It Started in Restaurants… Just Not How You’d Expect -

There’s something about matchbooks. They used to be everywhere. You opened a restaurant and you ordered the essentials. Placemats, coasters… and a pile of branded matchbooks by the door, ready for the taking. People collected them like tiny trophies. Little paper souvenirs that said, “I’ve been somewhere.” You’d leave with one in your pocket without even thinking about it.

But it was never really about the matchbooks. It was about what they stood for. A moment worth remembering. A place that stuck. Something small you could take with you that said, that was good, I’d go back. And while the matchbooks have gone, the feeling hasn’t. I’m still holding onto those moments. The ones that quietly dragged me into this industry… and never really let me leave.

Over the course of the next couple for posts, I am sharing a quirkier side of my young dining experiences.

I’ve been thinking about the hospitality moments that have stuck with me since I was a kid. There are a handful of restaurants that never really left me. Not because the food changed my life, and not because someone explained the provenance of a 60 year old aged piece of beef, but because something happened. A moment that somehow turned into a memory. Which, whether we like it or not, is the whole game.

None of it came from anything structured or written down in a training manual. It came from restaurants where things didn’t always follow a rule book… but somehow, they still got it right.

I’m talking about places where you were encouraged to throw peanut shells on the floor like it was part of the experience, where soft, spreadable butter felt like a life changing event, where you could fall asleep mid dinner and someone would quietly hand your mother a cushion instead of making it a situation, and where, at one point, turning ketchup and mustard into something that should never legally be called a milkshake was met with laughter rather than concern.

Looking back now, after years of working in this industry, it’s funny how those moments still hold up. Different world, different standards… but somehow, the feeling still feels right.

By today’s standards, half of that would trigger a meeting. Someone would step in, someone would write a policy, someone would find a way to remove the fun just to be safe. And yet, somehow, I didn’t grow up feral. I didn’t forget my "please" and "thank you". I didn’t lose the ability to function in public. I just remembered how those places made me feel. Which is slightly inconvenient, because it suggests that hospitality isn’t built on perfection or control, but on moments. Messy ones, human ones, the kind you can’t quite standardise without killing them.

Those places were perfect… just not in the way we usually define it. They had moments of polish, sure. But it was the mix, the contrast between things being done properly and things being allowed to feel a bit loose, that made them stick. They gave you something to remember, and a reason to come back.

So maybe if we took a page from this and relaxed a little, we’d stop strangling the life out of hospitality and actually make it enjoyable again .

And it often started with something as simple as a floor covered in peanut shells, and no one panicking.