Why I left a five-star career to build something of my own.
People are often surprised when they hear I left the hotel world. A career in five-star hospitality is something you work years to build — and I'd built it. So why walk away?
By Manouj Kaushikk, Founder & Director · 26 July 2026
The honest answer is that I didn't walk away from hospitality. I walked toward doing it on my own terms.
Two decades in the deep end
My years in hospitality took me through some of the most demanding kitchens and banquet operations there are — Hyatt, JW Marriott, Rotana in the UAE, backed by a formal hotel-management education. These aren't places that tolerate "good enough." They train a particular kind of discipline into you: the guest comes first, the details are everything, and consistency is the whole job.
I'm grateful for every year of it. That world gave me a standard I still hold to this day. But it also gave me long hours, missed occasions, and a growing sense that the thing I most wanted to build, I was building for someone else.
The turning point
I've told the story of the birthday I missed — my daughter's, on the 19th of May. That was the moment the idea took root. But the decision behind it was bigger than one evening. It was the realisation that I had two decades of hard-earned knowledge, and I wanted to pour it into something of my own — something close to home, for my own community, where the standard was set by me.
Trading security for meaning
Leaving a stable, respected career is not a small thing. There's comfort in a big brand — the salary, the structure, the certainty. Building your own place trades all of that for risk and long, uncertain days.
But it also trades it for meaning. Every choice at Nineteenth May is mine to make — the food, the service, the feel of the room, the way a guest is treated when they walk in. That ownership is exactly what I left the hotels to find.
The same standard, a different home
What I didn't leave behind was the standard. The discipline of those hotel years is in everything we do in Sector 67 — the kitchen, the bar, the catering, the way we handle an event. The setting changed. The commitment didn't.
That's the heart of Nineteenth May: not a restaurateur who picked up hospitality along the way, but a hospitality professional who chose to build a place of his own.
Come experience it for yourself.
The standard I learned across two decades of hotel hospitality is what shows up on your table, in our lounge, and at your event.
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