Learning Hospitality Through Food & Community Training, North Wales
You can learn a lot about hospitality from a book but you can't learn the resilience, the grit, the power of a real human connection which comes from hands on hospitality training. For that, you have to get out there. And for us, "out there" has always been North Wales. It's where we cut our teeth in hospitality, and discovered that a business is only as strong as the community that holds it up.
We figured if this place could teach us so much, it could do the same for the next generation. So we teamed up with a group of hospitality students from L20 Restaurant, (Hugh Baird College) in Liverpool to leave the classroom behind and see how it all works on the ground. This is the story of that trip, a deep dive into the real-world connections between food, community, and finding your own path.
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Find the Real Story
The best food always has a story. In North Wales, those stories are about grit. Take the folks at Gwinllan Conwy, who are making award-winning wine in a challenging climate and consistently defying expectations. Or Cosyn Cymru, where a transformed chapel is now home to incredible artisan cheese, proving passion can build something from nothing. On Ynys Môn, we saw it again at Y Cwt Cig, where a new generation is bravely taking the family farm in a new direction.
Get Your Hands Dirty
Before heading over to Anglesey we made a lunch stop at Growing for Change, where the students also learned how the simple act of working the soil can help rebuild lives, connecting food production with a powerful social purpose.
The real test, though, came when we got back to our base. We gathered the day's haul on the counter and tasked the students to take over the kitchen. It was messy, a little chaotic, and absolutely brilliant. We were working together rather than following recipes, allowing them to take the lead, and turning the day's inspiration into something tangible we could all eat. Cementing the connection between the producers and the plate.
Bring It All Together with Food
Everything circles back to our cooking workshop. It's where the stories and connections lined up directly with skills that the students are currently focusing on in their curriculum at college. That lunch, cooked by the students themselves, was the heart of the trip. It was a space to talk, to link the day's work to their futures, and to understand that hospitality is about more than just service.
Our final stop took us to Menai Oysters, where we saw how Shaun and the team work with the tides, not against them. Hammering home the respect for your environment, as well as patience, and collaboration.
We began this journey to find the story behind the food, and the students left with a new experience of their own. They saw firsthand that passion can turn a chapel into a creamery and that a new generation can bravely forge its own path. In the end, by bringing it all together on the plate, they bridged the gap between theory and reality, connecting the stories of the producers directly to their own emerging potential.
