Page 47 - The New Gold Standard

Set the Foundation
and me for 15 minutes and told us we could never be like the
guests who came to his hotel. ‘So don’t ever get jealous. This is
for Ladies and Gentlemen—very important people.’
“By the time I started working in the restaurant, I knew the
guests were very important. But a few months later I realized
that the maître d’ I watched every day was just as important
because every guest was proud when he talked to them. Why?
Because he was a first-class professional. He was somebody
special—because of the excellence he created for the guests. So
when I went to hotel school about a year and a half later, the
teacher asked me to write a story describing what I felt about the
business. And I wrote about the maître d’ at my hotel. I titled it,
‘Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.’ I wrote
we could be excellent like he was...absolute excellence.When you
walked into a room, you knew he was there. In any moment all
of us who serve can beLadies andGentlemen,just like the guests.
I think it’s a powerful thing that shouldn’t be missed by the won-
derful people in this industry. They should understand that.”

Former Ritz-Carlton President
Horst Schulze
As a boy growing up amidst the vineyards of Winningen, Ger-
many, Horst Schulze knew that his future lay in hospitality. At age
11, he informed his parents that he wanted to work in a hotel,
though he’d never laid foot in one—or even in a restaurant.
Three years later, Horst quit school to work as a busboy at
the Kur Haus more than 100 miles from home. The young Schulze
juggled his job with weekly hotel school, where he penned the
essay, “Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.”
Horst’s early career took him to Europe’s grandest hotels
and resorts, from work in the ski resort town of Gamisch to
Bern’s legendary Bellevue Palace, Paris’s Plaza Athénée, Lon-
don’s Barclay Hotel, and Lausanne, Switzerland’s Beau Rivage

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