And that was just what I was taught. You get ahead. Okay, cool. You get ahead of it, right. So very early on I was just indoctrinated into the idea of “just get ahead of it”. And it wasn't through any formal training, but that stayed with me, you know, for the last 20-odd years. If you can just get ahead of the guest, then they're never going to worry about a thing.
After that, I carried on working at university — in bars. I had to pay my way through university, I wasn't going to get through. And then halfway through university, I took a year in the industry and I convinced my financial studies tutor to let me do it in a restaurant because I was working in a place I really loved. So they did and at the end of my “sandwich year”, they offered me a job in the restaurant, so I had a decision to make — further education or management. And I'd always said to myself, the reason I want a degree is that it will help me get a job at a restaurant. So this was a bar manager. So I took the job.
My dad was really chuffed because I was the first member of his family to ever go to university. So by default was also the first person to ever drop out, which didn’t go down as well. And I don't know if he fully got it at that stage either, but I was passionate. I was doing competitions. I was loving it.
I came back up to the Lake District where in 2008 Simon was opening Rogan & Co. We met, he gave me the job as bar manager of Rogan and Co, and then my wife got a job in London. So I'm in the Lakes — she wasn't my wife then, she was my girlfriend — and she’s got a job in London working for a photographer. So I said, “Well, look, I've got this thing going, I'm loving what I'm doing at Rogan and Co, why don’t I come down in like six months or a year and we'll just do long-distance for a bit?”
She said “No worries.” So she goes down and she finds a flat. It's a flatshare — five rooms, four lads and her. I said, “I'll be down next week.” Absolutely not. So I moved to London, didn't have a job, didn’t have a plan. It was during the recession — 2008. I ended up, through a few different avenues, as a commis sommelier at the Ritz Hotel. And that was when things started to get serious. That place trains you well. I would advise anyone to work there. It’s an amazing place to work and I learned stuff.
I got by on personality at that stage. I'm not trying to say I’ve got a great personality, but in hospitality, if you're out front, present, smiling, you’re going to go okay. But they started going, “That's not enough. We need knowledge. We need process, order of service, these things need to be done.” And so for three and a half years, I sort of fine-tuned that, came back to the Lake District after the Queen’s Jubilee, and Simon gave me the job of maitre d’ at L’Enclume, which was the job I just fell in love with. And I've been with him for 10 years in September.
Superb: Congratulations, first of all. Now, let’s start there, at L’Enclume. One of the things that it’s known for is its relaxed style of service, and that followed your appointment as maître d’, so tell me what you did to change things up.
Sam Ward: I mean, I think it's important to know that, at the first instance, when Simon had the conversation with me about being a maitre d’, that was his focus. He said, “I want to go in a less formal direction.” And that was really the instruction. It wasn’t particularly specific. It was, “I don’t want a very formal restaurant.” “Okay, gotcha.” So, to be honest, I'd love to tell you there was a huge amount of strategy involved but there just wasn’t. What I took was all of the process and the product knowledge and the fact that you’ve got to get things right, and went on the floor and we were just ourselves. The big thing for me is rather than all of the focus being on process, put a decent amount of focus on the people. You know, I still get nervous before every service, because I don't know who I'm going to meet. I don't know what stories they've gone through. I don't know what's going on in their lives, but when you start caring about the people that come through, or even, you know, just for a few hours, you automatically become less formal. Because it's not about me and what I want to do, it's about what they need.
And sometimes it means breaking the rules a little bit and doing something a bit different and that's absolutely fine, you know? So I now train the team and do things like, “Okay, you've got someone that comes in and they've had a really bad journey on the M6” — which is pretty common — “what do you do?” You know, it's nothing to do with what spoons you use for a dish. It's nothing to do with what wine to go with something. What do you do? How do you make someone feel good? Because fundamentally, hospitality, you don't take the food home with you. You don't take the wait staff home — you shouldn't take the weight stuff home with you — you take a feeling and then you can get onto the idea of how do you change a feeling? How do you change a memory? Cause that's what — when you talk to someone about a restaurant, you're not telling them about your experience, you’re telling them about the memory of your experience. And the content of an experience versus the memory of an experience is a very fascinating topic. So, for us, it’s about making somebody feel good and if you can do that, it works.
So I think that’s where we focused our attention for a long time. And it started off just — what did the guests need at that point? They need a ride home, there are no taxis? Drive them home. They come in feeling a bit sniffly? Make them a honey-and-lemon. Those things make a huge amount of difference. Someone walks through the door and the first thing they tell you is “It's my mum's birthday.” Right, mum’s the focus — let’s make mum have a great time and then everyone else is going to have a great time. It's those sorts of things. And I just think traditional service sometimes forgets to keep the guest in mind. Sometimes not always but sometimes.
Superb: And was that something you picked up at the Ritz?
Sam Ward: I think what I learned from the Ritz more than anything was to be able to speak to almost any type of person, because the clientele is as varied as you can get — from royalty, captains of industry, billionaires, actors, Hollywood to people coming in who are travelling through England and they've heard of the Ritz. People who have been given a voucher, people that never dine out. I mean, those are the ones I used to really enjoy, you know? I remember there was a couple, I can't remember their names now, it was a lady and a gentleman. They were probably about 55. I remember that he was a plumber and she was a nurse in the NHS and they'd been bought this as a wedding voucher. It was something like 30 years, and they were nervous walking in and straight away my heart sinks because I'm going, “You shouldn't be nervous, you shouldn’t be nervous. This is your night, right? This is big.” And they told me they don’t eat out in restaurants and all that sort of stuff. So when the lady went to the bathroom, I said to the gentlemen, “Do you remember any of the songs from your wedding?” And he said a few of the songs from the first dance and about walking down the aisle and that sort of thing.
Now Ian Gomez, who plays the piano there and has been for about 4,000 years, is incredible on the piano and can play any song either from memory or if he listens to it once. So we started making a playlist together of the songs from their wedding, and all night — it wasn't every song, but it was heavily interspersed with songs from their wedding. They were the only people in the room that knew. And that sort of thing just changes it up. And we told them, we said, “Look, this is your night. This is about you.” And straight away you turn it around.
So I did learn it at the Ritz. And the same thing on a Sunday night. Who has their tea at the Ritz on a Sunday night? Who goes for tea? Because on a Sunday night, you don't go in out celebrating normally, you’re not having a business dinner. It's not a big night with friends, Friday, Saturday. You’re just having your tea. Who does that? And there are a lot of single diners and I got to chat to them and you get quite friendly with them quite regularly. And you learn that these people own the biggest companies in the world — just people. You maybe need to tweak the way you approach it, but they’re just people. So I did learn that skill there and I did really enjoy doing it there and just took that into L’Enclume.
Superb: And speaking of L’Enclume, it won a second star not long after you joined as maître d’ — and that seemed to open doors to all sorts of expansion opportunities — in Manchester and London and Hong Kong. We’ll get to those in a second but did the second star open doors in your career too? How did you progress through the company?
Sam Ward: Probably not straightaway at the two-star stage. You know, I had to prove my stripes, to make sure I got people's respect. That was really important. And the team. But then as time went on, I wanted to be more involved in it and it started off by being really opportunist, to be honest. An opening came up at Rogan & Co for the maitre d’ and I had an amazing assistant at the time and so it was a great opportunity for him to be able to step up there and I was able to go over and take over kind of a dual role. I think it was ops manager at the time, but essentially running both restaurants. Then an opportunity came up in reservations. We didn’t have a reservations manager, so I got in there and that was great because that was where I learned how important that is — it’s not just someone picking up a phone and taking a reservation, it can genuinely impact your entire business.
And then we didn't really have anyone running the finances inside. So then the half financial services degree came in handy. And it was great because now we have people running the HR and the finance and the reservations and the restaurants, and they all do it incredibly well, incredibly well, but I can talk to them because I’ve done every job in the company.
I was a sommelier at the Ritz for three and a half years, so I can talk to my sommeliers. They know more than I do about wine and I make sure they know that and I'm fine with that, but I know enough to be able to go, “Are there other avenues we can think about here?”
And I always advise this to people: Don’t wait for someone to give you an opportunity. They're out there every day. See them, take them. Just go for it. Go run reservations. You won't know how to do it, figure it out. And a year later you will know and it’ll make you a stronger manager. And when a restaurant manager’s going, “Oh, the bloody reservations haven't come through all right,” go, “Well, how many times do you get mistakes? One a month. Right? You go do it. You’ll get one a day.” So I do advise, I think if you're going to try and grow your career in hospitality, try and see a little bit of everything.
Superb: Good advice. Now going back to the group’s expansion — there were a couple of high-profile hotel restaurant projects in both London and Manchester that didn’t quite succeed. But then more recently the group has made a splash in Hong Kong, where you’ve got outposts of both Aulis and Roganic and a wine bar slash bakery. So what’s the thinking behind all that?
Sam Ward: Well, that was a really simple decision. We did a load of pop-ups over a period of 18 months, over the UK and over the world, and we did a very similar kind of thing. A sort of Roganic style pop-up, a L’Enclume style pop-up in various places. They were sort of week-long or weekend-long. None of them had the response that Hong Kong had and there was a few things really.
So it was in an existing restaurant in Hong Kong called Murasaki. It was a Japanese restaurant. And they invited us over. These things are fun. You know, you get to go — again, big name, but still working people that are working in restaurants, go, “Hey, do you want to fly over to Hong Kong and come and cook?” "Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. Lovely.”
The response to the pop-up was great from the guests — like, really great from the guests. And the owner of the restaurant at the time was also not really used to seeing what we do — liked it, liked the way we ran the place, liked the way we looked after the team, liked the way we served the guests, liked the amount of money in his till. It all went very, very well.
So he said, “My restaurant is not doing that well, you guys know how to do it better than I do. How about you have the restaurant and I’ll sit in the background and you operate it and we’ll have a head office. We’ll still keep the head office to do the recruiting and all that jazz.”
So we said, “Sure. Sounds great.” Came in as an operator. It’s a sort of managed franchise. We're heavily involved. All the management are teams of people that are trained up in Cartmel. The head chef Ashley Salmon is trained up in Carmel for six years, Pierre Brunelli, who’s the GM of both sites, he’s been with me for five years in Cartmel.
It was also part of a sort of HR thing where we can rotate people through. Obviously now with the quarantine, we can't really do that, but we can say, “Oh, you know, start working at L’Enclume and in 18 months' time, you’ll go do six months in Hong Kong, that kind of thing.” It’s started to happen again now, which is great.
When we opened over there, we were pretty nervous. It’s a very opinionated city on food. And it just flew from day one. And we took the same service. It wasn't as easy. We weren't quite sure how it was landing. And we were very, very firm on the fact that we were aiming the whole restaurant at the expat society out there. And so that's what it's about. It's about the English people, they know who we are, they'll come. And our PR guy, Geoffrey Wu said “No, don’t do that”. And he just ignored us basically and went firmly for the locals, and thank God he did, he was completely right in that decision.
The food is what we do here. It's been tweaked slightly with some of the salt and acidity, but fundamentally it's what we do. And we've kept looking after people, kept giving people lots of love. We're also right at the front of talking about sustainability. There’s not a sustainable infrastructure in Hong Kong. It's just not there. You can barely get something recycled, but it's got to start somewhere and we’ve been very vocal. We’ve done what we can. We don't feel it’s enough, but in Hong Kong, it’s more than anyone's doing. And so that's good. That starts talking about it.
Superb: Interesting. In reference to the Hong Kong expansion, you told the UK trade publication Big Hospitality, quote, “We’re more confident now. We ask the right questions.” What did you mean by that? What are the right questions to ask when launching a new project?
Sam Ward: I think just aligning yourselves on what you're trying to achieve. And I think it's important for any partner to do that with anyone they're working with, because if you do that, when you come up against problems, you'll jump them together. But if you're in it for different reasons, then it’s not really going to work. So, I think the first question I would ask any partner that I'm going to work with is, “Why do you want to do this?” You know, are either of us riding each of those coattails, as well? That's something you don’t want. Make sure you're aligned in what you're trying to achieve, and you’re both clear about what you're going to put into it. I think arrangements financially should always be both people do well. You know, it's really important, you don't want one party doing better than the other. That doesn't really work in my opinion. Those are the sorts of questions that you have to go through to just find out, really.
Superb: Good advice. One of the other interesting things about the Umbel Restaurant Group is that you don’t have outside investors, which must be rare. Is it a reason for the group’s long-term success, do you think?
Sam Ward: This needs fact-checking, but I’d be really interested to know how many restaurateurs have started up on their own, got no investment and reached, however you want to use the barometer for success for Simon, I don’t know — three stars could be one. I mean, how many three stars are still privately owned? I'd be very curious to know that.
So yeah, I think that's good, we’re nimble. So, I mean, through the pandemic, that was amazing because we were able to make decisions at 9:00 a.m. and they were in place by 10. And I know people that were working in much bigger environments with partners or investors and boards and all that kind of stuff. It could take two weeks to make a decision, now you didn't have two weeks. You just didn't have it. So we were going on gut. Yeah, I think it works really well for us to do it the way we’re doing it. And I think if you were to ever work with investors, it would be on a financial basis, not a decision-making basis.
Superb: You mentioned the pandemic and being nimble, so can you remind me how the Umbel Restaurant Group responded back in March 2020?
Sam Ward: Well, the first thing that went through my mind was, I been made managing director and partner of the company in January and the first major event for us happened on the 15th of March, 2020, when Boris Johnson went on TV and said, “If I were you, I wouldn't go to restaurants”. You know, I’ll never forgive him for that. It was poorly thought-out and I expect more from a leader than that.
Every restaurant in the country saw its bookings just fall off a cliff, like nothing they had ever experienced. And for me personally, straight away I thought I have to step up now. You know, I have to, and Simon as well, of course. This isn't about a menu change or a service change, this is about running a business early on. So Simon and I sat in a room with a couple of the people whose opinions we really value. Tom Barnes, our head of finance, people like that, and we said, right, we’ve had a look around, people are making redundancies on day two. As in, day one being the Monday, day two we were all hearing about redundancies. So automatically as an operator, you think if the bigger, more experienced guys are doing this is this the right thing to do? Maybe they know something we don’t.
So we did some calculations, and Simon and I were both pretty firm — well, everyone was — pretty fair about, we don't want to do that. We haven't hired these people because they are a number, we've hired the people. So we made a decision, Simon and I stopped paying ourselves instantly, the key management, who are on good wages and should be, went down to very basic minimum wage. So did the management team. And then the rest of the team — you know, the chefs and the waiters and the housekeepers— didn’t have to get drastically affected because we'd taken the cut from the top.
And also a 10 percent change in someone who's getting paid a lot of money doesn't affect them as much as a 10 percent change for somebody who is not on the higher wages. So we felt that it wasn't about equality, it was about equity, you know, making it genuinely fair. And Simon and I walked around every team and we looked them in the eye and told them, “this is what we're going to do and this is the move for now and we're going to work it out.”
Looking back, it was the singular best move we ever made because we were honest. There were tears at times, it was pretty stressful, but we were really honest and we said we're doing this for a reason. Furlough actually got announced three days later, and that was a bit of a saving grace because we were then able to support the team even more, which we did in a variety of ways, but we'd shown our cards and that was the thing. And it was, honestly, it taught me, keep trusting your gut, keep trusting your gut, because the companies that didn't do that are now struggling because they got a reputation for it, people heard about it, it’s not happening.
Then, of course, we just went, “Right, we’ve got to do something, you know, we need to figure something out.” So it's well-documented, that we started cooking food for the local people. We started a very sort of cheap meal service that developed into Home by Simon Rogan, which then became the new business that was financially what we needed to keep everything going.
Superb: And of course, the home-meal kit wasn’t just a hit, it’s still going strong. Why is that? Why keep it going?
Sam Ward: There are some really good companies out there supporting other restaurants to be able to do it. So they might fulfil everything for them and license things out. And I think that's great, it’s revenue streams for people that might not have had. We've chosen to keep doing it ourselves, which is definitely the harder way to do it. But one reason most restaurants don't do it, and it’s a perfectly simple one, is they have a kitchen for their restaurant not to also have a retail life. So we invested a quarter of a million quid into a new kitchen, about a mile away from Cartmel, and it’s members of our existing team have moved there to carry on the kits.
When we started them up, I don't think we were aware of how big it was going to become. It was something to keep doing something really. We didn't want to stop. We didn’t want to sit on our bums. We didn’t want to go and do nothing. There were also lots of great benefits of doing it in the pandemic. It gave us something to talk about, genuinely something to talk about. So we were on the tips of everyone's tongues, which meant we stayed busy when we reopened.
We've sold well over 2 million pounds worth of home kits. We sort of capped the numbers — about 200 a week is what we sell at the moment and that works for the model that we’ve got. We sell 200 meals with a little bit more on special dates like Valentine's Day and Mother’s Day and Christmas and that sort of thing. So that's going great. It's just another fantastic string to our bow.
Superb: OK, let’s talk about the Academy by Simon Rogan. This is the Umbel Restaurant Group’s partnership with nearby Kendal College. So far the Academy has trained around 15 chefs and a smaller number of front-of-house staff, giving them both industry qualifications and experience across two of your restaurants. What’s the thinking there? What are you hoping to achieve?
Sam Ward: Well, we had the idea before the pandemic and we've always worked closely with Kendal College. It’s always seemed like a natural thing to do. But we wanted to officiate it and also offer kids, you know? Because some of them straight out of school at 16 could join a restaurant, but it’s nice to give some further education and qualification opportunities.
So really we just put our skills in a pot, Kendal College and ourselves, and created an apprenticeship that’s been tweaked slightly, so it's catered more towards the modern dining, more towards our dining. The kids that are doing the academy are doing great. They've really pulled it all out of the bag and they're all future stars.
There aren’t people in the industry that are out there. This information was true as of April, 178,000 vacancies in the hospitality industry in the UK, which is up 675% from last year. There's record low unemployment in the UK. Put simply when you put a job ad out, it’s not going to anybody. There's nobody reading them. They're not there. It doesn't matter. You've got to build them. Our industry needs to build them. We need to show them what a great opportunity is.
One fantastic thing that's happened with the fragility of our industry being highlighted is that employers are being forced to be better employers. We've always operated fair working hours. Fair wages. We look after people. It's now not a perk, it’s a must in the industry and you see this and get phone calls every day going, “How do we do this?” Well, calculate how much it actually costs and then charge your guests what it actually costs.
In the fine dining industry, in my personal opinion, for as long as I've known it the price of what a diner pays has been subsidised by the personal sacrifice of the people that work. And when you really think about that, that's messed the entire market of fine dining pricing up. People genuinely think you can go to a fine dining restaurant and get three courses for 35 pounds. Are you insane? Like, really, really break that down.
So that’s a great time to get into the industry. So the guys coming through the academy now, they’re coming into a fresh new world, and it's really important that all the operators like me, and people that are older than me, don't wear those sacrifices that we've made like a badge of honour. “Well, I've done hundred-hour weeks and I've done 24-hour days and 36-hour days.” That’s not helping. OK.
We need fair working environments, good pay, and good opportunities. Anyone who still thinks it's okay to pay someone for 40 hours or 45 hours and give them a 60-hour rota. anyone that thinks they're going to subsidise the price of it. You're asking a stranger to pay less money so that you don't have to pay your worker-family the right wage. Come on. So we pay our guys properly and people pay proper money for it. And it works.
Superb: Finally, then, tell me about that third Michelin star. What does it mean for the restaurant, for Simon, for the broader restaurant group — for you?
Sam Ward: For Simon, 20 years of graft, right? And again, going back to this thing about, investors — he wasn't given 10 million quid to start a restaurant. He got in the kitchen with a pan and a sweetbread and he cooked and he cooked, and another member of staff came along and then another, and then another. I don't know that for me, that is a beacon of hope to any restaurant or out there that you can do it. It gets easier with other people's money, but you can do it.
So it’s a pat on the back from a hand that does matter. The team know that working at a world-class level, they know that. They get told that on a daily basis by the guests. So it was really hard for them. I think too that they were working at a world-class level but not getting world-class recognition. What that gave us was, “Yeah, you really are at the very, very top.” And that was amazing.
And the key is not to stop — not to stop pushing forwards. The culture is built on how can we be a bit better than yesterday. I don't want to like cryogenically save the restaurant. I've seen places that go, “Oh, that was it, that was the thing, don’t touch anything.” You know, I want it to keep moving forward and I want to keep going as if there's a fourth star, and just keep pushing it forwards. We reminded the team of that as well. Don't get scared about this. Don't get freakish. And don't get too serious about this. Keep enjoying it.
I think what it will do as well is allow people to look at us on a world stage and come and dine with us. We’ve already seen that — diners are coming from all over the world, which is great. I mean, the thing I genuinely love about that is I grew up a mile out of Cartmel. I get to stand in Cartmel, in this middle of nowhere, in this old medieval village, and I have no idea who’s about to come through those doors. And it could be somebody world famous. It could be a local from down the road. It could be someone that lives in Kansas and I get to chat about that. I get to learn about that.
I always try and encourage the front of house — “learn from your guests”. You know — you get to meet 30, 50, 80 people a day — ask them questions. I've got loads of marriage advice from my guests celebrating their 40th anniversary. I always ask them the same question. “You're here to celebrate your 40th wedding anniversary, loads of people aren’t. Why? Why are you celebrating that?” And the myriad of answers that you get is amazing. Normally it's something centred around “Have fun, laugh, enjoy each other”. And then the lady goes to the toilet and the gentleman calls me over and says, “Just say yes … all the time".
We don't want that to change, but the people that are going to come now from all over the world, what a treat. What an absolute treat.
That was Sam Ward, the managing director of the Umbel Restaurant Group.
And that’s all we’ve got time for this month.
This episode was written, produced and hosted by me, James Clasper, for Superb.
Many thanks for listening, have a lovely summer, and I’ll see you next time.