I have sat across the table from a great many chefs over the years, in kitchens, in boardrooms and occasionally at three in the morning during a crisis that only a chef and a duty manager can truly appreciate. So when I sat down to record this episode of Richard's Crestwell Chats with Chef Meik Brammer, Director of Culinary at the Marriott Hotel Manila, I already knew we were in for something more than the usual talk about menus and Michelin stars. What I did not expect was quite how candid, funny and genuinely instructive the conversation would turn out to be.
Meik has spent fifteen years at the same property, which in our industry is almost unheard of. Most of us move every two years, chasing the next challenge or the next market. Staying that long and remaining relevant takes a particular kind of discipline, and listening to him explain how he got there taught me a great deal about leadership, resilience and the quiet business of building trust over time.
A Career Built on Rejection
One of the most striking parts of our conversation was Meik's account of his early years in Germany. He applied to fifty hotels for an apprenticeship and was turned down by every single one. It was only the fifty first, a hotel in Lüneburg, that gave him a chance. He described being tested for a full month peeling onions and doing the most basic work in the kitchen before the chef would even consider taking him on properly.
There is a lesson in that which I think applies well beyond kitchens. So many of the strongest leaders I have worked with in hospitality started at the bottom and were tested, sometimes unfairly, before anyone trusted them with responsibility. Meik's persistence after fifty rejections says more about his character than any qualification ever could. He did not treat the rejections as proof he was in the wrong field. He treated them as the price of entry.
He also spoke warmly about Andre Freudiger, the executive chef who mentored him early on and who told him that every chef must decide, early and deliberately, what kind of chef they want to be. A kitchen chef, a fine dining chef, or something else entirely. That single piece of advice shaped Meik's whole trajectory towards banqueting and large scale operations, and it is advice I have given to young managers myself over the years. Knowing your lane, andchoosing it on purpose rather than drifting into it, tends to produce far more confident leaders.
From Chef to Business Leader
The transition from executive chef to director of culinary is one that many talented cooks never quite manage, because it asks something different of them. Meik was refreshingly honest about this. He told me that once he joined the executive committee, his view of the hotel changed completely. He was no longer only responsible for what happened in his own kitchen. He found himself being consulted by other properties entirely unrelated to his own operation, simply because people assumed his experience was useful to them too.
That widening of responsibility is something every hotelier eventually faces, whether they come from food and beverage, rooms or engineering. The skills that make someone brilliant at running a single department are not automatically the skills that make them effective across an entire operation. What struck me about Meik is that he leaned into that discomfort rather than retreating from it. He described taking on extra advisory roles across the Marriott Asia Pacific region for the Philippines, not because it was asked of him, but because he understood that saying no was rarely the right answer for someone in his position.
Sustainability as Practice, Not Policy
This is where the conversation really came alive for me. Meik did not talk about sustainability as a corporate initiative handed down from head office. He talked about it as something forced upon him by direct experience. He described a typhoon that hit Manila and the days spent clearing rubbish from the coastline near the hotel, rubbish that had come from the very sachets and packaging the local community relied on to survive day to day. That was the moment, he said, when he understood the industry had real power to change things, and a responsibility to use it. From there he built what has become a genuinely significant programme. Cage free eggs began with a single supplier willing to work with him when the price difference was still considerable. Two years later the price had come down and the volume across the group had grown to millions of eggs a year. He was equally candid that sustainability is never cheap in the early stages. You commit to the cost before the market catches up, and you have to be prepared to defend that decision internally until it does.
That honesty is refreshing. Too often sustainability gets presented as something free and easy, when the truth is closer to what Meik described. It takes conviction, patience and a willingness to absorb short term cost for a longer term outcome that benefits everyone, including the supply chain itself.
The Uniform Conversation
Meik wore one of the Crestwell bamboo chef jackets throughout our conversation, and it gave us a natural way into a subject close to my own experience. When I was running Hotel ICON in Hong Kong we trialled sustainable fabric uniforms in one of our outlets, a full three piece set for the kitchen team, and found that the material actually held its shape and lasted longer than the conventional option we had used before. It was a small pilot, but it taught me that sustainable does not have to mean compromised.
Before settling on bamboo, Meik had already turned down another supplier who offered jackets made from recycled plastic. He liked the intention but felt uneasy about the material itself — as he put it, it meant continuing to rely on something the industry should be moving away from in the first place. Bamboo won him over for the opposite reason: it is fastgrowing, easy to cultivate, and does no harm in the growing process. That, paired with the practical benefit of a cooler, lighter fabric, made it feel like the right fit rather than just another sustainability tick-box.
Meik's experience with the bamboo jacket echoed that. He spoke about the comfort, the way it held its shape after repeated washing, and the ventilation, which matters enormously when you are covering ten kilometres a day across a ballroom floor. But what I found most interesting was his honesty about the limits. He has not yet rolled the jackets out to his full brigade, because the daily wear and tear of a working kitchen is a different test entirely from wearing a jacket for photographs and events. He was upfront that cost remains the barrier to scaling it further, and that Crestwell still has work to do on pricing before it becomes something every chef in his kitchen can wear.
That kind of feedback, delivered directly and without flattery, is exactly what a young sustainable brand needs to hear. It is also exactly the kind of pilot approach I have encouraged partners to take when introducing new products into hotel operations. Start with the people who will actually champion it, let them stress test it honestly, and use that real world evidence rather than a glossy pitch to build the case for wider adoption.
Personal Reflections
What stayed with me after we finished recording was how Meik talked about budgets. He described stretching his own budget mid year to fund sixty four sets of the bamboo jackets for his senior team, not because head office told him to, but because he understood the story it told and was willing to use the trust he had built over fifteen years to make it happen. That is a subtle but important point about leadership in our industry. Influence is not always about authority. Often it is about the credibility you accumulate slowly, through consistency, and then choose to spend on the things you believe matter.
Key Takeaways
A few things stayed with me long after we stopped recording. Persistence in the early years of a career often matters more than talent alone. The move from department leader to broader business leader requires a genuine shift in mindset, not just a new title. Sustainability initiatives succeed when they come from lived experience rather than policy documents, and they demand patience with cost before the market adjusts. And finally, credibility built over many years in one place becomes a form of currency that allows leaders to take risks others cannot. It was a pleasure to spend half an hour with Chef Meik Brammer, and I look forward to checking back in with him in six months to see how far the bamboo jacket, and the wider sustainability story at the Marriott Manila, has travelled.