Rachel Orange on loving Hospitality more than ever

©  Rachel Orange, Schofield’s Bar

From working in the village cricket club to being bar manager at SCHOFIELD’S BAR, Rachel Orange has never been more grateful to work in hospitality. She talks being a better manager, why hospitality is colourful and the people who inspire her.

Rachel Orange’s first job was in her local cricket club in her small seaside village in the north of England. “Everybody from my village grew up playing cricket. On a Friday night it would put on coaching for the kids and then the parents would come down and have drinks. I’d be washing glasses, jumping behind the bar, just giving everyone a hand. That was my first hospitality experience.”

And the woman who ran the bar had a huge influence on Orange. “Her name was Shell and she was the warmest person that you’d ever meet,” she says fondly. “She was from Somerset and always had pink hair in the summer, and then in the winter it would be blue and purple. I was just obsessed with her. She took such good care of everyone - I remember wanting to be like her when I was older.”

Fast forward a couple of decades and Orange is now the bar manager of one of the UK’s most revered bars, SCHOFIELD’S BAR in Manchester. Run by brothers Joe and Daniel Schofield, classics and signatures are served with some of the best hospitality in the business, and Orange is in charge of keeping the bar and its team running at the high calibre its guests have become accustomed to.

©  Rachel Orange, Schofield’s Bar

Orange has fond memories of growing up by the sea and home-cooked food. “My mum cooked a lot of fish and seafood and my dad made a mean Sunday roast too. I suppose being in the north, we were also partial to a pie.” Spending her childhood by the beach also meant that Orange always dreamed of being a marine biologist - she loved spending time in the water, her mother constantly dealing with the sand in the family car.

But when she went off to university in Newcastle, she stepped back into the world of hospitality, working in nightclubs to support herself financially. After a stint at Perdu, she joined Alchemist which, now a big chain, was a lot smaller when she worked there. They gave her the opportunity to move down to Manchester to open another site - and this was when her bartending career really started to fly. “I think as soon as I started doing hospitality full time, I knew that this is what I wanted to do. It’s such a cool job: I just get to chat to people and make people's day.”

Her first competition changed her career course too. “Aviation Gin ran a competition and Pippa Guy who was working at The Savoy at the time was one of the judges. I ended up winning the competition and she asked to go out for a drink with me in Manchester. She asked for my details and if it would be OK to pass them onto somebody - of course, I said yes.” That somebody was Joe Schofield whom Guy had worked with at The Savoy. A week or so later he dropped Orange an email asking to meet, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Being the bar manager at SCHOFIELD’S BAR is less than linear when it comes to a job description. She takes care of the team, holds trainings, writes the menus and hosts the guests - locals, tourists and regulars, the latter of whom Orange would consider friends. At the moment, she is organising wider spirits training for the company. “Obviously a lot of people who work at Schofield’s are bartenders, but in some of the venues we have floor teams who might not have bartended as such and don’t have as much of a base knowledge of what they’re selling.”

While a lot of work, of course, goes into the drinks programme, being a ‘hospitality-focused bar’ means that guest experience is paramount. “ We’re massively focused on hospitality, and what we can do to make our guests feel really special. How can we do more than just give them a drink?” Orange uses the ‘third place’ theory to encourage the team to keep this top of mind. “If people come into the bar and they feel like they’re at home, relaxed and like that is their space where they can chill out and decompress - that is such a huge compliment.”

Paying guests individual attention, reading their mood, finding out if it’s a special day for them - all methods Orange and the team use to deliver that kind of experience.  “We always say that  service is black and white, but hospitality is colourful.” A good example is wedding anniversaries: the team knows all the gifts for the different years, so if it is a silver anniversary, they can make them a mini Silver Fizz, or play them their wedding song. “It’s so easy to do, but to those individuals it will make a huge difference. For us, the team, it’s also so rewarding when you see you’ve made someone happy.”

Being responsible for a team of people also requires some professional growth for Orange. Training in particular extends to her progression as much as theirs. “I love training people because I think it teaches you a lot as well. If I'm trying to train somebody, it just means that I'm constantly going over it in my head, and I have to make sure that I know everything. Having to write it down and put it into a format that people understand helps me learn too.”

Joe and Daniel have also invested in management courses for her, something that Orange feels is particularly valuable in this industry. “I think a lot of the time in hospitality, and it certainly happened to me, you bartend for a while, your boss makes you a manager, but then nobody really teaches you how to be a manager. I’ve learned it by doing it, and I'm sure when I first started, I made a lot of mistakes. But something I find really interesting is how you teach adults and how you create an environment where they can succeed.”

In her spare time, Orange also cooks a lot and loves to host - two things she attributes to her mum - and has also recently got back to being on the water, kayaking with a friend on the canal. “It is so zen and relaxing. Working in the hospitality sector, you're used to a lot of noise all the time, so just floating on a boat was so nice - I’m definitely doing more of that.”

Reflecting on her time in the industry so far, Orange is grateful for the people and experiences she has had over the years. “Pippa Guy has always been such an inspiration to me. Obviously, she helped me get to where I am, and I just think she's incredible.” She’s also had the chance to work alongside Haley Traub from Attaboy - “She's so cool and she's so good at what she does” - as well as Chloe Merz from Collab Bar: “She offered me quite a lot of guidance ahead of my first guest shift and talk - that was just wonderful.”

She’s also worked alongside Sam Ross and Mickey McIlroy (also Attaboy), learned from Kev Armstrong from Satan’s Whiskers and hosted Lorenzo Antinori and his team from Bar Leone for SCHOFIELD’S BAR’s fourth birthday celebrations. “That was a masterclass in hospitality. They fully took over the bar, we wore their uniforms, they brought drinks, nibbles, all their artwork. I was just in awe watching them do what they do.”

It’s no exaggeration that Joe and Daniel’s hiring of her has cemented her love for hospitality forever: “It’s entirely changed my life. The opportunities that come with working for them are incredible. I always wanted to do it as a career - but now, I think that’s true more than ever.”