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A comment
Could it be that future starred and rossetted restaurants will be posh equivalents of fast food eateries? Maybe along the lines of please take a number, this is where you will be sitting. You will find a menu on your table with all dishes explained. Please help yourself to a suitable wine for which you will find recommendations accompanying the dish of your choice in the self-service display.
What makes a good restaurant? Well, apart from good/great cooking and fantastic wines we have come to expect the food and chosen wine be brought to the table and served competently. We expect to be able to ask about what we are eating, about taxis, about the ingredient sourcing. And we don’t want to have to read about it. Foreigners expect waiting staff to speak English, French or the local language. This is called service: they serve who stand and wait.
However, they who sit and wait may in future not be served due to the increasing lack of able staff. To quote the article by M. Hickman in the Independent Online of 28th April 2008 standards of service are deteriorating as restaurateurs find it increasingly difficult to find adequate staff. The pay is atrocious, the shifts not family friendly, the status worse. So it would appear that restaurants are becoming increasingly dependent on staff from abroad, Eastern Europe in particular.
Payment by card rather than cash is one possible cause of the lack of interest of the service staff in good performance. But, hey. Who pays cash nowadays? If you know you are going to a place where one tips then you either take extra cash with you for the tipping or you up the ante on your credit card slip. And yes, everyone appreciates a little extra for being especially accommodating. And no, not many of us can keep a family nowadays on the quoted € 1,400 a month.
Waiters, especially those in high class establishments, go through training as long as a university student or chef. They are experts in their field. The chef’s creation plonked down on the table no longer appeals in the way it would if presented the way the chef planned it: with the tiny strip of leek still parallel to the plate and not hanging over the edge like a drunken sailor.
They want to serve. However they are not your mother and not your therapist. They take cheek from you without slapping your backside for it and do not get paid as well as a therapist! Good service is a two-way street. Maybe the British do not deserve good waiting because they are not good customers? The customer is king they say in Germany. But it only works if you have an enlightened and modern monarchy, otherwise the dictionary says it is dictatorship.
Please check the following for the background: http:// www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and drink/news/english-lose-the-appetite-for-a-career-in waiting-816638.html
This comment was written by Jane K. Clouston for DBK.
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