But Can You Do It Cheaper...? Coffee and catchup from A Caravan.

🔥 Stirring the Pot: Building Real Connections in a Cutthroat Kitchen World

It started - like all good stories - with lunch. Three career chefs, one table in Manchester, and no one trying to poach anyone else’s staff or be undercut, or backdoor'd (for once).

We came from different corners of hospitality: Nutrition, recruitment and UHNW consultancy. But as we tucked into our food, we realised we’d all been chewing on the same bitter ingredients: ghosting, undercutting, and the ever-haunting “Can you do it cheaper?”

Honestly, it’s enough to make you want to throw in the burnt, stained tea towel.

Hospitality is supposed to be about warmth, flavour, and connection. But behind the pass, it can feel like a pressure cooker of paranoia. You can’t turn your back without someone trying to backdoor your team, or a competitor telling a client, “Oh, they charge that much? We can do it for half.” (Yeah, and serve half the quality with it, geeza.) Insert eye roll emoji.

The Problem With the Industry Recipe

Too often, our industry is running on fumes and ego - everyone pretending they’re fully booked, totally fine, and not burning out behind the scenes.

And let’s not even start on the ghosting. Suppliers, clients, potential collaborators. One minute it’s “let’s do something amazing together”, and the next? Crickets. We’ve had more people disappear than a soufflé under a slammed oven door.

And yet, there we were - three chefs with no agenda but to support each other. Sharing stories, contacts, strategies. Saying, “Here’s who’s legit — and here’s who’ll steal your mise en place and your sous chef.”

I mean, I genuinely have had recruitment agencies interview me to not take me on, but use my exact presentation as a two year strategy for themselves, and employ my junior team to do it from under me, and taken on for a role, just to be dropped only months in, once they have your "black book" and no longer need you, which comes to one simple thing really, from recruiting perspective, ask better questions, from an interviewee perspective ask better questions, having chefs not fit the role taken on for? Guess what, ask better questions. We all agree, we needed this catchup - It wasn’t networking. It was nourishment, and it was well overdue.

Trust: The Secret Ingredient

We need to talk about trust more in hospitality. Not just with clients, but with each other.

It’s time we stopped acting like competitors in a cutthroat cook-off and started behaving like a brigade. There’s enough work for everyone — and there’s definitely enough bad clients to go around.

What we need more of is collaboration, candour, and a little chef-to-chef honesty:

• “That client ghosted me too.”

• “Here’s a reliable supplier who won’t shaft you.”

• "She's super hard working, wont mess around"

• “No, you’re not mad — that’s way too cheap for the work you’re doing.”

Because let’s be real: when we support each other, we all get stronger service, better gigs, and fewer nights screaming into the walk-in fridge of contemplation.

We shared support links, or nourishment suggestions, suggested who may be worth steering well clear of, and who is the salt of the earth, a rather cathartic culinary experience actually, never asking for anything in return, knowing its investing in us as much as each other, far better than any therapy session.

Cooking Up a New Culture

The Chef Hub was always about more than just gigs or bookings. It’s about community - the kind where you can DM someone without feeling like you’re about to get a sales pitch or an invoice, and the same for my fellow diners on the day. We dont do what we do to fleece, or extort, we offer career long advice, that comes with balance, all we want to do is have trust with our clients, and priced accordingly to support what we do, and be able to look after us, and you. IF we could be any cheaper, then that WOULD be the price. IYKYK.

Let’s plate up something better together:

• Let’s stop ghosting each other.

• Let’s call out the dodgy practices — and name the people who are doing it right.

• Let’s keep having those unfiltered, honest conversations — in person, online, and everything in between.

Because when chefs stick together, we do more than survive. We thrive.

I tell all of my clients, and candidates, you will hear from me, maybe a txt last thing at night, if its relevant to you, then its relevant to me, i'm still on "chef" time, you will get a reply, and I simply ask for that in return. Which actually, all three of us do, A LOT.

And if all else fails? At least we’ve got each other - and lunch.(Seriously though, next one’s on me - I’ve got a killer spot in the Northern Quarter.) may contain nduja...

#BehindThePass #TheChefHub #RealTalk #GhostedAgain #CollabNotCutthroat