Behind the scenes of one of London’s great hotels

By Albert Ward

Hotels, Orwell once wrote, are where ‘a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.’ This link draws us in: the sumptuousness of the world above; the dissonance with the realities sustaining it below. I had worked in hotels before; I wanted to know what it was like to work in one which was truly conceited, where this dissonance was most extreme. So, in the summer of 2021, I applied for a job as a dishwasher in the Hotel Grand, one of London's most famous. 

I spent most of my time in the hotel’s pantry, the small room above the main kitchen where food was prepared before being sent out to the restaurant. It was loud and cluttered. The metal counters lining the walls rang out with each tap; people yelled constantly; a receipt printer spat out orders every few seconds. There was a constant stream of staff charging up and down the long, narrow room. To step out from your workstation into this torrent was impossible at peak hours. Through the double doors at the end, waiters glided about serenely on the restaurant floor. How the guests never heard such sound and fury, I have no idea.

In my first few weeks, I was trusted only to polish wine glasses. In a place like the Grand, this is an art: at once intensely demanding and hopelessly boring. The process must be repeated perfectly and leave no trace on the glass. In the mornings, when footfall is light and you have just woken up, it is bearable. Towards the evenings, and particularly once the afternoon tea rush begins, it becomes outrageous. Imagine that you have already been standing for eight hours with little break, doing much the same task, pouring sweat. Now the work doubles, and you must polish at a rate of one every five seconds, while in one ear two waiters are screaming at you to hurry up, and behind them another three line up to do the same. Of course, if you do speed up, you will miss some fingerprint or limescale mark, all the while knowing that your work is inspected regularly by managers. When they see that you have missed something, you will be lectured about the unimpeachable reputation of the hotel. This goes on all day. By the end, you are all raw nerves. 

The pantry was always full. Most of the people there ignored me if they could. I spent most of my time with Bilal, a Moroccan who stood at the sink next to me. He had a brutal work ethic: it was only his enthusiasm, and my guilt towards him, which kept me going. ‘Hey, how you today, man?’ — all his sentences involved ‘man’ — he would bound up and ask every morning. He was adamant that the Grand was a shining light in high-class hotel work. ‘Man, you know this is the best hotel I’ve worked in,’ he said whenever I complained, and he had worked in many. The other staff were very different. The cadre of managers never did much other than make everyone uneasy. Even the maître d’, who hid in his office and never waited on guests, was wary of them. The huge numbers of service staff who supported the running of the hotel and who were paid the lowest wages — the cleaners, porters, busboys and the like — I only ever saw on trips to the laundry room or at lunchtimes. I never much saw the chefs; they were an oddly quiet group, eating their meals apart, and only rarely venturing up into the pantry from the kitchen below.

***

After enough hours in the pantry, I was offered a trial contract as a waiter. It was the first time I had been in the restaurant, a moodily lit, cavernous space with ruched curtains and a deep-red carpet. There was not, it turned out, much I was going to be charged with. I spent most of my time laying tables, scurrying to the pantry whenever guests came to sit. Like polishing, even this simple task was performed to freakish standards. Each waiter was outfitted with a ruler to measure exactly the correct ratios between cutlery, and the distance from chair to table — all details the guests almost certainly never noticed. 

The overwrought and imperious waiters I had known in the pantry were very different on the restaurant floor. They replaced tension with grace and composure. Their gazes lifted; to let a guest go unattended for more than a minute was unacceptable. For this reason, the hotel employed an army of them, nearly one for every three diners in the restaurant on some shifts. The work was easier, though, and I felt I had progressed in social standing significantly. I even found myself treating the dishwashers with the same disregard as everyone else had treated me, talking only to other waiters and demanding plates brusquely.

The increased prestige of waitering came with conflict, however. One occasion stands out. The senior manager, Simon, drew all the waiters together in the back of the pantry at the end of the day and stared at us, furious. He held up his phone; on it we could see a photo of a receipt for afternoon tea, price £481.23. He swiped to the next picture. ‘Now look at this.’ We saw the card machine receipt, reading £4,812.30.

A waitress quivered at the edge of the group. Simon worked his way around the group toward her, feigning obliviousness. ‘We’re checking the CCTV,’ he told us gravely. 

The waitress broke straight away. ‘It was one mistake, and an easy one to make! I’m sorry!’ 

Simon nodded, his smile not quite reaching his eyes. The rest of us were dismissed. The waitress stayed behind. 

Hostile scenes like this over trivial mistakes were common. I have no idea if the guest was ever refunded. It would hardly have mattered, since they had seen and accepted that price. The kind of person who dines at the Grand without checking the bill is not one who worries about money. The waitress, by the way, was fired.

***

It was not so much the hours, the poisonous atmosphere or the environment which made the hotel so unpleasant. These are not unique to hospitality. It was the demand that you care deeply about the work. I was a lazy dishwasher, and a worse waiter. I have worked in catering; I have served plenty of repellent people. If you have done any of these in an average place, you can at least seek solace from the drudgery in a kind of sardonic detachment. You can joke, mess around and slack. Both you and your customers know that the job is boring, but you need maintain no pretence. It is work and you are paid for it. At the Grand, this is impossible. It is never a job, but a ‘passion’, a ‘love’: these often passed the managers’ lips. You cannot just wash dishes; you must treat each as if preparing a meal for a partner or best friend. You must be more a friend than a waiter, albeit one who is entirely servile. 

The mentality of waiters at such places is thus unique. To be a good waiter is to spend a long time in the presence of the very rich. Yet, while you become these people’s friend, while you school yourself in their lives and tastes, you will never be one of them. You imagine yourself at their table, participating in the meal, though you never will. Certainly, you will not be treated as on their level, no matter how much they humour you. You become a snob, but only a vicarious one. 

After even a short time at the hotel, it is easy to be drawn under the comfort blanket such servility affords. The nicer guests make you feel as though you really are their friend, or at least their confidante, and the indifferent ones you nonetheless lionise for their wealth or fame. Proximity to them was enough. I became drawn into the celebrity of the hotel so much that I wanted to show its guests an exceptional time and, when the kinder guests complimented me, I felt great satisfaction. I was their friend, and we were dining together, after all. I started to take an interest in the apparatus of their wealth, an attitude which extended to even the lowest levels of the hotel’s social hierarchy. During staff meetings, conversation would regularly shift to the flagship suites: Had we seen them? What were they like? The few who did not espouse this enthusiasm were always viewed with suspicion. If you were working here, why wouldn't you think like this? 

This commitment to be someone’s friend and not just their servant, and therefore to provide them with a ‘unique’ experience, is a fiction with which all great hotels delude themselves. It is utterly superficial. The Hotel Grand did bring out a complementary cupcake with ‘Happy birthday!’ traced neatly in chocolate icing on it, and each time the guests would cry out in delight at such a thoughtful gesture. But far down in the kitchen there were miles upon miles of shelves with such thoughtful gestures: identical lines of identical cakes with ‘Happy birthday’ and ‘Congratulations’, each waiting for a name to be appended. A guest had received one before? No problem. There was always another thoughtful gesture available: a ‘personalised’ card, a trinket or other memento of your visit. The hotel kept extensive records on each guest for this purpose, this demonstration of spontaneity. 

It is not as if the hotel cares about all its clientele either. Most of the guests who come to the Grand are, as Simon the manager euphemistically called them, ‘not usuals’. They weren’t always tourists; often they were quite wealthy, just not steeped in the traditions of the hotel. They were treated with disdain. This snobbishness is really an extension of the servile mindset, for the waiters only care about the exceptional guests — the minor royals and Hollywood celebrities — whom they take to be the true ambassadors of wealth. Everyone else is utterly false. Worse, they are infringing upon a place the waiters see as holy. 

I had only spent a few weeks at the hotel, but it was enough. I handed in my resignation at the end of one Thursday and was escorted out immediately. Why do so many stay, though? Some, such as the migrants, perhaps had few better options. But far more loved the work, particularly the waiters. They were obsessed with the life: with its perceived prestige, rituals, and the bearing one adopted while doing it. This is strange, because the friend-servant paradox will never trouble the guests. It makes no difference to them whether staff really care about what they are doing or imitate such care. But it matters greatly to the waiters, for it dooms them forever to a life of degrading servitude. Waiters in places like the Hotel Grand work long hours in bad conditions to pursue this, without realising the contradiction, giving up any hope of good wages, better hours, secure work, or respect. Were they not to place this life on a pedestal, they might see it more clearly. They might recognise the impotence of their situation and demand a better lot, or leave altogether. 

Surely a failure to do this is one of the reasons why union membership in the hospitality industry is so low (though reliance on migrant labour and temporary contracts are also influential). I doubt these cautions will be heard. Many of the people I left behind had committed, and were content, to manufacture lives and friendships with the guests at the sublimation of their real ones. They performed each task, no matter how menial, as if the guests were watching. They provided, in every new encounter, the appearance of novelty. And yet they were not resigned to it; they exulted in it.

The names of people in this story have been changed to preserve their anonymity.

ALBERT WARD is reading for a DPhil in Politics. He always wishes he'd picked English.

Art by Esther Goddard