Tina Heitkamp and her boss Anthony Stewart-Moore can both fairly be described as citizens of the world. Tina, 31, has German citizenship but was born and raised in the Philippines and is fluent in English, Tagalog and French. Anthony is British but has an American green card; his other languages are German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.
Anthony is general manager of the five-star Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, London, where the 300 permanent staff (there are also 300 regular casuals) represent 74 nationalities. You might think that their differences divide them but they are the ties that bind them.
“My colleagues are my family and my friends,” says Tina. “We are a team who play together and work together, often socialising in our spare time.”
Tina, who graduated in international studies in the Philippines and needs only to submit a thesis to complete her masters, arrived in the UK after a spell in France. She adores London and, though she hopes to travel widely, says it will now always be her home. “I just love it: the fact that there are expensive restaurants next to cheap ones, markets, musicals and free museums . . . ” she says. “It is the most wonderful city I have ever been in.”
When Tina arrived in London she worked as a telephonist at Claridge’s before co-ordinating its business centre. Then she moved to the Grosvenor House as PA to the hotel manager. Anthony takes up the story: “I poached her. When my previous assistant left, I went to my colleague and asked if Tina could work for me.
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“She is very special and I learn a great deal from her. I always say that I report to her because she has a degree and I don’t. I didn’t want an assistant who was a guard dog; quite the opposite. Tina figures out ways for people to see me and for me to help them.”
Anthony has spent all his working life in hotels, starting as a “bus boy” who was allowed to approach tables to clear up only once the diners had departed. Much of his time has been spent in America and he has been with the same company (which morphed into Marriott and took over the Grosvenor House) for 23 years.
Anthony arrived there in January 2004 and is now overseeing a £100 million restoration: 300 of the 500 bedrooms are closed while a spa is being built and public rooms are undergoing refurbishment.
The Great Room — the largest banqueting room in Europe, holding 2,000 people, with four or five functions a week — has already undergone redecoration. All of this work poses logistical challenges. “Old pipework is found, for instance, or structural beams that no one knew about,” Anthony says, “and the project manager tells me that the space we have been selling to visitors won’t be ready for another six months.”
The restaurant has had to move around and is now in the ballroom after staff worked all night to transfer it. “It isn’t part of waiters’ jobs to carry furniture but they all volunteered,” says Anthony proudly.
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He is passionate about high standards. “I genuinely care. I remember, when I was managing a hotel in Washington, picking some rubbish out of an ashtray and being watched by a wide-eyed bellboy who wondered why the boss was stooping so low.
“A few weeks later all the bellboys were at the door of my office. They were carrying a bench.
“A few years earlier, they had had a run-in with the management and had negotiated a bench for the staff, having insisted that they shouldn’t have to stand on their feet all day. They were giving the bench back to me as a way of saying that they could work with me.”
Hotel work is inherently hard: Tina starts at 8.30am, attends “morning prayers” — the daily briefing meeting — then prepares Anthony’s schedule. She leaves work between 6pm and 8pm.
They have a close working relationship, but though she has been to dinner at his family home, he is always Mr Stewart-Moore to her.
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“He is my good friend,” she says, “but it is a mark of my respect not to refer to him by his first name.”