For fifteen years, hospitality was my whole world. Hotels, restaurants, events — the kind of work where you’re always “on,” always solving someone else’s problem five minutes before it becomes a crisis. People who know that industry tend to assume the same thing about anyone who’s been in it as long as I have: eventually, you open your own place. This post is about my own career change from hospitality, and why a restaurant was never actually the answer.
I didn’t open one. And for a while, I felt like I owed people an explanation for that.
What Fifteen Years in Hospitality Actually Looked Like
Hospitality teaches you things you can’t learn anywhere else. Reading a room in three seconds. Making a stranger feel taken care of without them noticing the effort behind it. Staying calm when everything behind the scenes is on fire, because the guest in front of you should never have to know that.
It also teaches you what the job costs. Long hours that don’t map to a normal life, holidays spent making sure everyone else’s celebration goes smoothly, and a kind of tired that doesn’t lift with a weekend off. It isn’t really about the hours. It’s about giving so much of yourself to other people’s experiences that you lose track of your own.
That’s the tired I hit eventually. Not one bad day, but an accumulation — the industry itself wearing me down, even while I was good at the work, and even while I still loved parts of it.
Why a Career Change From Hospitality Made Sense
A restaurant would have made sense on paper. It’s the natural next chapter for someone with a hospitality background — take everything you’ve learned managing other people’s spaces and finally build your own. I considered it seriously. But I kept landing on the same problem: a restaurant would have asked me to rebuild the exact structure that burned me out in the first place. Different address, same demands.
So instead, I made a real career change from hospitality — not away from what I loved about the work, just away from the specific format that had worn me down. What never left me, through all of it, was the actual love: for food, for travel, for the specific kind of joy that happens when you put people in a room, a city, or a country together and let something real happen between them. That part was never the problem. The structure around it was.
Building Something New Instead of a Restaurant
Her Hungry Feet started as an attempt to hold onto that part — the joy, the connection — without rebuilding the version of hospitality that had worn me down. Not a restaurant. Not a hotel. Something built around the same instincts, pointed somewhere new: women traveling together, discovering places and food and each other, with someone who actually knows how to take care of a group doing the planning. You can read more about how that idea first started to take shape in my very first post, here.
I don’t think of this as a consolation prize for not opening a restaurant. It’s the better idea, built from everything those fifteen years taught me, without asking me to carry the same weight that made me need a different path. If you’re curious about what burnout in service industries actually looks like from the inside, this piece from Oysterlink is a good, honest starting point.
Where This New Chapter Is Headed
Right now, that means Japan. I’m treating this trip as real, hands-on research for what group travel with Her Hungry Feet can actually be. After that, more details will come together: dates, pricing, the first proper group trip.
But the reasoning behind all of it starts here. Fifteen years of knowing exactly what I didn’t want to rebuild. And finally, the clarity to build something else instead.
If you’ve been following along on Instagram, some of this will sound familiar. If you’re new here, welcome. This is the real story, not the polished version.