Simon King: ‘I feel like I’ve got the best job in the world’

Can you tell us about your experience within hospitality? 

I’ve been in the industry since I was a teenager, so really my entire life. At the very beginning, I worked in country house hotels. After my A-levels, I studied Hospitality Management in Devon and then went to London in the late 90s where I worked in numerous five-star hotels, including The Lanesborough and The Ritz Hotel. 

I went on to win a national award and that’s where I met a chap called Gordon Ramsay, which is how I started working for him as a restaurant manager at three Michelin-star restaurants. I worked with him for five and a half years, and as the business grew from just two restaurants to about six or seven, I took a respite because it was all rock’n’roll; at the time, I was called manager, but I was still cooking. 

Then I opened a restaurant for a lovely guy called Theo Randall in the InterContinental on Park Lane, which had just reopened after a renovation. Around that time, I did a charity dinner in a catering college where I managed all the students to produce amazing courses for a great cause. One of the chefs at that event was Heston Blumenthal and he saw how I managed the students and asked me for a coffee, and so that’s how I joined him as operations manager for five and a half years. I looked after The Fat Duck and then we opened a pub called The Crown.

One of my all-time special figures was a guy called Danny Meyer, who I worked for for around two and a half years in New Zealand. It was cool working from a different culture – it was a different world and also very, very service focused. 

I kept that going and then Gordon Ramsay convinced me to come back, so I moved back to London where I was managing director for over 16 restaurants in the UK and France. I soon left Ramsay again – this time to work for JKS Restaurants – because the work culture wasn’t right for me. It was still old school culture; Gordon’s approach was a bit archaic with a hostile environment that operated on the belief that, in order to get the best out of people, you have to treat them poorly and push them to their limits. That’s not the way I work and I don’t think it should be the way we do things anymore.  

I started Igniting Hospitality to support, develop and promote other businesses, as well as help less established businesses through Covid by promoting training on all the aspects of a hospitality business’ management. Seemed as though I always gave advice to businesses, so I thought of doing it professionally. I opened my first actual brick-and-mortar business unit and I love it – I feel like I’ve got the best job in the world. 

How did Igniting Hospitality start and what does it aim to do for the industry? 

It started during Covid and it came about as me sharing my knowledge and my network, seeing as I’ve done a variety of different roles. It’s a very dynamic consultancy in that it can be training managerial skills; launching content development; investment funding. Mostly though it’s just offering support to businesses of various sizes to help them take the next step, to help them navigate difficulties, to provide them with a resource. We also do a little bit of motivational speaking. 

Because my passion lies in so many different areas, I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into just one. But as people see, my background is on the high end, it’s on refinement and taking service from good to great. Igniting Hospitality looks to elevate offerings, as well as navigate challenging times. It’s about refining and doing things as well as possible.

How did you help Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and Danny Meyer build award-winning restaurant portfolios?

Gordon was growing his business aggressively – it only had two real sites and we grew that to six or seven in a five-year period. I not only looked after the flagship, but also supported service-wise, helped out with reopenings and every significant opening we had. I grew the business as one of the main figurehead managers at a time that was service oriented. I was the face of the business, but Gordon was obviously the brand.  

I joined Heston at a time where the food had gone to another level, yet the service had plateaued – it was a little bit rigid, a little bit dated. The food, however, was lovely – everything very dynamic, very original, yet the service was quite traditional in comparison, to the point where it was scripted. I found that it wasn’t right; for me, one size doesn’t fit all, and everyone was having the same menu, it was a performance that was not tailored per guest. I am of the opinion that every guest experience should be slightly different, because you should adjust your approach to your guests. That’s what I changed – instead of scripting every single detail, I made service far more flexible. We made it more interactive, more individual. We took service to another level and that has been one of the proudest moments of my career.

Danny is an unbelievable operator and the best one I’ve ever worked with, especially in terms of service and his cultural values are just off the chart. I still hold those values close to my heart and try to replicate them wherever I go. He wrote a book called Setting the Table, which is such a good read and filled with inspiring stories. But there was a point in time where those stories, that culture and service standard I know him for, weren’t really being continued to be taught in his businesses. He was focusing on other things and lost his way a little bit, so I was part of the process of actually re-establishing those values in the business. That came in the form of a non tipping approach. We went tipping-free and it turned out to be huge. The tipping culture in America is such that tips only go to the people serving your food, which means that the vast majority of your team that made that dish happen don’t see any tips. Hospitality is a team sport and therefore the whole team needs to be rewarded. 

In your opinion, which management skills are crucial yet are often overlooked in this profession?

I think people skills are paramount, which may sound obvious, but what I think is overlooked is the people skills that you have for your guests also need to be used in your working routine. And that isn’t always the case. If you treat your staff like guests, you’ll then find that they become more caring, thoughtful, precise and don’t feel like they’re being neglected. I also find that financial elements of the business aren’t often passed on to staff. There is a reluctance among owners or senior management to share financials. I think from first-hand experience that when you empower your staff and train them, you show that you trust them.

There’s also health – and not just mental health, but also nutrition and sleep. Managers need to care for staff more. There’s something that is said in sport: the number one performance enhancing element of the last few years has been sleep – not training techniques, not nutrition – sleep. So often in our profession, we’ve got people working late at night, coming in first thing in the morning, staying late at night, then first thing in the morning, and we’re still expecting them to perform without fault. They’re on stage. On top of that, we work very hard physically, yet the nutritional value of our food is often very poor. It’s quick, it’s simple, it’s cheap, and we give it to our staff. It’s exactly the same thing – we wouldn’t do the same thing to our guests. And I’m not saying we do extravagant seven course tasting menus for staff food, but again, we need to account for them better. If we give them nutritional food, they’re less likely to be unwell, they’ll have more energy and be more motivated to be better at what they do for us. It’s a simple investment. 

During one of my first consulting contracts, I had a very refreshing conversation where they were talking about renovating the restaurant’s revenue generating areas. Often, we look at how we can get three more covers in this spare or that space to increase revenue, but they were looking at spaces in the business to improve staff facilities! It might seem silly, or even basic, but that’s not a conversation I would’ve had before Covid. We were talking about staff rooms, about better lockers, to make showers – facilities that were, in many industries, basic, but for us a changing room is often a storeroom. I’ve lost count of the number of great restaurants I’ve worked in, yet I still had to have my lunch sitting on a cardboard box. 

As an industry, we need to improve the way we look after our people, because we need to be competitive in the market. It isn’t just about paying more money because a lot of the younger generation are not solely focused on money. They want flexibility, they want respect, they want a nice balance in life, and rightly so. 

How do you judge contestants on the ‘Young Chef Young Waiter of the Year’ competition? Do you have a personal criteria that you work off of? 

For me, it is about being as consistent as possible. From being a competitor and having judged this competition all these years, it can be difficult to maintain scoring even for everyone all the time. We do have quite strict criteria and we try to create as many tasks – whether for chef or waiter – that are likely to happen in the workplace. We certainly have to deal with pressure, what’s their knowledge? What are their personal skills like? What are their ambitions? At the end, we collect all the data from questions like these and then it gets weighed in order of importance. And even then, we as a group of judges, consult again on how it happened and our interpretation. It’s the structure, but also the overriding factor of: would you want to be served by this person? Would you have this person deal with this situation? What was at the forefront of their mind? Was it to resolve the issue quickly, efficiently, etc. 

What’s next for Igniting Hospitality?

I’ve got a couple of new concepts that I’m heavily involved in and I’m hoping to launch this year and possibly the next, so lots and lots in the pipeline. What I think I’ve enjoyed doing the most and what I love about the industry is having a broad spectrum of different roles and responsibilities. I have my own business, which has been great. I love working with young chefs and waiters – taking their service to the next level has been very important to me. 

I am looking for ways to give back to the hospitality industry; sharing my passion for it is amazing. And while I continue to help businesses, I am looking for ways to be involved in new concepts. So yeah, the plan is to keep doing what I’m doing and just reach further out and hopefully connect with more people.