At Wahaca, we are a chain of restaurants. There, I said it. Yes, I’d prefer to call us a collection, a family or a small group but the press/foodie journals love to just attach “chain” to anything over a certain size or age, and that’s that. Chain you are; interesting food innovator you are not.

Chains are perceived to do no good. The public are encouraged to follow suit, and young food lovers and experience seekers persuade themselves – understandably, given the negative sentiment – that a chain is not somewhere for them to be seen. The quality and provenance cannot be good because chains just care about profit…right? 

It is possible to overcome the negative sentiment – Nando’s and Wagamama have done it brilliantly, but with big, big budgets. The likes of Dishoom and Pizza Pilgrims, as great storytellers, have so far avoided the worst of the accusations. But it seems we at Wahaca are burdened with being a chain, and we have to wear it heavy around our necks. Recently, onezone, an app I love, refused to put us on its app because we were “too big, and it doesn’t really do chains”.

This despite there being many businesses on the app whose quality, provenance and care for hospitality don’t get close to what we offer, and certainly not anywhere near the price we offer it. Look, I understand there are some chain businesses that clearly put profit over quality, and who quite frankly don’t care what they serve as long as they can make a buck from it, but there are also some “good chains”. 

At Wahaca, we strive to provide excellent value for the quality and experience you get, and we have a real provenance and care in what we deliver. We painstakingly cook with more than 200 ingredients fresh every day and invest in free range meat and well sourced vegetables and pulses to create dishes I would be delighted to have at any independent restaurant.

Going into a very worrying economic environment, it feels that there is an important place for the “good chain” offering delicious, nutritious and freshly cooked food. Perhaps now is the time for them to be brought in from the cold. 

Some journalists get it. I think Grace Dent is wonderful. I remember being so proud a few years ago when she posted that Wahaca had replaced Wagamama as her favourite chain. It wasn’t a criticism, it was a nod to the investment we had made to what we offer from a quality, sustainable and service point of view. Clare Finney also wrote an excellent piece where she goes through clearly where the likes of Hawksmoor, Wahaca and Dishoom add real value to the consumer in an increasingly expensive world of eating out. 

So, maybe I’m being overly sensitive. Maybe it’s not such a big problem? Alas, for Wahaca, it seems it is. We’ve just come off the back of interviewing a whole lot of 20 to 30-year-old Londoners about Wahaca, and almost without fail, their initial response was negative. The crux of it was: “I would never go to Wahaca because it’s a chain.” I felt the tightening of the noose around my neck when I read this. We then asked them to go and visit a Wahaca and did some focus groups off the back of their visit, and the results were staggering.

The feedback was excellent. If the truth be told, we let ourselves down on a few occasions due to service (the food was bang on every time), but the overwhelming majority (more than 95%) said they had never realised how good we were and that they would definitely come back – and would even want to tell their friends and bring them too. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Laugh in happiness that what we are offering after all these years remains relevant and exciting, or cry because we have been so awful at showing a new generation who we really are.

The next six months feels like such an opportunity to introduce a whole new world of people to Wahaca. Chain or not, I defy anyone to come in and try our sweet potato taquito, our regen beef gringa taco, our beetroot tartare tostada or our freshly made and shaken margaritas and not leave feeling pretty damn positive about what Wahaca is up to. Thomasina Miers (co-founder) and I have an unbelievable sense of pride in what Wahaca offers and are led by a genuine family of champions who wear their love for these restaurants on their sleeves. 

My message: a chain doesn’t have to be a pariah. Some of us genuinely care about our customers, how we treat our teams and the quality of each and every one of our dishes and drinks. A year into opening Wahaca Paddington (which embodies everything we stand for as a business), we are still on 4.9 stars (out of five) on Google, with nearly 1,400 reviews. We must be doing something right! Please go and visit a Wahaca, I’d be intrigued if you think differently. Rant over!

Today I am talking, innovation. Coming up: pineapples, reading glasses, jukeboxes and more. But before any of that, it’s time for the first of not one, but two, Friday Opinion quizzes.

 

Question: Which well-known high street bank has installed a jukebox? And I am talking a proper bank – mortgages, ISAs and overdrafts. And I am talking a proper jukebox – Little Simz to Little Mix and Bowie to Bros. Is it:

 

A: Santander?

B: HSBC?

C: Barclays?

 

Need some more time? Tick, tick, tick. Right, time’s up. The answer is Santander. It has come up with something of a banking revolution at its branch in London’s Queen Street by creating a bank-café-workspace-meeting place all rolled into one. More on this in a moment.

 

Meanwhile, we find ourselves in “Awful April”, with the butcher, the baker, the brewer, the wine supplier and the candlestick maker all upping their prices. Add to this Rachel Reeves throwing in her substantially-more-than-two-pennyworth of operating costs and Trump’s tariff tantrums, and it is little wonder we are battening down the hatches. But be careful that your innovation and creativity aren’t stifled as you batten down.

 

And just to clarify one thing; creativity and innovation doesn’t have to be all singing and dancing. As Ceri Gott (formerly of Hawksmoor and now independent culture and leadership coach) put in so eloquently at Propel’s Talent and Training Conference, creativity can be “a series of micro innovations”.

And how about this as an example of a micro innovation, spotted by my industry chum, Kieron Bailey? There’s a hotel bar that noticed customers kept forgetting their reading glasses and were finding it tricky to read the menus, so what did it do? It created a reading glasses library. You see, innovation doesn’t have to be quirky wackiness. It could be improving a process through a back-of-house technology idea or simply finding a better way to do something you’ve always done in a certain way.

 

Now, back to the Santander work café, I imagine the scenario went something like this. The chief executive is sitting at his desk and there’s a knock at his door. In walk some Santander creative types who want to float an idea past him.

 

“Hi guys,” he says.

 

“Good morning, sir,” one of them replies. “We have an idea.”

 

“Hit me,” says the big boss.

 

“We want to double the size of our Queen Victoria Street branch by chucking out the clutter in the basement and turning both floors into a café bank with free-of-charge meeting rooms,” says the creative type.

 

A colleague pitches in: “Free, even for non-Santander customers, and we are going to sell coffee and cakes, and we are going to install a jukebox, with songs ranging from Bowie to Bros.”

 

“Brilliant, love it, draw up the plans,” says the big boss.

 

Delighted and motivated, the Santander creatives start leaving the office to start bringing their vision to the next stage, but the chief executive calls them back.

 

“Hey, guys, actually…” he pauses, looking each of them in the eye. “Hold the Bros.”

 

Okay, that was a fictional scenario made up in my head, but you get my drift. Santander embraces innovation and dares to embrace change. Scenarios like that play out in our sector and others all the time – maybe not quite the way I describe below, but I bet I’m not that far wrong.

 

“So… I’ve had this idea,” (clears throat).” We turn one of the cubicles in the ladies into (shuffles slightly uncomfortably) a (pauses) disco toilet (throws caution to the wind). Yes, a toilet that with every press of the flusher, turns on disco lights, ABBA and It’s Raining Men by the Weather Girls.”

 

“Yes, love it,” says the Schloss boss. “Let’s do it.”

 

“So,” says one of the team, “we print these golden tickets and then hide them around our pubs, and when people find them, we give them a little treat.”

 

The marketing boss asks: “What’s the return on investment?”

 

“Smiles,” says one of the team. “Smiles on the faces of our customers.”

 

“Love it, let’s do it,” says the boss.

 

“Yes, so remember custard creams?” says Tom in the creative team

 

“Yeah, my nan loved them,” says the marketing intern cheekily. Giggles all round.

 

“Okay, this is what we should do. We coat them in chocolate – and when I say chocolate, I mean we use more chocolate than biscuit, and then we call them the Outrageously Chocolatey Milk Chocolate Coated Custard Creams.”

 

“Genius,” says one of the team. 

 

“A biscuit for every generation,” says Tom, looking at the young intern, “including your nan.”

 

It’s always creative idea day at Fatto A Mano headquarters in Brighton, but this day will never be forgotten:

 

“Right, bear with me on this one,” says one of the team, before declaring: “Pizza for a pineapple.”

 

The silence of bated breath.

 

“Yes, we offer a free pizza to anyone bringing in a pineapple.”

 

That brings us, rather neatly, to our second quiz.

 

Question: Fatto A Mano ran the pineapple-for-a-pizza promotion across its estate of seven pizzerias and achieved daily pineapple redemption levels of:

 

A: Half a sack?

B: Half a pallet?

C: Half a tonne?

 

The answer, my friends, is – and this is not some sort of late April Fool – half a tonne of pineapples a day. And when I was chatting with Fatto co-founder Dav Sahota and head of marketing Izzy England, they told me the intended consequences of the promotion were achieved tenfold – and the promotion generated some absolutely beautiful, heartfelt unintended consequences. And yes, they’re going to run it again. 

 

The one thing all of these ideas have in common is they were born in an environment where creativity and innovation are encouraged. Protect your bottom line – yes, absolutely, of course – but protect innovation generation too. Think more pineapple.

 

A smiling face across the bar, at the table or behind the reception desk is at the heart of good hospitality. It has an effect that the guest may be barely conscious of, but it runs deep. They have been noticed, they are welcome and, somehow, that stranger is here just for you. For a moment, at least, they are important.

 

Smiles are infectious – in a positive way. They make people feel better. Even before a customer has been served their food or drink or seen their room, they’re feeling optimistic about the experience to come.

 

Hospitality operators tend to recruit their customer-facing staff on the basis of personality, including that ready smile. You can try training it in, but it doesn’t really work. Human beings are sensitive to the genuineness of other human beings.

 

Yet, smiling isn’t always easy. The bar is like a stage on which staff must perform, shift after shift, and the fact is that some days they might not be in the mood. And there is training that can help them rise above the humps.

 

I once attended a training session in which an actor shared the kind of techniques actors deploy to ensure that a theatre performance they might have to repeat every day (and twice on Saturdays) seems fresh to an audience seeing it for the first time. One method involves, for instance, imagining that you have a well of energy at the bottom of your stomach that you must draw up each time you go on stage.

 

But what if the well runs dry for hospitality staff? A false smile, or no smile at all, immediately weakens the subtle bond with the guest. And it weakens your business.

 

With that in mind, along with all the other things you’ve got to worry about, the 2025 Hospitality Salary Survey report from software provider Access, which attempts to gauge the mood of staff as much as what they’re earning, is rather troubling. 

 

Only 61% of employees who responded said they were happy in their job, down from 69% in 2024. Only 73% are proud to work in hospitality, down from 80%. They are less likely to be smiling. Okay, it’s one survey, but there’s a sense here that various factors are coming together to form a story that’s not good.

 

If we ask why staff aren’t feeling so happy, the drivers seem clear. Surprisingly, in a time of rising inflation, the proportion of hospitality staff earning less than £30,000 a year has risen from 30% in 2023 to 37% in 2024 to 46% today.

 

And they are working more overtime. For 22% of the survey, up from 16%, it amounts to 16 hours a week over their contracted hours. Worse, 59% are not being paid for that extra work.

 

For three in five of these employees, tips provide a substantial added income – but as their customers start watching their spending, that too is diminishing. The number taking more than £2,000 a year in this way has almost halved. Only a third of those receiving tips now make more than that.

 

It’s often said that money isn’t the only thing that satisfies people working in hospitality, which may be true, but there has to be a limit to how far you can push it.

 

A fair salary was important for almost everyone surveyed, but only half of them thought they were getting one. And while pay is partly about recognition and status, it must also compensate for a soaring cost of living that affects staff as well as customers.

 

As all these negative trends combine, it has another impact – of a kind that can ruin those smiles. A shocking 32% of respondents said their job is having a negative impact on their mental health, up from 25%. 

 

Like I say, it’s one survey, and the responses will be very uneven across the trade. But it would be no surprise, considering the pressures the industry is under, that the people on the front-line are feeling it, doing more for less, and all the while, having to keep smiling.

 

Michael Deakin, an experienced hospitality worker who has lately been blogging about this kind of thing, describes a special relationship between staff and their guests, a kind of glue that sticks the experience together and that makes that community work.

 

When the smile begins to waver, that bond falls into jeopardy. More than ever, when hospitality operators say they are a people business, right now, they have to mean it.

Lastminute.com has just celebrated the 25th anniversary of its initial public offering, when the opening day pop in its share price gave it a value of more than £570m – well above the pre-float capitalisation of £400m. Around this high point of the frenzied dotcom boom, the company’s offices housed a fax machine with a handwritten notice above it that read “The £400m fax machine”.

 

This jokingly referred to the fact that all the online flight and hotel bookings Lastminute.com received from customers had to then be faxed to the relevant airlines and hotels because none of these early online systems were connected, and it was all a rather Heath Robinson combo of elastic bands and sticky tape. 

 

Today, we are looking at a radically different scenario as the growing legion of these online travel agents (OTAs) are using today’s much improved systems and now wield great power over their “partners” in the hospitality industry. They have been incredibly successful at attracting millions of customers who no longer book directly with the operators across the hospitality sector.

 

Indicative of this accumulation of power is the war Ryanair waged over the past couple of years with Lastminute.com and others, including Booking.com, Expedia and Kayak. Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, calls them “pirates”, and his battle with them resulted in the OTAs stopping selling Ryanair flights at the end of 2023. The result was a fall in sales, and the airline had to slash prices to fill its planes. 

 

The normally fireproof O’Leary clearly felt the heat and grudgingly agreed deals with the major OTAs, whereby the customers’ contact and payment details would be passed on to Ryanair. This is clearly an incredibly valuable concession as it wrests the customer relationship away from these third parties. But when announcing these new partnership arrangements, no mention was made of the other major factor in these awkward relationships – the commission paid to the OTAs.

 

The recognised figure is around the 25%-30% mark, which is truly margin-crushing, and yet another killer factor during these especially tough times for the hospitality industry. It’s no wonder that the ideal would be to reduce or eradicate any reliance on these booking aggregators by most hospitality companies. 

 

Another rambunctious character in the O’Leary mould is Sir Tim Martin, founder of JD Wetherspoon, who also took a dislike to the OTA model and no longer uses Booking.com to take bookings for rooms at its growing number of pub/hotels. The business has instead chosen to promote its growing number of hotels (currently numbering 50-plus, with more than 1,300 rooms) through direct means – via its magazine and at the properties themselves.  

 

Having a recognised leader is one way to fight these costly middlemen. The other is having an equally well recognised brand. Simon Palethorpe, chief executive of Haven Holidays – which is now opening JD Wetherspoon pubs on its holiday parks – says the company is in the luxurious position of having almost 100% of its bookings made directly, and that this is possible through having a very strong brand in the marketplace. He suggests the likes of Center Parcs will also be in a similarly strong position.

 

Although Haven has to commit budget to digital marketing on platforms including Google to attract customers, this is still a much better deal than forking out the third-party commissions, and Haven can maintain the direct relationships with its holidaymakers. While the well-recognised brands can take such a route to avoiding the middlemen, they could be a positive resource for smaller operators who are effectively outsourcing their marketing to these third parties.

 

Where life is tough is the middle-ground – it is ever thus – where the brands are insufficiently well known, but the business is of a scale that it needs a high volume of bookings. Of course, the story of middlemen inserting themselves between hospitality companies and their customers is not isolated to the OTAs. The whole industry is awash with them – from table booking solutions to payment providers and food delivery aggregators, and myriad other plug-ins and widgets that promise operators they will revolutionise their business. 

 

These solutions all provide upsides, but their margin-sapping demands are proving increasingly harmful to hospitality businesses as cost pressures mount. It’s time for every company to take stock of what real value these tools are adding and how this balances with the costs they are also ultimately adding to a business. It’s the £400m question.