Lost Shore Surf Resort, Edinburgh

Jason Wright

Hospitality Operations Authority

Jason Wright is a hospitality operator with over 20 years of experience building, scaling and turning around food and beverage businesses across international markets. He combines commercial discipline with operational expertise, developing strong teams, efficient systems and profitable concepts that perform consistently from launch through expansion.

There’s a moment, usually around week three of any new venue, when the plans stop mattering. The spreadsheets, the concept decks, the beautifully lit renders — they’re still true, but they’re no longer the thing in front of you. What’s in front of you is a venue that needs to feed two hundred covers on a Saturday, a front-of-house team still learning each other’s names, and a guest standing at the pass who has no idea any of this is new. She just wants her food to be good and her evening to feel effortless.

That’s the job. Not the concept. The delivery of the concept, service by service, until it becomes real.

A Destination First, a Resort Second

Lost Shore is Europe’s largest inland surf resort, built around a wave lagoon in Edinburgh, which means our F&B was never going to work as an afterthought bolted onto accommodation. Lost Kitchen and the rest of the offerings, the rotational street food concept, market and eventually room service had to be destinations in their own right, capable of pulling in people who have never touched a surfboard and never will. That’s a different design brief than most resort dining. You’re not just feeding guests between activities; you’re building a reason to come back on a Tuesday in February when the lagoon is quiet and the weather has other ideas.

I’ve learned that a destination dining experience isn’t a menu decision. It’s dozens of small operational decisions stacked so consistently that the guest never sees the scaffolding — only the outcome. Stock management means the kitchen never has to apologise for what’s out. A supplier relationship, structured so the guest gets range and quality without us gambling on cash flow. An events calendar — our Highland Fling weekend among them — built to convert a one-off visit into a habit. All of it is what “destination” means once you’re past the opening month.

Teams Are the Product

Here’s what I’d say to anyone stepping into resort F&B leadership: your guest experience ceiling is set by your team, not your concept. I’ve spent the last few months running structured reset meetings across our kitchen and front-of-house teams and completing a full compliance audit — unglamorous work, but it’s where high performance actually gets built. Not in a training manual that never gets read. Whether a chef feels safe flagging a problem before it becomes a Saturday-night crisis, and whether a server understands why a dish is plated the way it is well enough to sell it with conviction.

Over twenty years across the UK, Australia, and West Africa, I’ve run kitchens in wildly different contexts, and the throughline has never been cuisine — it’s been culture. Teams perform when they understand the “why” behind the standard, not just the standard itself. That’s a leadership discipline as much as a hospitality one: you’re translating a board-level ambition into something a nineteen-year-old on their second shift can execute under pressure, without you standing over their shoulder.

Innovating Without Losing the Thread

Guest expectations move fast, and it’s tempting to chase every trend — but the resorts that win aren’t the ones with the newest concept, they’re the ones whose concept still makes sense a year later. Every innovation we’ve introduced at Lost Shore has had to answer one question first: Does this deepen the reason someone travels here, or is it just noise?

Food cost percentage, labour forecasting, the unglamorous financial architecture behind a kitchen and staff — I’ve spent real time in that detail, because innovation without operational discipline is just an expensive experiment. The two must be built together, or the concept doesn’t survive contact with a real busy Saturday service.

Operational Excellence Is the Guest Experience

I’d push back gently on the idea that operational excellence and memorable guest experience are two things you balance against each other. At scale, they’re the same thing, wearing different clothes. A guest doesn’t experience your stock management or your rota — but they absolutely experience the absence of its failure: the dish that arrives on time, the server who isn’t stretched across four sections, the beer that’s actually in stock.

Excellence, done well, is invisible. That’s precisely why it’s so easy to underinvest in and so costly when it’s missing.

The Questions I Keep Asking

If we removed every system, every forecast, every carefully renegotiated supplier contract tomorrow, would the guest notice? Almost certainly not, immediately. They’d notice three weeks later, when something breaks that used to just work.

Are we building teams that can carry this standard without me in the room? That’s the real test of leadership, and the honest answer changes depending on the week.

And as resort dining becomes more sophisticated across the industry, what will make guests choose us specifically — not just any well-run destination, but this one? For us, it’s that the food and the culture around it were built from the same brief as the wave itself: something worth travelling for, and worth coming back to.

That’s the piece I’d want every leader casting their eyes over my meandering thoughts to walk away thinking about. Not whether the concept is exciting enough. Whether the team behind it can deliver it, day after day, night after night, long after the opening buzz has worn off, and long after I’ve walked out the door.