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No one assumes that the best food is found in expensive restaurants. Yes, there are many things that differentiate expensive restaurants in India from their cheaper counterparts: fancy decor, more expensive crockery, heavy, ornate menus and so little lighting that you can’t read these ornate menus. But it’s not necessarily because of the food.
Sometimes, when they want to signal that they are crowded, buzzy places, these restaurants design their interiors in a way that includes hard surfaces that don’t absorb sound (for example, no soft furnishings) so that the noise level is always high. This annoys people like me who want to hear what their lunch or dinner companions are saying (and can’t in these so-called ‘busby’ restaurants) but that’s okay: many people who pay these prices don’t really believe in conversation. When they stay quiet, they’re actually speaking their minds.
I don’t mind that the food is often so much better in the cheaper places. But what always surprises me is the level of service. In the cheaper places, the waiters are underpaid and untrained. They make up for their lack of training with hard work and enthusiasm. In the expensive places, where you should expect world-class service because the prices are so high, you will often be disappointed.
For a country with a tradition of hospitality, it is surprising how badly run our restaurants are and how poor the service often is.
Let us take some examples.
Welcome
The hotel industry will tell you that the welcome is the most important: guests make up their minds about a hotel before they even reach their room. So, hotels train their reception staff accordingly. Sadly, they forget that the same principle applies to restaurants: guests want to feel welcome. And when it comes to standalone restaurants, they give little thought to the welcome anyway.
This is in stark contrast to the West, where people like Will Guidara and Danny Meyer write bestselling books about how they’ve worked to make guests feel welcome. In the U.K., at any restaurant in the old Corbin and King empire, staff are evaluated based on how welcoming they make guests feel.
In India, we don’t care: even in many top restaurants. The ‘greeter’ is usually a young person who has just moved to Delhi or Mumbai and has no understanding of the job. They won’t recognise regular guests, will struggle to understand names on reservations and will have no understanding of the choreography that goes into running a full restaurant. I usually feel sorry for these young people who have to fend off guests, answer the telephone to take bookings, check the reservation list and check how many tables are empty/or will soon be empty.
Of course, they’re not always right. But managers always blame them; not realizing that if a guest’s first contact in a restaurant is the newest and lowest paid member of the team, it reflects on management, not on the staff.
Service Behavior
At Purse Se in New York, more than a decade ago, they taught servers the concept of the bubble. The bubble is the private space that each guest has at each table. Under no circumstances should a server lean into this private space. But, of course, in India, servers are not trained to do this. They lean right into you to adjust your table settings, often getting so close that you can smell their aftershave. It’s not their fault. They just haven’t been trained correctly.
Most people go to restaurants to talk to their friends, family or business contacts. They don’t go there to talk to the server. Yet this basic principle is not respected. Often, when you are in the middle of a very interesting conversation, the server interrupts without warning. The reasons for interrupting will be trivial: “Would you like your dinner, sir?” or “Another bottle of water?” It could easily have been waited out, but no one has taught the server to look for the right opportunity to come to the table.
Servers have also been taught the mindset of keeping everything neat and tidy at all times. Let’s say you’re drinking something (a whiskey, a coke, some wine) and you put a little bit in your glass so you can enjoy it during your meal. Chances are a careless waiter will come by and clean it up without even asking you.
We are the only country in the world where this happens and I am surprised that managers don’t tell waiters that their job is to make the meal enjoyable for guests, not to rush to their tables, interrupt their conversations and confiscate their food and drinks.
Now it has come to a point where the server will start a conversation with you even when he can see that your mouth is full and you cannot respond easily. You get the clear feeling that he considers himself a busy person who has only two minutes to talk to you and he does not care whether you are eating something when he arrives or not.
What’s worse is that when this unwanted attention is forced upon you, even when you really need a server, it becomes impossible to find one. You have to wave your hands and yell before you get the server’s attention.
ordering food:
In most good restaurants in the West, staff meals or ‘family meals’ are an important part of the day. Often chefs are employed to cook just for the staff and sometimes dishes liked by the staff are included in the menu for guests. When new dishes are introduced, they are tested on the staff first. And even if this is not the case, every member of the serving staff will be asked to try each new dish to make it appealing to guests.
This never happens in India. In hotels, employees eat in the cafeteria with all the other employees and it is very rare that a single person serves the food to the server so that they can explain each dish to the guest.
So, your server is basically a note-taker. He has little to offer in the way of advice. He only recommends the dishes the kitchen has told him to pass on. (“Keep recommending the broccoli. It’s getting bad.”) Many servers refuse to write down the order. I always ask them to do so, but they say things like “Don’t worry sir… I’ll remember.” And, of course, they don’t remember. And the order gets messed up. In a good restaurant in the West, if a server refused to write down an order, he could be in big trouble. Here, the chalta hai attitude that pervades the entire service experience is anything but.
whose fault?
Almost none of this is the server’s fault. They need to be trained, they need to be told what is acceptable and what is not. But restaurants don’t care. Owners are too busy choosing nice plates or telling the chef to put ‘truffle’ tacos or Japanese hand rolls on the menu. The most basic requirement of any restaurant – service – is constantly overlooked.
And the guests have to suffer.
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