Managing Up in Hospitality: Owners, GMs and Opinions

TL;DR: Managing up in hospitality means actively shaping your relationships with owners and GMs rather than just reacting. Chefs who understand what stakeholders care about and communicate clearly keep their kitchens intact.

Managing up in hospitality is not a soft skill. It is survival. And if you have ever stood in a GM’s office being told that the risotto ‘feels a bit heavy for the demographic’, you will know exactly what I mean.

I spent the better part of two decades cooking in hotels, and the thing nobody prepares you for is not the double-service Christmas rush or the fish delivery that turns up on a Friday smelling optimistic at best. It is the sheer number of people who have opinions about your food and the authority, real or imagined, to do something about them. Owners who have just returned from a trip to Tuscany. General managers who ‘used to cook a lot before the kids’. Revenue managers who want to know if you could make the tasting menu a bit more, and I quote, ‘accessible’.

The chef and owner relationship, or the chef and GM relationship for that matter, can be genuinely brilliant. I have worked with hotel owners who trusted me completely and gave me the kitchen I needed to do proper work. I have also worked with one who emailed me a recipe for mushroom soup he had found on a lifestyle website. Both require a strategy.

What Managing Up in Hospitality Actually Means

Managing up is the practice of actively shaping your relationship with the people above you in the hierarchy, rather than simply reacting to whatever they decide. In a kitchen context, that means understanding what your GM, owner, or director of operations actually cares about, and communicating your decisions in those terms, without abandoning your culinary standards to do it.

It is not flattery. It is not politics in the grubby sense. It is recognising that the people signing off on your food spend most of their day looking at spreadsheets, and if you want creative freedom, you need to occasionally speak spreadsheet back to them.

The Chef and Owner Relationship in Hotel Kitchens

Owners are a category unto themselves. Some have hospitality backgrounds and are genuinely useful. Others bought a hotel because it seemed more interesting than a pension fund, and they are learning in real time alongside you. Neither type is inherently wrong to work with, but they require different handling.

The first thing to understand is that owners are almost always thinking about asset value, occupancy, and reputation, in roughly that order. Your food is a piece of all three. When an owner questions a dish, they are rarely questioning your technique. They are worrying about whether a guest will complain, whether the price point will hold, or whether the menu matches the story they are trying to tell about the property.

Get ahead of that. When you launch a new menu, do not just send it upstairs on a printed sheet and wait. Invite the owner for a tasting. Walk them through the thinking. Explain why you are doing grouse in September, what it costs, and what it does for the room’s reputation. Most owners, given a proper explanation and something decent to eat, will get out of your way. The ones who struggle are usually the ones who feel excluded from decisions that carry their name.

Handling GM Feedback on Menus Without Losing Your Mind

General managers are a different challenge. They sit between ownership and operations, which means they are simultaneously managing upward themselves, and their anxiety tends to land on whoever is closest. Often, that is you.

Handling GM feedback on menus requires you to do something that does not come naturally to most chefs: listen past the suggestion to the concern underneath it. When a GM says ‘do you think we need something lighter on the menu’, they probably mean ‘a guest mentioned something about portion size’ or ‘our dietary accommodation requests are backing up’. Find out which one before you respond, because your answer will be completely different depending on the actual problem.

The worst thing you can do is become defensive. I know, because I have done it, and it accomplishes nothing except to make the GM feel they cannot raise things with you, at which point they will raise them with the owner instead. That is not a better outcome.

Kitchen Leadership and Communication Up the Chain

Kitchen leadership and communication within the brigade is something most chefs are trained for, at least informally. Communication with the floors above is something almost nobody teaches, and it shows.

A few things that actually help:

• Write a brief monthly note to your GM or owner. Not a report, not a spreadsheet. Two paragraphs on what is coming into season, what is working, and what you are changing and why. It takes ten minutes and it builds an enormous amount of goodwill over time.
• Frame food decisions in business language when speaking upward. Not ‘I want to use salt-marsh lamb because it tastes extraordinary’, but ‘the salt-marsh lamb is a strong margin dish and it gives us a provenance story that works well with the clientele we are trying to build’. Both are true. One lands better in a management meeting.
• Pick your battles. If the GM wants to add a prawn cocktail to the bar menu because the owner likes one after golf, let it go. Save your capital for the things that genuinely matter to the food you are trying to cook.
• Give people early warning of changes. A new autumn menu is not a surprise if you have been mentioning it since August. Surprises make stakeholders nervous, and nervous stakeholders interfere.

Executive Chef Stakeholder Management: The Longer Game

Executive chef stakeholder management is really about building enough trust over time that you are given creative latitude. That trust is earned incrementally, through consistency, transparency, and a demonstrated understanding that you are running a business as well as a kitchen.

The chefs I have seen lose their jobs, good chefs, technically accomplished people, almost always lost them not because the food failed but because the relationship failed. They stopped communicating. They became reactive. They started treating every piece of feedback as an attack on their craft rather than a management problem to be solved.

The restaurant management hierarchy in a hotel is particularly layered, and it helps to understand who actually has authority over what. The GM controls the overall guest experience and the budget. The owner or ownership group controls strategy and investment. The food and beverage director, where one exists, sits awkwardly across both. Knowing who to go to for which decision saves an enormous amount of wasted energy.

When the Feedback Is Simply Wrong

Sometimes the owner’s suggestion is not just inconvenient. It is genuinely bad food. A request to add a dish that does not belong on the menu, to use an ingredient that is out of season and overpriced, or to simplify something to the point where it loses all meaning.

In those cases, the answer is not ‘no’ delivered with a hard stare across the pass. It is a counter-proposal. Acknowledge the concern, offer an alternative that addresses it, and explain your reasoning. ‘I understand you want something more familiar on the menu. I have been thinking about doing a very good roast chicken, properly done, which I think would land well with that audience and give us something approachable alongside the tasting menu.’ You are not capitulating. You are redirecting.

If the pressure continues and the proposed change would genuinely compromise the integrity of what you are doing, that is a conversation about values and fit, not about menu engineering. Some kitchens are not the right kitchens. Knowing when you have hit that wall is also a form of managing up, even if the direction of travel is toward the door.

The Short Version

• Managing up in hospitality means actively shaping your relationships with owners and senior management, not waiting for them to come to you.
• Involve owners in menu decisions early, through tastings and brief written updates, before they feel the need to intervene.
• When handling GM feedback on menus, find the actual concern underneath the suggestion before you respond to the surface request.
• Frame food decisions in business language when speaking upward. Provenance and seasonality are not just culinary values; they are margin arguments and reputation arguments too.
• Pick your battles. Spend your goodwill on the things that genuinely matter to your food and your kitchen’s identity.

The chef and owner relationship, at its best, is one of the most productive partnerships in hospitality. The owner brings the room, the investment, and often a genuine passion for what they are building. You bring the food. It only works if both sides feel they are being heard. That does not happen by accident.