The Caterer interview Zuleika Fennell As chief operating officer of arguably the most
revered restaurant group in the UK, Zuleika Fennell has the enviable task of executing the strategy of her visionary bosses, Jeremy King and Christopher Corbin. In her first major interview, she tells Amanda Afiya why empowering women is part of the plan
You have an unusual name, where does it originate from?
My mother was a dancer, trained in ballet, and my father [David Fennell] was an actor in Crossroads, for his sins, and they met in the West End. My name came from a play my father was doing at the time, based on the book Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.
Where did you grow up? Mostly in Buckinghamshire. My father – as many actors and actresses end up doing – went into hospitality. He opened a series of pubs and country inns with great restaurants attached to them, and so from 14 onwards I was working in one business or another, washing dishes, serving desserts, working on reception and the bar and working my way up to being a waiter. That’s where my passion for hospitality came from, to be honest.
You studied politics at university. Were you thinking of a different career?
All I had ever wanted to do was go into the theatre. I trained as a singer in school and university, and was actually at school with one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sons. In fact, he came to a school production and saw me there and wanted to pull me out of school to go into musical theatre. Both of my parents said that over their dead bodies was I going to drop out of education and go into musical theatre. They kept saying to me, just do your GCSEs, and I did those, and then they said, “Well, just do your A levels. You’re a singer, so you can come back to it at any time”, so I did my A levels, and then they said “Well, you’ve done so well now, why don’t you do a degree?” When I finished university, I thought I’d kind of missed the boat on the singing thing, although looking back I don’t think that was
necessarily the case. But by that stage I had become so turned on academically that I just wanted to get into the working world and make my way. Plus, the competition in the stage and theatre and music worlds is so fierce and I think when you are a young girl, suffer- ing from confidence problems, the entertain- ment industry probably isn’t the right one to go into. With hindsight, my parents were probably steering me in the right direction.
Why do you think you had confidence problems?
As a younger woman, I think I was a really anxious person. As a child, I was never good with change and it made me very unsettled. My parents moved around a lot – they bought new businesses, turned them around and sold them, so we were uprooted regularly. I also grew up with three incredibly confident sib- lings who were always fighting for attention.
After your degree you went to Australia. I considered Westminster and the world of politics and, oddly enough, when I look at the future, maybe 10 years from now, it might be a nice second career, but at the time it seemed like such a back-stabbing environ- ment; a really harsh, male one. So I decided to take a year off and go to Australia to do a bit of travelling and see what I wanted to do when I came back. But of course, with my hospitality background, I ended up moving around hotels in Australia for five years.
So why did you leave Australia and, more specifically, hotel operations?
The only reason I got out of the industry on the ops side was because I was unlucky enough to be a passenger in a very bad car crash. I was an inch-and-a-half taller than I am
“Somebody needs to go around behind entrepreneurs, putting all the structure and the processes in place to make sure their vision is being executed correctly”
24 | The Caterer | 20 March 2015
www.thecaterer.com
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRAIN FRANKLIN/HOSPITALITY MEDIA
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