To Örebro University

The need for competent hospitality workers is significant for the sustainable development of the restaurant industry. However, with the recurring challenges of recruiting and retaining a competent workforce, there is a need to understand how employers portray and communicate hospitality work in the recruitment process. Therefore, this study examines how employers construct the image of the hospitality worker, by analyzing what job advertisements signal and communicate to the applicants. Through thematic analysis of 100 job advertisements in Sweden, we found that the ideal hospitality worker is an individualized team player with occupational passion. This means that social capacities and commitment to hospitality and gastronomy, factors that are difficult to measure, are of relevance to gaining employment. Additionally, by asking for social capacities, the distance between work and leisure is diminished and the employee is constructed as a commodity for the purpose of improving service. In contrast to the common image that hospitality work is work that anyone could do, we conclude that the qualifications for becoming a hospitality worker in the restaurant industry are fairly complex.

Interest in having an occupation that connects with consumption practices of taste has increased in the contemporary creative economy. In addition, the restaurant scene in Sweden as well as globally has recently been moving towards a casualisation of high-quality restaurants, which presents new questions about how to understand and practise the work in restaurant dining rooms. The study focuses on dining room professionals working in an evolving culinary restaurant scene, with the purpose of investigating them and their search for sense in contemporary restaurant venues. We use identity perspectives and hospitality as concepts to understand how the professionals create meaning in their work through interviews with professionals working in a subset of restaurants in Sweden. With such an emphasis, this study identifies a certain culinary hospitality identity that needs creative spaces, social exchanges and the idea of authentic materiality to make sense of the restaurant work. In contrast to the way dining room work has traditionally been pictured, this article shows that the industry needs to understand hospitality professionals who put their own authenticity in the foreground, which also guides their choices about where to work and how to perform in these contexts. This also helps the industry to become more attractive, as it is in a vulnerable position after the coronavirus pandemic.

The restaurant industry is currently experiencing a shift in taste judgements. Practices and discourses on taste are communicated and expressed in contexts where food enthusiasts meet, resulting in a complex debate about the production and consumption of “good and bad” taste. This study aims to explore the intricate dynamics that shape the performances of dining room professionals in contemporary restaurants. Based on autoethnographic fieldwork at two restaurants in Sweden, this study uses cultural taste and dramaturgical theory to understand the social processes in restaurant culture. The results demonstrate how dining room work is organized within an unstructured environment through organic service, aesthetical framing, and self-representation. Based on these findings, the article argues that the interplay between the restaurant’s ambiance and the self holds value in shaping specific hipster hospitality. For instance, this is achieved through the blurred line between frontstage and backstage. This study contributes to the understanding of the changing role of work in contemporary restaurant culture, in which a less pronounced distinction between private and public, and between formal and informal service are some of the elements.