The Instinct We Lost in Hospitality — And How to Bring It Back
Somewhere along the way, hospitality lost its instinct. Spaces have become too neat, too finished, too commercial. Here is how we find our way back.
Spaces have become too neat, too finished, too commercial. Everything is polished to the point of sterility. Restaurants are increasingly disconnected from the food, from the people, from the street itself. Authenticity has been engineered out of the experience, replaced with glossy surfaces, oversized budgets, and a misguided obsession with "completing" absolutely everything.
But hospitality was never supposed to be a showroom. It was supposed to be human. Textured. Honest. Alive.
Texture Over Perfection
We’ve forgotten that the most important touchpoints are the simplest ones: the table, the chair, the warmth of a kitchen that feels like a real workspace rather than a staged set.
Dull the lights everywhere else and let the honest parts shine. You don’t need $500 feature lights scattered across the ceiling. You need craftsmanship with a story—something made by real hands, not a catalogue.
Spend money where people touch and connect. Not everywhere.
Simplicity Is Not a Trend — It’s a Return to Instinct
Menus don’t need to be large. Surfaces don’t need to be perfectly finished. The space doesn’t need to look like a hyper-curated retail lobby.
What matters is the relationship between the kitchen, the staff, the food, and the guest. When artists, builders, designers, and chefs collaborate from day one, the result is naturally coherent. The space, the people, and the food all speak the same language.
The Cost Crisis Is Warping Hospitality
The industry has become painfully expensive to start and impossibly expensive to run. Compliance, permits, consultants, overheads—we’ve created a restrictive infrastructure so tangled that it consumes the very energy needed to create good hospitality.
We’ve designed a system where operators spend more time managing paperwork than shaping beauty. The result? Spaces that look like copies of copies because no one has time left to think, let alone imagine.
We need more venues on train lines, more flexible zoning, more political appetite to free small business. Without structural breathing room, creativity suffocates.
Reconnect the Restaurant to Its Sources
Food doesn’t arrive from a vacuum—it comes from growers, trucks, crates, soil. Why hide that?
Imagine design that expresses the whole chain: the farmer’s crates rolling in, the truck’s markings echoed in wayfinding, the raw materials visible and celebrated, not hidden out the back.
And then there’s the waste. The sheer wastage—labour, materials, energy—is staggering. Joost Bakker showed what’s possible when you treat waste as a design material. Yet most venues still mix everything into a single bin because the system is built to discourage alternatives. Again, it’s not a lack of care. It’s a system that blocks care.
We Need a Renaissance — Art Is the Path Out
Right now, the enemy in the room is a mindset: the box-thinkers, the blockheads, the ones who panic when something doesn’t fit an existing category.
We don’t beat that mindset by complying harder. We beat it by creating outside of it. We need artists—true artists—to rise up again. We need loopholes, grey areas, the raw sculpture of ideas. We need spaces carved out for experimentation, not spaces squeezed into pre-approved containers.
You can’t change a system from inside if the system doesn’t want to change. You change it from the edges—the cracks, the nooks, the margins—just like permaculture teaches. Work with the whole system by starting where it is alive.
Inception. Build. Operation. One Whole.
Hospitality works best when the idea, the build, and the operation are not separate phases but one continuous organism. When chefs shape the layout, when builders respond to the workflow, when design grows out of the way the space will actually be lived in.
That nucleus—inception, build, operation—is where the beauty lives. Not in the box-ticking. Not in the glossy finishes. Not in the over-designed shell.
How to Make This Real — Practical Strategies for a Tough Commercial World
This is the hard part: how do you keep the art and the instinct when rents are crushing, labour is expensive, regulations are exacting, and capital is tight? The bad news: there’s no silver bullet. The good news: there is a coherent tactical path that lets you prove the idea before you blow the budget—and a set of structural alternatives for when you scale.
1) Lead with marketing & prototyping — validate before you build
Design the idea virtually first. Create strong visuals, a narrative, film a simple promo or proof-of-concept video, and map the customer experience before signing leases or ordering fitout. Build the tribe first. Use social channels, community events and pop-ups to gather an audience.
2) Reduce upfront capital, iterate with used & local materials
Use second-hand furniture, regional hardwoods, reclaimed steel—the aesthetic is purposeful and cheaper. Prioritise durable, clean surfaces where hygiene matters and leave other surfaces raw and honest.
3) Rethink ownership & labour economics
Staff equity and co-ops. Explore models where staff take a smaller wage in exchange for ownership shares, profit-share, or time-vested equity. This aligns incentives and reduces fixed payroll pressure.
4) Funding alternatives & ecosystem finance
Community shares & crowdfunding. Invite locals to buy into the project with clear benefits. Grants and cultural funds. Barter and in-kind. Collaborative investment vehicles.
5) Work the political and planning angle
Partner with local councils, business improvement districts and regional development agencies early. Form coalitions with other small hospitality operators to lobby for zoning flexibility.
6) Operational design that reduces waste & cost
Design for material reuse and closed loops from day one. Create supply networks with seasonal, local procurement to shrink transport costs and strengthen relationships with growers.
7) Incubators, shared infrastructure & collaborative spaces
Shared kitchens, washing facilities, cold storage co-ops and delivery hubs reduce capex and operating costs. Incubators can host rotating chefs and pop-ups, enabling experimentation with shared risk.
8) Measure, iterate, and publish the learning
Treat every activation like R&D. Measure yields, labour hours, average spend, waste, and the qualitative community impact. Publish honest case studies.
This Is Bigger Than One Business
If this movement is to succeed it needs more than entrepreneurs—it needs designers, artists, chefs, local government, small investors, and communities to think together. It will require political pressure: zoning reform, incubator funding, simplified compliance for low-risk activations. Short term, that means tactical actions you can take now. Long term, it means coalition building and cultural shifts.
We can make beautiful hospitality that’s humane, honest and regionally truthful and commercially resilient—but it takes strategy, creativity, collaboration, and the courage to prototype in public. Start small, prove value, and scale in ways that preserve the thing that makes the space worth visiting in the first place: its story, texture and people.
