Long before Ernst Huber ever heard of a tropical island called Singapore, there was Sellenbüren, the small Swiss village where he grew up and where his parents ran a restaurant. “I used to do my homework there, and always heard the latest village news,” he remembers, eyes twinkling. “In school, I became the person with information for my friends, because I was always the one in the know about things that people were discussing.”
Good gossip aside, it was an independent childhood. He helped out in the restaurant, washing dishes and learning how to cook from his mother. In the mornings, he and his sister made their own breakfast while their parents slept in, as they kept late hours at the restaurant. By the time he was a teenager, Ernst was studying butchery, cooking and restaurant management in Zurich. At the age of 21, he landed his first job as a cook at a Hilton hotel in Malta.
“First, I said yes,” he explains with a laugh. “Then I asked: Where’s that?” The Mediterranean archipelago turned out to be the first stop in his globetrotting adventures, which brought him to other Hilton hotels in Iran and Kenya. The most valuable lesson he learned from these travels? “You have to adjust wherever you go, because people won’t adjust to you. You have to work hard, be honest, and treat everyone equally. That’s what I have tried to teach my children. Every person is a person, whatever colour they may be. We had cooks in Nairobi who collected their salaries with their thumbprints because they never went to school. But that didn’t mean they were stupid. I never had a problem in all the places I worked, because if you respect people the way they are, they’ll respect you. It’s as simple as that.”
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Andre, the younger of his two sons, agrees that treating everyone with respect was a value that his parents drummed into him and his brother Ryan. “From a young age, we were taught that everyone is equal. Our dad would always tell us that in Switzerland, people don’t look at what a person does, but how well he did his job, and more respect would be paid to a cleaner who did a good job than a doctor who did a bad job.”
The brothers experienced Ernst’s commitment to equality first-hand when they started working under him at Swiss Butchery, which their father helped to start in 1994. “I told them, you are equal to everyone else, you don’t get special treatment,” says Ernst. “When you have gone through your whole life as an employee, you know how people think and how they talk. The moment you show favouritism, you’ll get problems with the staff. So it’s very important that everybody is on the same level.”
