What would hospitality look like after lockdown? Timothy R Andrews and Sarah Kettel explore how UK pubs and restaurants were preparing for reopening in 2020.

From local recruitment and local produce to app-based ordering, visible hygiene and outdoor dining, they look at the operational changes businesses were considering and how customer expectations might change with them. The conversation also asks where technology could help and where human interaction would remain essential.

Recorded in 2020, the episode captures hospitality trying to work out what its “new normal” might actually look like.

What we cover

• How pubs and restaurants were preparing to reopen after lockdown
• Why local recruitment and shorter commutes could become more important
• The growing focus on local produce and more sustainable sourcing
• How app-based ordering and payment technology could change service
• Why visible hygiene was becoming part of the guest experience
• Rethinking customer journeys, layouts and risk assessments
• Outdoor dining and creative approaches to social distancing

Keep exploring Talking Hospitality

Discover more conversations, practical ideas and industry perspectives from Talking Hospitality.

Welcome to this, the second episode of our podcast, Talking Hospitality. I'm Sarah Kettel. I'm a chef and a restaurant manager. And this is Timothy R Andrews, and.

I'm a consultant working on the building of a new hospitality academy and involved in a number of hospitality projects.

So just to explain to you the name of our podcast, there isn't a typo, you'll know that. I'm Sarah Kettel, often called Sarah "Kettle". I'm not a kitchen appliance, but it's a play on words.

In last week's episode, we talked about inspiring stories from the hospitality industry during lockdown. We have listeners from all over the world, including the UK, Poland, Holland and the us. Thank you to everybody that listened and shared our podcast.

We hope to share some more inspirational stories with you in the future.

On Today's podcast, with 31% of pubs and 50% of hospitality businesses still to reopen, we look at what the future in hospitality might look like, some of the difficulties, and provide some top tips on how to survive the new norm. So let's get straight in the future, in the future, I think local is going to be a key selling point for businesses.

If you're looking at the recruitment market, for example, a lot of people, and partly this is partly influenced by Brexit, but people are looking much more at the local hiring of people. So people within the area.

Yeah, you're right.

And I think we've all just sort of slid, probably, I don't know, maybe in the last 50 years into this, this whole model of life where you can't afford to live, where you work, you have to commute. All these new train lines are being built saying, oh, isn't it brilliant?

You can get somewhere in 15 minutes, but there's no trains running, the economy stops and nobody stops thinking about that. I want to be local. I don't want to commute into central London, you know, I don't want to travel an hour to get to work.

And actually, nobody does now. Nobody.

And also, I think people want to see local produce as well.

Oh, they do, absolutely. Yeah.

You know, I think that's going to be a key factor as well. Where does the food come from? What's the story behind the food?

That's becoming such a key issue right now, when we've seen how the government have backtracked on the U.S. trade deal.

Yes.

Brexit. Luckily, everyone is talking about chlorinated chicken.

Yeah.

You know that? I did. I was one of the people who's emailed the Prime Minister and asked him what on earth he thinks he's doing.

Because ultimately, when you think about it, the cheapest foods that come in as imports and sadly is usually meats that goes up there with processed food. These are going to be going to the poorest in society who are missing out. And so. And nutrition is key. We're talking about the nhs.

You know, everyone's been stood out there clapping the nhs.

Well, you can't stand out there and clap the NHS if you're not going to make sure that somebody who maybe is teaching on the poverty line in your community is not eating well because they're going to get sick and that's going to put Australia on our health services. Everything is connected and we lost that disconnect before and we need to get back.

Absolutely.

If you serve a seasonal menu, if you shop local, if you buy local, if it's local produce, you're doing something good for your community and the world that you live in.

Absolutely right. Two other areas I think that are going to be different. One is the use of technology and one which we'll come back to, which is hygiene.

Now, I think if we talk about the technology, we've already seen it with some of the venues that have opened, orders had to be made in advance or via the use of an app. And it will be linked largely, if they ever get it right to test and trace.

When's that, then?

The world beating app, when it does happen, it will be tied into. People will need to order beforehand, they will need to make reservations beforehand that are dropping in as a sort of casual passerby.

That's going to be minimized quite dramatically or eradicated in some cases, people will need to order. So if restaurants and pubs will need to have time to in app to.

Order drinks, for example, well, this is another way in which the industry has responded and I heard something fantastic that had happened yesterday. So obviously we all use point of sale technology to take payments.

There's a company that set up called Good Till, they created some software which was being used, but it wasn't huge as they thought it would be, and it was actually created for stadiums.

So if you were sat, say, I don't know, in the O2 or at Wembley, you could sit at your seats and you could order with the app and then go collect bar and they'd say it'll be ready in five minutes.

A bit like, you know when you used to go to like chiquitos when you were young and they give you the little buzzy thing where you sit and wait for it to go off.

Yeah, that's right, yeah.

It was a mobile app version of that, essentially, and it told you when, which bar to go to, what time to get there, and your order will be ready and bagged up and ready to go.

Now, there wasn't as much uptake as they thought, but what they've been able to do is to successfully transform that into a technology that restaurants can use so that when you do order online, they already have the functionality to say, right, choose a pickup time and we'll tell you where to go. And that's already there. So we've already got the technology. So actually when it comes to that, we're kind of sorted, which is great.

We have the facilities already. It's about implementing them. So that's a really good tip.

Robots.

I went to Alton Towers last year with my nephews and they've got a roller coaster restaurant there where your food comes out of the kitchen, which is above the restaurant on little tiny roller coasters on a track.

So your little roller coaster cart arrives at your table and then you take your food out of it yourself and put it on the table and then the roller coaster goes away again.

Brilliant.

I mean, how cool is that? I think we should have that everywhere.

Although I'm a bit funny with robots because I saw an episode of X Files, Mulder and Scully went into a restaurant and it was all run by robots and it was very scary. So I'm going to stick with the human interaction, if that's okay. The other thing I think is hygiene will become very high up in the ninja.

Now, I don't mean the obvious making sure everything's clean. I think it's going to be the visibility of hygiene standards.

People are going to go in and they are going to want to see somebody wiping the tables down with the cloths, with the masks on, making sure that they're doing it, that there are hand sanitizers that they can see very easily. They understand that why there are spacing restrictions.

And I think that is where perhaps in the past we kind of hid these things because we didn't want to detract from the show or the experience, particularly the more high end stuff. Now that's going to be part of what people are going to look for.

Yeah, I think you're right. And actually one of the things that I heard at the start of lockdown was before that, before everything shut.

And when the message quite clearly for a couple of months was wash your hands, then the instances of food poisoning went down.

Yeah.

And not just in hospitality in homes, because it's, you know, when you work in hospitality, hygiene is up there, it's on your agenda, whether people see it or not. Washing your hands is just something that you do constantly.

And we, you know, we all have dish pan hands all the time because we're constantly keeping clean.

However, people at home weren't really doing that and then they were, and then there were less hospitalized people with things like Compylobacter, which is what the most common form of food poisoning you get from raw chicken, raw meat. So it's, it's good that everyone's appreciating it. It's not just us.

It's not just us that's got clean hands now, it's our customers as well, which is quite reassuring, I think.

Also the other thing is, what most people forget is that all good hospitality businesses had very high hygiene standards already.

And so really the use of risk assessments and the health and safety, if it was already implemented Covid is just a little bit extra addition to the standards that should already be maintained. So it's not like suddenly there's this big, oh, my goodness, how I going to deal with this?

It's another infection of which there may be some requirements depending on the venue to have PPE or not, or certain spacing or screens that you might need. But outside of that, a lot of the job was already being done, was already being cleaned.

A good restaurant is one of the cleanest places you'll enter after a hospital.

People need to remember that now that venues have reopened, there is only so much that a hospitality business can be responsible for. You can't have a guard on the door watching people go to the loo to make sure they're not standing right next to each other, for example.

It's just not going to be practical for a lot of business.

So there has to be a degree of where we can educate, whether that's through posters, having hand sanitizers, making sure everything's clean properly, et cetera, et cetera. But there's a point where the customer has to. Businesses will need to look at the journey of the customer. Where do they go in and out?

Where do staff go in and out? What is the journey of the food as it arrives for preparation in the kitchen, all the way to when it is served onto the table.

And I think if they do that when they're making their risk assessments and they consider that when they're opening, they'll know whether it's practical or Not.

Yeah, that's very true.

And hygiene and cleanliness, people will be part of the customer experience.

Absolutely, yeah. It'll be the.

That's our new normal, that's our new norm.

I think public hand washing is going to become a thing again. I noticed today when I took a short tube ride this morning that there are now absolutely enormous hand sanitizing stations inside every tube station.

And that's last week, some. So I think maybe we all just kind of forgot about sanitation for a bit. And luckily that's coming back, which I also think is a good thing.

Totally agree, totally agree. And I went to Hong Kong and one of the things that struck me there was people always washing their hands.

There's always opportunities because they had SARS previously and it stayed in their minds.

And of course Hong Kong has had outbreaks, but actually very short and very controlled and I believe that that is because they were ready for it because of what had happened before. And I suspect this is what's going to happen within the uk.

Oh, yeah. We're going to have to be ready now. And I think our lack of space.

We're very guilty in the UK of being such an old country with old buildings that everything's really cramped because I think people used to be smaller, didn't they? They must have been.

Yes, they did, Sarah.

People were tiny little miniature Britons. But we're all so much bigger now and we don't have any space. It's really hard. We need to make space for things again.

And we've never had that privilege of having the weather where we can kind of sit outside maybe three quarters of the year because obviously, you know, any bank holiday is going to rain and we have the craziest weather. But there needs to be more provision for space and air around everything we do.

Yes. Having an outside space is going to be essential, certainly in the next few months.

Yeah, totally. I've seen some really good solutions actually to outside eating. I've seen something amazing in Paris, which was a cafe that's got its outside tables.

They've actually taken the chairs that you can't use. Instead of taking the chairs away, they filled them with giant teddy bears.

That is brilliant.

It is the cutest thing I've ever seen. So every day is a teddy bears picnic and you social distance. I just think that's genius.

Brilliant. Great for marketing.

It worked. They're in all the international newspapers, so. Yeah, it worked really well for them.

Yeah.

And of course in Holland there's also come up with some new tricks as well, so like, there's a restaurant that's got bubbles around tables and keeping them individual. And then the waiter brings the food over, but it's on a kind of like a. Or a plank.

And then they pass the food into the bubble so that only the people that are separated only get that meal. And there's no contact between the waiter and the guests, which is pretty cool, too. And it looks really funky, too.

That is so bizarre, but kind of cool.

Okay, so to wrap up, we think that successful businesses need to consider in the future, or certainly in the immediate future, sustainability.

Yep.

Which is something we're going to come to in a later episode. Story of the food is going to be much more important than before. Local produce, local talent.

Yep.

They need to have creative ideas for being outside.

Yes. They really do.

And hygiene and technology are going to be game changers.

They are indeed. Thank you for listening.

Please share this podcast and let us know your thoughts and comments on what you think the future will look like in hospitality.

We look forward to you joining us in the next episode of Talking Hospitality Available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, and YouTube. Thanks for listening.

Bye, everyone. Bye.