This week the Guardian featured the family who run the Checkers restaurant in Wales – they’ve returned their Michelin star because business was overtaking their family life. Kathryn Francis, who runs it together with her sister Sarah and her partner found the success difficult to balance with caring for their children.
And they made the very brave move of changing how they operate, becoming more accessible to more people, finding more balance in their lives, and of course more time for their children. According to Kathryn, “You have to decide what’s most important for you. Working late evenings and having kids is difficult. It’s not a problem exclusive to hospitality. Many people in other jobs struggle to get a balance. Kids need you to be around and they still need you when they are teenagers. It’s about striking a balance between life and work. We got to the point where we thought, this isn’t sustainable.”
I love this story because they did something that’s not easy to do: choosing what matters most to them, even more than the validation they got for their food. Isn’t it great that we’re giving ourselves the permission to do this in our industry?