Annamarie Chestnut opened her first restaurant, Annamarie’s, at 19. Thirty-three years later, she runs two locations and is expanding the original. It is a family-run business, and she is self-made, built in and for the community she serves. Somewhere along the way, she started teaching employees things she once assumed people simply knew. How to read a table. How to notice the guest who has been waiting. How to make someone feel considered rather than simply served.
That experience exposed a gap the industry has been slow to name. National Restaurant Association research projects that the industry will add more than 100,000 jobs in 2026, bringing the total to 15.8 million. The people arriving are new to the work. The assumption that hospitality comes naturally has less to stand on than it used to.
Service and hospitality are not the same thing, though they are often treated as if they were. Service is execution, such as menus, timing, procedures, and standards. Hospitality is awareness, judgment, and human connection. It is reading a table and adapting. It is anticipating a need before it becomes a request. QSR Magazine describes the difference plainly: service is functional, hospitality is emotional, and service creates satisfaction while hospitality creates loyalty.
Chestnut places it as an equation. “Service, attitude, relationship: you need all three,” she says. A server who delivers every plate on time and never makes eye contact has done the first part and missed the rest. A server who tells a table about their dog while the food sits in the window has confused personality with hospitality. Both are doing something. Neither is giving the guest an experience they will return for.
The distinction has commercial weight, and the data now supports what she has observed for years. Intouch Insight found that guest satisfaction fell from 98.9% to 31.2% when service shifted from friendly to unfriendly, even when the operational elements remained unchanged. Nearly 22% of guests left without a basic thank you. Chestnut says, “Force-feeding someone at a high speed is certainly not hospitality. That is transactional.”
Chestnut’s own numbers tell the same story. About 70% of her customers are repeat customers, by her account. That kind of loyalty does not come down to location or menu alone. Chestnut believes it is also built in the way people are made to feel when they walk through the door. She is candid that she cannot attribute all of it to herself, but she is equally clear that when she is in the building, the day tends to go better.
Her background shaped that view. Her parents were old-school. They taught her that if someone chooses to spend their hard-earned money with the establishment, they deserve the best experience that can be given. For the first 20 years, she cooked in an open kitchen, where she could hear what was happening, see what was happening, and speak to customers even when she was not serving them. That proximity taught her what hospitality looks like in practice, and it is why the business remains rooted in the community that built it.
The pandemic changed the workforce she hires from. Restaurant workers left the industry, and the people who came in were younger, less exposed to the rituals of hosting and gathering that once transmitted hospitality by example. For a time, she wondered whether the problem was her management. She read books on being a better manager. She built systems. The systems helped. They did not close the gap.
What she teaches now is not complicated, but it is deliberate. “Attitude is way more important than experience or personality,” she says. She sends training videos daily. She holds table meetings. Some employees rise to the occasion. Some leave within an hour and a half. The ones who stay tend to become the ones customers ask for by name. She says, “I don’t claim to be an expert in anything. A little common sense and some pride in your work can take you a long way.”
The lesson is not that younger workers are worse. It is that hospitality, like service, is a skill. It can be taught. It can be practiced. It can be trained with the same intention restaurants already apply to menus, timing, and standards. Treating it as something employees either have or do not have leaves the outcome to chance. Training it deliberately puts the outcome back in the operator’s hands. If hospitality is the thing customers actually return for, why would any restaurant leave it untaught?
