The restaurant critic’s topic sentence says it all: “Yes, financially viable restaurants are about nice meals out. But, as it happens, they are about much more besides.”
Jay Rayner goes on to explain, and I love Jamie Dornan’s testimony about bartending: “It’s great for learning people skills, communication and dealing with wankers. All very handy in entertainment.”
Note that The Guardian of Manchester has no pay wall, and is one of the more reliable sources of information currently being offered from a global perspective. Click the link, take a moment, and think about the hospitality sector in a cultural context.
When pubs and restaurants close, our culture is a casualty, by Jay Rayner (The Guardian)
Before Stanley Tucci was Stanley Tucci, he was just another out-of-work actor striving to make ends meet by pulling front-of-house shifts in a restaurant. “Like so many people in the arts, without the income and flexible hours that restaurant work affords,” he told me, “I would have struggled to support myself until I was able to do so as an actor.” The theatre star Anna-Jane Casey says she needed that work to sustain herself through gaps between jobs. Likewise, the Sherwood and Dear England writer...Read more