Hospitality Meets with Phil Street (2026)

27/08/2026

At 16, Neel Radia FIH had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with his life.

Then somebody suggested hospitality.

What followed included:

• Walt Disney World
• 18 months backpacking around Australia
• Joining the family business “for a year” and staying for around 15
• Being railroaded into a chair role at 26
• Nearly turning down national leadership because he hated public speaking
• Getting media training… then appearing on BBC News almost immediately
• Performing in a hospitality pantomime
• And eventually creating a social enterprise built around kindness and cake

So, naturally, this week’s Hospitality Meets episode is:

The story of the Disney dream, the panto and the cake.

Neel’s journey is full of moments where the obvious route disappeared.

Disney didn’t unfold the way he expected.

The family business became much more than a temporary stop.

A deeply personal experience around food and care gave him a new sense of purpose.

And the thing he was most afraid of, public speaking, eventually became something he learned to step into rather than avoid.

There’s a line he comes back to several times:

“If you don’t try, you never know.”

Which feels like the whole episode, really.

Try the job
Try the role
Try the stage
Try the thing that scares you
Try helping
Try giving something back

And, if all else fails, make cake.

🎧 New episode out now https://linktr.ee/Hospmeetspod or wherever you get your pods

Big shout out as always to the heroes at RotaCloud for their continued support of the show.

19/08/2026

What pairs beautifully with a £250 bottle of Californian wine?

Apparently, a proper dirty kebab at 2am.

This week on Hospitality Meets, I’m joined by Bradley Dorrington AIH, co-owner of The Wine Cellar in Bury St Edmunds, for:

The story of £250 wine, dirty kebabs and a haunted hotel.

And it is every bit as good as that sounds.

Bradley’s journey includes:

• Starting out in a proper old-school pub at 15
• Turning down an apprenticeship with a space company
• Opening The Wine Cellar at just 25
• Building the place in six weeks
• Not sleeping for six days before opening
• A customer asking him to sort out her 26-year-old son
• Naming his daughter Margaux after Château Margaux
(Suggesting this may make her tax deductible)
• A Facebook critic declaring that “wine bars are so eighties”
• And some fairly convincing haunted-hotel stories from Hotels

But my favourite bit might just be the late night kebab

After a wine tasting, Bradley and a fellow hospitality soul ended up sitting in The Wine Cellar at around 2am, eating filthy kebabs while drinking a bottle of wine worth north of £250.

Bradley’s verdict:

“This is hospitality”

And he’s right

Because underneath all the polished service, awards, ambition and beautiful bottles, this industry is really about people, stories, laughter, connection and those slightly ridiculous moments you remember forever.

Bradley sums it up perfectly near the end:

Hospitality makes memories, happiness, conversation and friendships.

Sometimes it also makes a dirty kebab the perfect food pairing.

🎧 New episode out now - https://linktr.ee/Hospmeetspod

As always, a massive shoutout to RotaCloud for their support of the show

12/08/2026

There are startup stories

And then there are startup stories involving:

• Three phones at the zoo
• Personally paying for customers’ food when the AI got it wrong
• A restaurant being called hundreds of times by someone playing music down the line
• And a sales prospect refusing to make a business decision because…

Mercury was in retrograde

Obviously!

This week on Hospitality Meets, I’m joined by Christian Wiens, founder and CEO of Loman AI

Christian and his team are building voice AI for restaurants - answering calls, taking orders, making reservations and helping front of house teams stay focused on the people actually standing in front of them.

But the bit I loved most was hearing what the early days really looked like.

Christian literally walked around a zoo with multiple phones, manually watching restaurant orders come in and fixing them in real time.

If the AI made a mistake?

He’d sometimes just pay for the customer’s food himself

Because apparently “move fast and break things” becomes significantly more expensive when the thing you break is someone’s dinner

And then there was the potential customer who loved the product, wanted to buy…

…but wouldn’t make any decisions while Mercury was in retrograde

I was 48 years old when I heard of that one. You genuinely cannot prepare for every objection

There’s loads in this one about AI, innovation, restaurant tech and the future of hospitality.

But there’s also a lovely human story about one restaurant owner finally getting to take his kids trick or treating because the phones were handled for him

Which is kind of the whole point, really.

Tech removing the noise so humans can spend more time being human

🎧 New episode out now - https://linktr.ee/Hospmeetspod or wherever you get your podcasts

As always, a massive shout out to RotaCloud for their continued support of the show.

05/08/2026

She followed a boy to Thailand

The relationship lasted about a weekend

Hannah stayed for two years

This week on Hospitality Meets, I’m joined by Hannah Swarbrick-Done, founder of The Yellow Group, for:

The story of two left flip-flops and the AI non-exec.

And yes, both of those things are entirely relevant.

We get into:

• Running one of the world’s largest pub crawls
• Guiding travelers around Thailand
• Wearing two left flip flops without noticing
• Designing an entire hostel without a business plan
• The leader who changed Hannah’s career with one simple question
• Why promoting people without supporting them is a terrible idea
• Being told she wasn’t good with data
• Using AI to remove the barriers that once held her back
• Creating an AI non-executive director called Simon
• Building The Yellow Group
• And becoming a golf influencer with approximately 400 followers

But underneath the travel stories, AI experiments and unexpected golf career is a really thoughtful conversation about leadership.

About the people who see something in us before we fully see it ourselves.
About building the right structure around talented people.
And about not allowing the world to completely dictate your mood.

As I apparently said during the conversation:

There are enough things trying to take the smile off your face, so you might as well govern your own smiling ratio.

Whatever that meant!

🎧 New episode out now: https://linktr.ee/Hospmeetspod or wherever you get your pods

As always, a massive shout out to RotaCloud for their continued support of the show

29/07/2026

Sometimes the best podcast episodes begin before I even know there is a story

Eirini Tamousi runs Nectar, a family owned Greek Mediterranean restaurant and cocktail bar in Edinburgh.

One day, a guest was talking to her and said:

“Have you ever heard of Hospitality Meets? I think you should go on there”

I'm a little speechless (Yeah Phil, whatever 😂)

Someone listened to this show, experienced what Eirini and her family had created, and connected the two.

Then Eirini did something equally important.

She reached out.

And thank goodness she did, because this is an absolute belter of an episode:

The story of the restaurant that opened without food

It is a story of:

• Four family members combining very different skills
• Years of trying to make the idea happen
• Investors pulling out
• Finance arriving one day before the deadline
• Family arguments under unbearable pressure
• A broken fryer
• A broken grill
• Opening week without being able to serve food
• And the restaurant’s bins disappearing across Edinburgh

But beneath the chaos is something genuinely moving

It is about the courage to keep going when almost everything is telling you to stop.
It is about learning that people cannot know you need help unless you tell them.
It is about protecting the people you love while building something together.

And it is about honesty becoming part of the hospitality experience.

One of Nectar’s first guests was told:

“There’s no food, but you can have alcohol.”

She still came back

I am incredibly grateful that Eirini reached out but I think you will be too

A story full of passion, heart and authenticity

But I am also so grateful to the guest who sat inside Nectar, saw the story behind the restaurant and thought it belonged on Hospitality Meets.

That is the show doing exactly what I always hoped it might do.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here: https://linktr.ee/Hospmeetspod

And as always, a massive thank you to the awesome folks at Rotacloud for their continued support of the show.

Sometimes the best podcast episodes begin before I even know there is a story so please always reach out if you think you or someone you know has a phenomenal story to tell.

24/07/2026

Uncommon began as a happy accident. A planned residential building in Highbury faced planning issues. Instead of giving up, the idea of co-working emerged. Early conversations were tough, with many skeptical. But with feedback and persistence, the concept grew. Timing was everything, and taking a leap of faith, even with uncertainty, made it happen. -working

22/07/2026

I’ve finally made it

Not in life, obviously

But I recorded a podcast in an actual podcast studio and, for approximately 3 seconds, felt like Steven Bartlett.

This week on Hospitality Meets (supported by the legends at Rotacloud) I’m joined by Chris Davies, CEO of Uncommon, for The story of the office that smells like itself... it'll make sense when you listen.

But honestly, we cover some ground.

We get into:

• University ASBO threats
• A business called Stash Monkey
• Being sued over the word “stash”
• Cold calling private equity firms without really knowing what he was doing
• Why 51% certainty is sometimes plenty
• Why businesses are teams, not families
• Yellow energy
• Happy accidents

There’s also a very real conversation about leadership, culture, building teams, making mistakes and the responsibility you have for the energy you bring into a room.

There's so much gold in here, some brilliant stories and something for everyone

🎧 New episode out now - https://linktr.ee/Hospmeetspod or wherever you get your pods

15/07/2026

This week's Hospitality Meets is... how can I put this... a little different.

Normally I'd be introducing a hotelier, chef, CEO or entrepreneur.

This week...

I interviewed artificial intelligence.

Yes, really. I went there.

No flat white's exchanged hands, in fact there were no hands

Just me... and ChatGPT.

What started as a bit of an experiment quickly became one of the strangest, funniest and actually a little thought-provoking conversations I've had in a long time.

We talked about where AI came from, why it seems to have a sense of humour, whether we should trust it, what genuinely worries it (well... as much as something that doesn't actually worry can), and somehow ended up inventing the phrase "digital adulthood."

There were laughs.

There were moments where I genuinely forgot I was talking to software.

And there were a couple of occasions where it answered with something that made me stop and think.

The episode is called The Story of the Library That Talks Back.

I hope you'll give it a listen.

One question before you do...

If you had one hour with artificial intelligence... what would you ask?

👇 Drop your questions in the comments.

Who knows... they might feature in the next instalment of The AI Files.

As always, big love to RotaCloud for continued support of the show

Listen https://linktr.ee/Hospmeetspod or wherever you get your podcasts

08/07/2026

A luxury hotel General Manager

A lady of the night

A 30cm ruler

An angry gardener

Honestly... this week's Hospitality Meets has it all 😂

I sat down with Rory Slater, Managing Director, London for COMO Hotels and Resorts, expecting to hear about luxury hospitality, leadership and beautiful hotels

We definitely covered all of that...

But we also found ourselves talking about:

- Chasing unwelcome guests through hotel corridors
- Retrieving business cards from underneath bedroom doors with a ruler and sticky tape
- The hospitality practical jokes every chef seems to experience
- An Easter egg hunt brought to an abrupt halt by one very angry gardener
- Building a career across London, Palm Beach, New York, Beijing, Japan and Hong Kong

And amongst all the laughter were some brilliant reminders about leadership, curiosity and having the courage to take opportunities when they come along.

One line really summed Rory up for me:

"You look after your team"

Simple.
Powerful.

A brilliant conversation with one of hospitality's genuine good guys... and proof that some of the best career lessons come wrapped up in the most unexpected stories

A huge thank you to RotaCloud for their continued support of the show

🎧 https://linktr.ee/Hospmeetspod or wherever you get your pods

01/07/2026

Six years ago, I sat in a rather warm hotel room with a hotel General Manager called Robert Richardson, FIH MI and recorded what would turn into episode 4 of the show.

Neither of us knew quite what was about to happen

Since then...

He's become CEO of the Institute of Hospitality.

The Institute has grown to more than 17,000 members.
Membership is at its strongest level in years.

And somewhere along the way, he was accidentally announced in his new role on social media whilst being tagged as... well... let's just say it definitely wasn't the Institute of Hospitality 😂

But beyond the laughs, this conversation goes somewhere much deeper.

We talk about imposter syndrome
The pressure of public speaking
An unexpected cancer scare
The reality of living through an eight-year stalking ordeal
Why leadership is about stewardship, not ownership

And why the stories we tell ourselves are often the biggest barriers we'll ever face

One quote that really stayed with me was this:

💭 "No one develops from a place of comfort"

It's honest.
It's vulnerable.
It's funny.

And it's a brilliant reminder that behind every leadership title is simply another human being trying to do their best

A huge thank you to Robert for returning to Hospitality Meets for a fourth time and, as always, for being so open with his story

And Big love also to RotaCloud for their continued support of the show.

🎧 Link to listen - https://linktr.ee/Hospmeetspod or search "Hospitality Meets" wherever you get your pods

Hospitality Meets with Phil Street

27/08/2026

19/08/2026

12/08/2026

05/08/2026

29/07/2026

24/07/2026

22/07/2026

15/07/2026

08/07/2026

01/07/2026

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