From the Kitchen to Tech: Why Supporting the Hospitality Industry Meant I Had to Step Out of the Kitchen

If you’ve ever worked in hospitality, you’ll know that it’s not just a job—it’s a way of life.

Anyone who’s worked in hospitality will know how quickly it can become your whole life. The

camaraderie, the rush of a packed service, and the satisfaction of delivering unforgettable

experiences to guests,is like nothing else. But, we’ve all seen the flip side: the exhaustion, the stress, and the toll it can take on mental health. To truly support the people who make this industry thrive, I realised I had to step out of the kitchen and take a different path...

My Start In Hospitality

Growing up, hospitality was the backdrop of my life. From landing my first ever job as a KP at

14, to leading shifts during busy prime-time service, I fell in love with the industry and the people who made it. However, as we’ve all experienced, behind the energy was the feeling of constant chaos. It wasn’t just about physical exhaustion; it was the mental strain on every business owner I worked under, having to juggle food quality, experience consistency for guests and creativity alongside the boring and overwhelming admin needed to stay afloat.

I still remember the fear of an unexpected EHO inspection slap bang in the middle of one

chaotic Friday service. A week of back-to-back bookings, combined with our frequently errant

Sous chef had pushed my usually hard-edged boss to breaking point. Then during peak service on the Friday evening in strode, the biggest nightmare (most diligent) of an EHO I’d ever seen. The kitchen was as spotless as could be reasonably expected during a Friday service, but the inspector really pushed it, looking for anything wrong with the physical environment of the kitchen. He went through every prepped ingredient in the fridges, checking labels and dates and asked us all a tonne of questions, all whilst we desperately tried to cook, plate and send out the flood of orders coming in

Now this EHO was just doing his job; what else is he meant to do during an inspection but,

well...inspect? For my boss, however, after weeks of constant pressure, this was just the icing on the cake. I could see he was on the verge of boiling over, when finally the EHO asked to see our paperwork.

That was when I saw something I’d never seen happen before. All the blood drained from my

boss’s face. The bubbling anger dissipated in a fraction of a second and was replaced instantly with fear. The past months dealing with low staffing, a crap sous, and constant overbookings, meant he hadn’t thought about paperwork. This question was the first time he’d thought of the job that he’d been missing every day for over a month.

Suffice to say, the EHO left, us with a depressing FHRS rating of 3. and a feeling of deflation.

For my boss though, it was far worse. Sticking that 3 rating up would impact his restaurant’s

reputation and revenue. It would solve his understaffing issue, but only at the expense of his

ability to stay afloat. As a business owner now, I know it would have felt like a punch to the gut, and he would have gone to bed every night terrified for the future of his business until we were reinspected. That reinspection took 3 long months to come, and during that time, my boss cut his own salary and didn’t pay himself a penny.

Leafe is born

My experience will not be particularly shocking to the readers of the Burnt Chef Project blog. It is an experience we have gone through and something that is carbon-copied every day in at least one or more kitchens all over the world.

To be clear this isn’t about to be a passionate attack on the work of EHO’s or a teardown of

establishments like the Food Standards Agency. They do essential work. Just in recent history, we saw the lowest number of food hygiene incidents and outbreaks in 6 years. A lot of this is down to the work of the FSA. Yet amongst the piles of admin, it’s easy to lose the thing that got you passionate about hospitality in the first place... the hospitality! How can you possibly focus on ensuring every plate of food, every drink, every greeting every table setting, every glass, the lighting, the music, the signage, the branding, cleanliness and any of the other things it takes to run a successful hospitality business when you’ve also got to worry about your haccp plan, hygiene paperwork, VAT returns, food waste, allergen sheets, tip management, building maintenance, negotiating with landlords and the 1 million things it takes to run a business full stop.

I went through this when as a 21-year-old old I started the Eate collective. The idea was simple.

Find a local venue, convince them to let you do a 1-night only pop-up and then run a ticketed

fine dining event with new, local suppliers and a team of guest chefs from different restaurants working together in the kitchen. The events were pretty much run at cost but allowed new restaurants and new suppliers to talk about their business to guests and network.

It started out great, with the first 6 events going off without a hitch, but as we grew and started to get more serious, the amount of admin and management of paperwork before, during, and after an event became more and more prevalent. I was able to do it, but before long I was completely out of the kitchen. Ironically, spending more time in the kitchen with great chefs was the very thing I had started the collective to do more of and here I was stuck on admin. When looking for a solution to my admin problems around Eate, I wanted something as simple as possible. We were drowning in paperwork, staying later and later after each event just to catch up on all the admin from the day. I found myself saying, “I just want a f**king app”.

I realised I couldn’t be the only one fed up with this dynamic, and if it was affecting me on this

small project it must be killing full time operators.

I signed up for so many websites that professed to be the solution I needed, only to find a

horrific mish-mash of web-only digital forms, all claiming to be an “easy to use” hub. After about 6 months of this, I decided I had to build it myself.

It was time to embrace where I had ended up... to be able to make a real positive difference in hospitality I had to step out of the kitchen for good.

Leafe is an easy to use app that lets you do all the admin and management work you need to run a hospitality business 75% faster than pen and paper.

At its core, Leafe is about simplifying operations: streamlining planning, improving

communication, and reducing the endless paperwork and that constant feeling of

"plate-spinning" we all know too well. That’s why Leafe was founded with the anchoring ethos of “for chefs, by chefs”. Leafe is an app released for the creative, hard-working, hospitality-focused individuals that make the industry tick. It is a way for those people to be able to spend more time on the things they love whilst avoiding having to neglect the things they have to do to keep the doors open.

Why The Burnt Chef Project Matters

Having been pushed into an out-of-kitchen role, and then my choosing to start Leafe solidifying that career move, at first I found myself lamenting the fact I could hardly call myself a chef anymore. So much of my professional and, if I am being honest, personal identity was linked to being a chef-to cooking professionally and being in the kitchen- it felt like a betrayal to myself to not be doing that on a daily basis.

However after several years working to build and grow Leafe, I’ve come to realise how wrong I was to feel that way. Starting Leafe has meant that I am able to meet and experience hospitality in its infinite forms. I’ve been privileged to work with every type of food operation, from fine dining to military catering services, kebab shops and cruise ships. Having that crucial time on the front lines of the industry enables me to go into those various workplaces and know how to have an impact on the individuals who make the place run.The Burnt Chef Project is an example, like Leafe, of hospitality people building organisations for hospitality people. Their mission to address mental health in hospitality is vital, but that isn’t only why you should get involved. You should get involved because their training, resources, and community are made for people who worked in the kitchen by people who worked in the kitchen.

This is a surprising rarity in our industry- why? Because, like me, chefs and hospitality people don’t like the idea of leaving the day-to-day grind of service, and while dedication is important- we need more staff- we also need system change.This can only truly happen if some of us are prepared to step out of the kitchen and use our knowledge and experience to build something impactful. BCP is a shining example of that and an organisation that absolutely needs to exist and grow. We can’t all make the decision to risk our careers and leave the kitchen; not all of us want or are able to, but the great thing about BCP is that you can get involved without taking that leap, and you will be able to impact our industry on a wider scale with programs created by people like you.

So, next time you’re mid-service thinking, surely things don’t have to be this hard; check out the BCP site and see what small thing you can do to change our industry for the better.

Author

CEO of Leafe