No peace of mind

Karim Boulet has spent over 20 years in some of the most unforgiving environments for Food & Beverage professionals. He has worked in New York, in Aspen, in remote island resorts in the Caribbean and in the Maldives, ultra-luxury private properties, at Six Senses, and in restaurants for the ultra-wealthy.

I met Karim through Les Roches's campus in Crans-Montana, Switzerland. He breathes his love for good food, great wine, and the best service. He is the type of person who, when describing the evening's special, makes people say: Stop, I'll take that. For Karim, it is clearly personal.

And you can clearly see that depth in how he speaks about what success looks like for an F&B leader. He doesn't use abstract management language. His expertise flows naturally with concrete, practical advice.

Karim sees F&B leadership as an all-in-one role that combines service expertise with the full scope of talent management, including hiring under high uncertainty, hands-on onboarding, continuous performance management, and all the human complexity that comes with people working together. He advocates embracing that complexity and bringing a positive mindset to improving it, if you want to build a lasting career in F&B.

Talent management kitchen. 

Most people like me who haven’t worked in F&B see what is above the surface. The table setting, the plates, the wine recommendation, the waiting time, quality of service and fast pace. What we do not see is the back of the house, the talent management kitchen that makes or breaks all of it.

“It's all in one. In F&B leadership you're going to deal with all of those things. High-risk hiring, hands-on onboarding, continuous performance management, training during service, firing quickly, while making sure your compensation is competitive, dealing with immigration policies and complexities, and then…being good at solving personal staff issues. If a staff member comes to my office with a problem, I'm not going to say 'please go see HR.' I close the door, I offer them a coffee, and I ask what's going on.”

And because F&B is guest-facing, everything becomes visible. There is no buffer between quarters. Guests interact with the restaurant two, sometimes three times per day. That frequency turns talent management into something brutally practical. You see instantly what works. And what doesn’t.

When I asked Karim whether there was any talent practice in F&B that could empower staff, make them more independent, more stable and in turn give leaders some peace of mind, he didn’t hesitate. He said it with no frustration but almost with a smile. He said it as a fact. And that sentence captures a lot of how he sees leadership and talent management. 

“There is no peace of mind in F&B...It’s not possible. If you want peace of mind, you need to find a different department. In F&B you need to embrace the complexity. If you see it as a problem, every day you walk in thinking: which problem am I going to fix today? I don't think that way. I see complexity as an opportunity, not a problem. Every day I think; what needs to change? And I fix it. What can be improved? And I work at it until it’s better. That's how I work and live life. Why? I can’t explain why…that’s just how I'm set up.”

Karim said there is no golden recipe for talent management or leadership in F&B. Humans are complex. Resorts are different. Cultures mix differently. What works in one country might collapse in another. So he observes, reacts, and anticipates. Karim told me he is always observing. He watches how someone greets a table. He listens to the tone. He notices body language. He anticipates tension before it surfaces and reacts in real time. For him, F&B leadership is about constant observing and constant adjustment 

The theater of repetition. 

In environments where the same play is performed every day, excellence is not a mystery. It’s a discipline. Karim compares the F&B operation with a theater where the team performs the same “play” every day. 

"People do the same tasks over and over. There's no excuse not to be doing it better, because this is your practice. You can't close the restaurant and tell guests: Sorry, we have practice today. We're not athletes. For us, operation time is practice time. So you need someone paying attention to what's being missed, and reintroducing the right behaviors over and over."

The challenge is that practice time is operation time, with every service being both the performance and the rehearsal. Karim said that this means a lot of repeating, correcting, reinforcing. Again and again. 

"I assume people don't know. That's my starting point. So I repeat like a parrot. I repeat, and I repeat, and I repeat...If the same task is done a hundred times, there is no excuse for not improving it. But improvement doesn’t happen automatically. It requires repetition and patient leadership. And if you don't have the patience to do that, this job is not for you. I am patient, I see it as something I need to be to develop the team…”

If not parrots, F&B leaders look a lot like teachers. You take advantage of small learning moments, debrief quickly, reinforce behaviors, lead by example, and model standards. All while the theater show goes on.

Very high standards. 

I asked Karim about the gap between high standards and very high standards in F&B. It's a gap that many F&B professionals aspire to cross but struggle to know what closing it entails in practice. As always, Karim’s answer was precise…

“…It's all the details. At what speed do you approach the table? At what moment do you make eye contact? How many centimeters are you from the table when you engage? These things seem small. They are not small. For ultra-luxury, the best training is butler training. I’ve always said that F&B staff should do butler training. The demeanor, the service dynamic, how you address a guest…it's the same whether you're a butler or you're working front-of-house. It doesn't matter if you're asking how they want their shirt pressed or how they like their steak. You're in front of the guest from morning to night. The training should be the same. The performance expectations should be the same..."

In very high-standard environments, F&B service is more than delivering the order correctly. It is about reading the guest, anticipating needs, adjusting pacing, mastering product knowledge, understanding wine, and delivering consistency while personalizing for every guest.

The secret ingredient. 

What makes Karim a rare profile is the combination of operational leadership and technical mastery. A journey that started watching his grandmother cook, continued through culinary school, took him from chef to waiter to sommelier, and eventually to senior F&B leadership. Along the way, he turned into one of those rare people who can speak the language of the kitchen, the cellar, the dining room, and the rest of the operation simultaneously. 

His secret ingredient? Passion. That, I think, is the real differentiator for great leadership in F&B.

That passion shapes how he interviews candidates. I thought it was a brilliant approach for soft skills interviewing when he told me he listens to what he calls "living information". When someone truly has a passion for stellar service to guests and shares their experience delivering it, the answer flows differently. The story has texture. Details come naturally, without effort.

"I pay attention to those emotional cues...Is memory evolving something real in the person in front of me? If it's real, it's going to flow very naturally. There's expression in the face. The eyes. You can tell the information is living. They're not reciting a story or telling me what I want to hear; they're remembering."

For Karim, passion can't be faked for long. And his passion is visible. He can talk like a chef, taste like a sommelier, and lead like an operator. He has been all of them. Those experiences shaped not just his palate but his perspective in the business, in leadership, and what it takes to succeed in both. 

He doesn't describe F&B as a series of problems to be managed or service standards to be met. He describes it as a living, complex, unpredictable system. One that he clearly enjoys and takes full responsibility for every play in the theater, for the guest enjoying it, and for the staff performing it. 

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