The unexpected career trajectory of a food and drink writer

Or, how the hell did you get into this dream job?

People often ask me how I got into the dream job of food and wine writing. Like most people doing this job who didn’t come at it via nepotism and connections, it wasn’t straightforward. I thought it would be fun to give you an overview of my career trajectory so far. 

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My first job was shit. Quite literally, I was a kennels assistant and my role was to go into around 25 dog pens, let the dog into an exercise yard and shovel any overnight poos into a bright yellow bucket half filled with water and disinfectant. I would carry the yellow bucket from kennel to kennel filling it with layers of brown defecation of varying hues until the slurry reached to around a couple of inches from the brim. Then, I would take the bucket and very carefully tip the liquid shit down a dedicated sewage drain. The fear of splashback was real. For around seven hours of this and other cleaning tasks, I was paid £15 (cash) and a tinned ham sandwich. 

A teenage goth me around the time of the shit shovelling job

When I quit that job because I refused to work on Xmas day and I was sick of being bitten by both dogs and cats, I went on to work as a chambermaid in a succession of hotels a bus ride away from my home. I became closely acquainted with all kinds of body hair and astute at whipping sweaty sheets off a bed while trying not to breathe in. I once found a pair of men’s rubber knickers in a dresser drawer. My thrifty older colleague had a habit of grabbing any rubbish out of the bathroom pedal bin so as not to waste another plastic bin bag until one day she put her finger right into a used condom. 

From there I moved into the broader hospitality game, waiting on at weddings and conferences at the hotels I was working in, then much later on to cafes and bars in Manchester as a waiter and pastry chef and FOH manager. In between those jobs I worked in a call centre for years, a place full of drifting, disillusioned misfits many of whom became lifelong friends. I did a stint on a tarot card hotline too. That was an eye-opener. In another tangential career move, I was an SIA security guard at the Academy music venues, paid to watch bands and carry out fainting girls. 

I worked on every floor of alternative clothing emporium Afflecks and co-owned my own shop called Totally Doomed there for about six months. All of these casual jobs gave me the flexibility I needed to be in a band because that was all I really wanted to do. To write songs, hang around in musty rehearsal rooms and tour the world in vans. And I did that, covering the length and breadth of the UK many times over as well as Germany and other bits of Europe and a good chunk of the USA. And I’m still doing it. My band The Empty Page has a new album out in May. 

totallydoomed

A post shared by @totallydoomed

But when I reached my 30s, I decided I wanted to do something with my non-music playing time that was more of a challenge for me mentally. I’d dropped out of college three times as a teen and never gone on to complete higher education. I decided to get a degree. 

With no A Levels, I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to do university study but one day on a lunch break from the cafe I worked in, I called the OU and asked for advice. They explained I could access a student loan and encouraged me to go for it. So I did. I had no idea what I was going to do with the degree or even what I wanted to study but I learned there was something called an ‘open degree’ where you picked a base layer and added different modules every year from then on. My options for the biscuit base were arts or science so I went with the former. 

In my first year of part-time study, I covered music, art history, English lit, English language, philosophy, religious studies and more. The first essay I submitted had no introduction or conclusion, just a stream-of-consciousness wall of text. I hadn’t had to do any formal writing for over 15 years and I hadn’t a clue. My tutor helped me to learn how to craft a piece of writing.

The degree took me about six years part-time while I continued to do other work. I did a short course and got a job as an English language teacher. I couldn’t believe it when they just gave me a class and a book and went, ok, go teach. I’d never been in a job where people were trusted to get on with things before. I felt like an absolute charlatan. It was one of the most terrifying things I’d ever done.

thekelpage

A post shared by @thekelpage

My first class was a ladies-only class full of women from the Middle East. They were funny, smart and sarcastic even in a second language and although I constantly felt like they were going to find out I wasn’t a real teacher, we had a lovely time learning English together. I’m certain I learned more about grammar than they did. It was a huge challenging time riddled with a lack of confidence (which has been a recurring theme) and in the end, it wasn’t for me. I continued to do it online though, which suited me better. One-on-one conversation classes with higher-level learners who just wanted to practise chatting with correction. 

Doing this helped me to keep a spontaneous backpacking trip going a bit longer. My 30s were kind of a mid-life crisis. I packed everything in that I should have done in my 20s. I continued with the degree during the nine-month backpacking trip where my partner Giz and I hopped Diceman style from country to country with no real agenda and a minimal daily budget. We ended up going to France, Italy, Greece, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, America, and Mexico and finished up recording an album in Canada with Gggarth Richardson who did Rage Against The Machine’s first album amongst others. A solid gold guy and a mind-blowing experience.

When we came back, I went back to teaching but it didn’t feel right. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I went back to cafe work for a bit and dreamt about doing a cooking course at Leith’s or Le Cordon Bleu. I thought this might aid me into going back into kitchen work more seriously but I wasn’t fully sold on the long hours. I mused a course like that could be a path into food writing but soon concluded that going to London to do a cookery course for six months or a year was a privilege available to other people than me. I simply couldn’t afford it. 

A few of my more sensible friends gave me some CV and career advice: decide on something you want to do and look at what’s missing from your CV that would convince an employer you could do the job then fill in the gaps by either finding related work or doing some courses. It seemed a lot but I had nothing to lose as at the time, I was barely making ends meet.

Based on my teaching work and what was ultimately becoming an English and philosophy degree, I managed to get some bits of work writing SEO-focused blogs and transcribing PHDs. It was a step toward proving I could write but I wasn’t there yet. The problem is, there is no path to becoming a food and drink writer. It’s all about hard work, tenacity and a big dollop of opportunism. I applied to a few local sites but got nowhere, so I went back to teaching again on a good old zero-hour contract. 

While I was teaching, I saw a job on Facebook as a Christmas temp at Manchester Confidential. This was a minimum wage, part-time role phoning restaurants to ask if they had any January deals planned. It would fit around my teaching which was mostly in the mornings. I applied, got an interview and the Editor David gave me the job. I quietly cracked on in a little side room away from the main team, emerging occasionally to make a brew and offer everyone else one. I got a lot of abuse on that phone line. Nobody seemed to like me when I told them where I was calling from and I didn’t know why but I would learn eventually. 

I got chatting with the people there and mentioned to them that I liked to write. As the Xmas temp work ended, I asked if they might give me a few hours of writing work. They agreed. Shortly after that, the Editor left, so a full-time role as staff writer came up and I jumped at the chance. I quit the teaching job and launched myself fork first into proving myself as a restaurant writer.

I knew food. I’d worked in kitchens, travelled the world as a food tourist and cooked from every cookbook going in my 20s. The art of writing about it developed with help from my new editor, Deanna Thomas who I have to thank for not only teaching me to write reviews but also giving me a confidence in myself that doesn’t come naturally.

I felt I didn’t know enough about wine, so I asked my boss if he could recommend any wine courses. He paid for me to do my WSETs with Manchester Wine School and I blazed through levels 1-3 getting ever more joyously nerdy. I’d found a new passion to burrow into like a tipsy mole. 

When the pandemic hit, we shut down like the rest of the world but Deanna and I kept content flowing along with a few other writers including Vicky Smith another great mentor to me as a writer. It’s a story for the pub, or perhaps another blog but just before Xmas 2020, Deanna quit. I was offered the job of Executive Editor.

The reasons Deanna quit made it difficult for me to take the job. I didn’t feel I had the required experience either but I had just signed a mortgage agreement for the first time in my life and it came with a significant pay rise. This was the first steady, enjoyable job I had ever had, and a role as Editor was great for my career. So I took it.

Other team members also quit so I had to build an editorial team more or less from scratch. My first dream hires: Vicky Andrews to head up the Liverpool site and Lucy Tomlinson to cover news and politics in Manchester both said yes. I then hired more people and brought new and previous freelancers back on board. It was an incredibly talented team and I did my best in the role but having never managed a team like this before and with a lack of real support from the people above me, I struggled. I was trying to be all things to all people. I wanted our content to be brilliant. It was, but I was hard on myself and others. I was trying to prove something. My mental health rapidly declined and in the end, I held on too long and quit quite dramatically on Halloween 2022. I collapsed into myself for weeks not knowing what to do next. 

When Manchester’s Finest got in touch offering me the same role, my confidence was at rock bottom. This was the boost I needed and I took the job. I worked hard for a six-month trial period but it wasn’t the job for me. I thanked them and told them I would be moving on but agreed to do some occasional writing for them on a freelance basis. Was I crazy to quit another full-time Editor role in a time of uncertainty for journalism? I trusted my gut and I haven’t regretted it so far. Let’s see, shall we?

In the meantime, I had won commissions from Time Out and VICE which gave me a little more confidence to pitch to other nationals. I’m still scared of pitching so I’m not doing as much of that as I’d like but I have a few irons in the fire. I also started my own Substack newsletter as an outlet for regular writing about Manchester’s food and drink but you already know that. It’s going better than I expected and I am so grateful to everyone who reads it.

I’d also been asked to do a bit of tutoring with Manchester Wine School. This utilised my teaching experience, love of wine, and copious dad jokes. I now host several wine tastings a month with MWS and absolutely love it.

Manchester Wine Tours (image: Debbie Ellis)

To tie this all together, I started musing on what I could do with my vast knowledge of Manchester food and drink that wasn’t writing or working for someone else. I came up with Manchester Wine Tours. These are afternoon city tours of Manchester taking in points of interest and four different restaurants, bars or shops tasting wine with delicious snacks. The tours take roughly four hours and are probably the most fun you can have if you like wine, wandering and meeting new people. It’s going so well that it now takes up the vast majority of my time and I couldn’t be more pleased. I’m also doing bits of work as a wine host and private sommelier off the back of all of this.

So there you have it. My career path on paper looks like if you gave a crazed cat a crayon and let it go mad on a blank sheet of A3. There has been no real game plan and no forward-thinking, but a lot of hard work, studying and crucially, saying yes to new things even when they were scary. I’m very happy with where I’m at in life even if it has taken a couple of eclectic decades to reach this point and who knows where the next year or two will lead me. I’ve certainly got some stories.