The food was plenty, but did you feel welcome?

Photo by Keesha's Kitchen on Unsplash

I have been in three different rooms this year where the food was excellent and the service made me want to leave. Not because anyone was rude, not because anything went wrong in the way that generates complaints or gets written up in a manager’s incident report; but because something essential was absent: the kind of warmth that tells a guest, without a single word, that their presence in this room was the point.

I want to walk you through all three rooms. Because I think the conversation about cold service in Nigeria often gets flattened into one argument, one culprit, and one fix. The truth is more layered than that. The problem wears different clothes depending on where you are standing and who is responsible for the table you are standing near.

Room One: The Social Party

The caterer arrived at noon for a six o’clock event. By the time guests walked in, her team had been on their feet for hours. They were not hired for their hospitality instincts; they were hired to get the food out hot, keep the chafing dishes full, and clear plates before the next wave arrived. That was the brief. That was the job.

Nobody told them that a guest approaching the buffet line is also, in that moment, asking a quiet question. Am I welcome here? Nobody explained that the two seconds before a waiter opens their mouth is actually a hospitality decision.

Photo by Saile Ilyas on Unsplash

So when a guest leaned over and asked what was in the third pot, the answer came back flat, without a turn of the body, without eye contact, without the small generosity of a name — just a word pointing at a dish.

The food was groundbreaking, long story short. The caterer had clearly spent real money and real skill on the menu, but she had not spent anything on how her team would carry themselves in the room. And in that gap, between what was on the table and how it was offered, the guest felt the cold.

This is the social party problem. The caterer is accountable to the host and the people she knows, not to a hospitality standard. The servers are day hires who may never work together again. There is no brand on the line, no service philosophy in the room.

Room Two: The Corporate Hotel Event

This one is a different kind of disappointment, because the expectation was higher.

A company chose a hotel for its annual dinner. They paid a venue fee that had several zeros in it. They chose that hotel specifically because the name on the building implied a certain standard. Guests arrived in that room carrying an assumption. That assumption was reasonable. It was also, on that evening, wrong.

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The hotel was short-staffed. The assisted buffet, which should have meant a uniformed attendant at each station — present, attentive, able to guide a guest through the menu — had become something closer to a self-service line with decoration. The uniforms were there. The training was somewhere else entirely.

Speak of which, this is the scenario that troubles me most professionally because the infrastructure for good service existed. The hotel had a standard operating procedure. There was a manager on duty. Someone, at some point, made a decision to deploy fewer people than the event required. And the guest, who had no idea what was in store, simply experienced the result.

A guest at a corporate hotel event is not just a guest. They are a data point in someone’s procurement decision. If the service was cold, the hotel may not be on next year’s shortlist. The stakes are measurable. The gap between what was promised and what was delivered is, in this room, a business problem dressed in hospitality clothing.

Room Three: The Restaurant

This is the most personal room of the three. A guest at a social party was invited; a guest at a corporate event was sent. But a guest at a restaurant chose to be there; they made a deliberate decision with their time and their money. They walked through the door carrying something fragile, which is the hope that this evening would be worth it.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Cold service in a restaurant is a different kind of wound. It does not feel like an operational failure. It feels like rejection.

The buffet in this context may be a weekend brunch spread, the kind that photographs beautifully and fills a reservation book. The abundance is visible and intentional. The restaurant invested in the menu, in the styling, in the social media moment. What it did not invest in, or did not invest in equally, was the human layer.

The waiting staff who seats you without greeting you. The attendant at the station who is present in body but somewhere else entirely in attention. The manager who walks past three times without making eye contact. None of these are dramatic failures. All of them are dreadful in their accumulation.

Because here is what happens in that room: the guest eats well, the food is everything it was supposed to be. And they still leave feeling like they were tolerated rather than welcomed. They will not write a bad review, but they will not come back with the kind of enthusiasm that builds a loyal dining community. At the end of the day, a restaurant is not just selling food. It is selling the experience of being chosen back.

The Thread Running Through All Three Rooms

The caterer, the hotel, the restaurant — three different contexts, three different accountability structures, three different reasons the warmth went missing. But there is one thing they share: in every case, someone made a decision about what to invest in and what to assume. They invested in the table. They assumed the human layer would take care of itself.

It does not take care of itself. Warmth is not a personality trait that staff either have or do not have. It is a practice. It is taught, modelled, expected, and reinforced. When it is missing, it is missing because nobody made it essential.

Help me understand why, in a country where hospitality is genuinely woven into our cultural fabric, where we know how to make a stranger feel like family in a domestic setting, we have not yet made that translation into our professional spaces.

That is the question I am sitting with. And it is the question this column will keep returning to because the food, in all three rooms, was excellent; the table was full. But the guest, too often, was not quite held and a table that does not hold its guests, in the end, is just furniture.

Olubukola Akanbi

Akanbi is a communications, marketing, and hospitality practitioner. Welcome to My Table is her weekly column on hospitality as a practice of respect, dignity, and thoughtful detail.