In a cream suit, with a sharp new haircut, Fred Sirieix appears entirely at home in the bar of a glitzy London hotel. And that’s as it should be. First Dates’ host-cum-matchmaker spent his career in high-end hospitality before being “sidetracked”, as he puts it, when telly came calling. Now his new show is taking him right back to his roots: the nitty gritty of hotel and restaurant service.
In Fred’s Last Resort, 12 young Britons looking to change their lives are dropped into a five-star resort on the Côte d’Azur – glittering sea, white parasols and glossy one-percenters in massive shades – to learn every aspect of the hospitality business. There’s £10,000 and a job for the last one standing. Predictable havoc ensues as, thrown in at the deep end, the recruits spill drinks, tell one guest: “Your arse looks amazing”, and are equally revolted by waxy discarded cotton buds and oysters. Many Apprentice-adjacent tropes are present: tasks and team leaders, speakerphone recriminations, terrible decisions and professionals watching in mute horror as the chaos unravels. But the kids, with all their insecurities and anxieties, are very endearing – those you would employ in a heartbeat but also the ones who could age you 10 years in a single lunch service – and it has heart and humour.
I found it stressful, though, I tell him. “What stressed you out?” he asks. Oh, you know, the sense it’s all going to go wrong. “It’s interesting that you find it stressful. When you go into a service like this, for me it’s quite smooth: you know what you have to do, you know how to do it, you know who’s going to do what and when they’re going to do it. It’s just flawless really.”
Flawlessness is a life’s work, though: as the recruits make obvious, there’s no overnight magic. Now 51, Sirieix grew up in Limoges in central France, where his parents were nurses; he has often said how deeply their attitude to patient care inspired his own philosophy. Dinner table conversation, he says, was “always about the patient, about their experience, and the care they were receiving”.
Despite the family’s strong service ethos, his mother “wasn’t overly excited” initially when he wanted to go into hospitality. She pushed him to apply to, and board at, an elite catering college 150km away from home. It was the springboard for his move to the UK, aged 20, to work at Pierre Koffmann’s three-Michelin-starred La Tante Claire in Chelsea, London. He loved the idea of living his life in English, he says, and it didn’t hurt that “being French at that time, when you came to the UK, you were like an exotic animal”.
British receptiveness to other cultures also appealed. “When you’re French, you’re very rigid and disciplined in the way that you approach hospitality and the world of food, so for me to work with Americans, Australians, people from all over the world, opened my mind to a different way to work. I think that made me better, made me richer in the way I was doing my job.”
Sirieix is rightly proud of what he’s achieved. “I’ve always worked hard: I’m first in and last out. But I’ve won every single award there is to win in hospitality, I’ve run very successful places and I’ve always enjoyed it.” That work ethic serves him well in television too: he’s basically everywhere these days with BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 shows; he even pops up advertising Petit Beurre biscuits. “They know I’m going to deliver.”
That pride in a job well done, and the hard work needed to get there, is what he’s trying to inculcate in his Last Resort recruits. It highlights a slightly steelier side to him: supportive, yes, but less avuncular than the matey maitre d’ persona we’ve become accustomed to. “Don’t call me bruv,” he tells Lance, a charming, if self-sabotaging, “content creator”, keen to provide for his new baby, but also apparently keen to avoid work.
He was very clear with the kids, Sirieix says, on what was expected. “It’s about being the best at what you do and not just seeing it as: ‘God, it’s so boring!’ If you think it’s boring, do something else.” Even so, his approach, he says, is miles away from the training he received back in the day. “There was lots of shouting. It was tough.” To inspire this 2023 generation, he says, he needs to “hug them by the shoulder and take them with me”.
The show highlights a basic fact of hospitality work now, he says. “You can’t find people who are already trained up and know what they’re doing; you have to teach them from scratch.” This is his favourite theme and greatest frustration – our failure to value, and invest in, the sector. The government treats hospitality as unskilled; the number of catering colleges has more than halved in the past 20 years from 280 to between 110 and 130, he says. “If you’re a parent, are you going to say to your kid: ‘This is an unskilled profession that nobody respects; why don’t you go and work in it?’” Then there’s Brexit (he has made his feelings clear, protesting on Twitter when asked to prove his status after 27 years and calling it “a con and a lie” in an interview). “We Brexited, but we didn’t put anything in place to replace the people who were not going to come from the European Union. Some 40 to 50% of manpower comes from Europe, so what’s going to happen? You can’t have a robot-led industry – it doesn’t work.”
Our problem is partly cultural: in France, front of house is respected; in the UK, “it’s a stopgap. If you are stupid at school, you can be a chef and if you’re really stupid you can be front of house. That’s the way it is perceived.” Why? “Basically, it’s master and servant – and nobody wants to be the servant.” In France, he says, there’s a deeply felt appreciation of the culinary arts; he grew up with three-course dinners, not the crisps and sandwiches some of his UK neighbours have for tea, and he still sets the table properly to eat. In places where hospitality has cultural capital, “it’s natural it’s perceived as a profession”.
Yet we’re fascinated by the human drama hospitality offers: we gobble it up on screen, as the popularity of White Lotus, The Menu, The Bear and more testify. “People don’t want to work in hospitality; on the other hand they all want to hear stories about the restaurant and the hotel world. There’s movement, there’s lots of people, situations, a lot of things happen.” I ask if he has a particularly memorable working experience to entice people into the business; he tells me about working in a crack “flying squad” of restaurant staff in Monte Carlo in 1990, the magic of the camaraderie in the seafront staff accommodation. “It was such an exciting time to be there, to learn the trade with all these people and do the job I was trained for.”
No one could accuse Sirieix of slacking when it comes to raising his industry’s profile. Before Last Resort, there was Michel Roux’s Service, his first TV show, in 2011, which was also about training young people for front-of-house jobs. In 2013, he launched National Waiters’ Day, a marketing initiative aiming to raise the status of service jobs. Then there’s the charity he founded, The Right Course, which trains prisoners in hospitality skills. “We transform the staff mess into a fully functioning restaurant run by prisoners for the staff.” He has a son and a daughter by an ex-girlfriend, and ran pop-up restaurants at their primary school, getting kids involved in every aspect of the business from marketing to menu planning and service. But these and other small initiatives, he says, can’t replace investment on a national level.
Staffing isn’t the only issue facing hospitality; with people cutting back on luxuries, and food and energy price rises, is it in real trouble or can it weather the storm? “It’s difficult for a lot of people and you can see it every day. Look at the official figures in terms of the number of places that are closing.” (He’s right: there were more restaurant bankruptcies in 2022 than during the Covid crisis). The high end, he thinks, is thriving, but below that, “it’s very difficult”. Restaurants are cutting back on services, which makes working there unsustainable if staff are only offered a handful of shifts each week. If nothing changes, he says, “only a few good places are going to be able to produce the kind of experience that customers expect. The industry is going to go down.” We’re a service economy and tourists, in particular, he says, judge a country on the experiences they have. “If hospitality as an industry doesn’t do well, it’s going to have consequences for the whole of the UK.”
The New York Times recently explored how angry restaurants are becoming: customers demanding more, no-shows rising, restaurateurs trying to fight back, punchups in fast food joints. Does he think the job is harder now? “No! Customers are just the way they were when I started. If you go to a restaurant, you expect somebody to smile and to welcome you and greet you like royalty. You want your champagne or whatever you ordered to come, and you want your food to taste good.”
He has little time, too, for complaints about long hours and tough working conditions. “It’s all-consuming. You’re there at nine in the morning and at 12 at night you’re still there. But if you want to have a quality place, I don’t know how else you can do it.” Big hotels can be slightly more forgiving, he thinks, but work-life balance, for him, is: “If there is work, you work; if there is no work, you don’t work. That’s just the way it is – you’ve got to accept it.” He draws a parallel with his 18-year-old daughter, Andrea, a Commonwealth and European champion diver and BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year, a proud fixture on his Instagram. “Yesterday I said: ‘How are you?’ and she said: ‘I’m so tired.’ She’s got her A-levels; she’s got to train six days a week. I said to her: ‘Andrea, you’re doing the right thing. What you’re doing is very hard and not everybody can do it, but you’ve got to keep at it, keep working hard, keep your head down and know within your heart that you’re doing the right thing.’ I think it’s a way of life.” He likes a sporting excellence metaphor: he describes wanting to play for the Premier League and the “Manchester” of front of house and quotes Muhammad Ali on his hatred of training when I ask about the punishing and much-criticised internships that are a feature at the recently closed Noma and continue at other high-end establishments.
This harder-edged Sirieix is fascinating, but I’m craving a touch of joie de vivre. Is there anything he finds really weird about his home for the past 30 years? “I don’t think there’s anything bizarre – I think it’s lovely.” Not even Marmite? “I have never had Marmite.” Well, how about some first-date advice, from our love guru of the past decade? “I’ve never had any problem with first dates,” he says (he’s now engaged; his fiancee, “Fruitcake”, shared a Celebrity Gogglebox sofa with him last year). “You’re going to meet somebody and you’re going to get to kiss the girl at the end, right?”
Perhaps that’s not surprising: you have to understand and like people to do both his jobs. “People are so different and wonderful, yet we all want the same thing. People need a connection; they want to feel loved.”
It reminds me of something he said about hospitality earlier: “People go to these places for basic needs – they want a bit of love, they want some food, they want to drink, they want to feel warm. It’s very simple.”
He always seems to be enjoying himself on screen. Is he? “I want to have fun! Because life is so pointless!” he says, leaning back, gesticulating and sounding immensely French. “I say ‘pointless’ because one day you die and it’s all gone and nobody will remember and nobody will know anything and I will not know that I was here. I find it … I don’t even find it sad – it’s just a reality and a fact. It’s very pointless and very beautiful at the same time.”
• Fred’s Last Resort is on E4 and All 4 in March.
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