Restaurant service standards are slipping

All over the world people rave about Asian service.

The people who do the raving are mostly westerners who cannot conceive of a situation in which relatively poorly paid service staff (poorly paid by western standards) who do not depend on tips, smile happily while they are at work and seem genuinely pleased to serve their guests.

 

I admire so-called Asian service too, but my one reservation is that it depends on an adherence to strict operating procedures. In such countries as Thailand or Singapore, any deviation from normal is likely to throw servers off balance. They have been trained to expect the expected. And when the unexpected arrives, they are never quite sure what to do or how to handle the situation.

 

   On the other hand, Indian service, in my view at least, is far superior to Asian service (Asian being a synonym for East Asian, of course) because Indian service usually involves more use of discretion. When things go wrong, as they often do, Indian servers are rarely fazed and improvise quickly. That doesn’t happen, in say, Bangkok or Macau.

 

   Having said that, I have the depressing sense that even at the top end of the market and in the big metropolitan hotels, our service standards are slipping. Indian service is still better than much of the world. But we are not as good as we were, say, 10 years ago.

 

   One problem is the explosion of restaurants and hotels. It is good to see the industry expanding and, of course, it’s great to have many more choices than we had a decade ago. But the flipside of the expansion is that there is a shortage of trained staff because of the demand from the new restaurants and hotels. Supervisory staff are often people who are still not ready for the job and have been over-promoted because of the desperate need to find people to fill positions.

 

   I am usually more forgiving of staff at standalones because independent and non-hotel restaurants, notoriously, don’t always pay servers as much as they deserve. The situation is better than it was, say, two decades ago but too many restaurant owners expect servers to live off tips and don’t pay them properly. (This is an international practice. Servers in New York restaurants don’t get paid enough and customers are expected to make up the difference by leaving large tips.)

 

   Five-star hotels, however, are different: Almost everybody who works there is paid a reasonable wage. Most members of staff have undergone training programs. And their bosses and supervisors have usually risen up through the ranks and so understand the requirements of the restaurant or the hotel at all levels.

 

   So why are service standards declining? Well, apart from the staff shortage, there are other reasons, most of them the fault of the hotels and restaurants themselves.

 

   Let’s take one example. Everywhere in the West, and increasingly in the East, restaurants invest a lot of time and money in making sure that the welcome is a high-grade experience. At the top restaurants in Paris or New York, you will be made to feel special from the moment you pass through the entrance door. In cities like Los Angeles and New York, the greeters or the people at the door are so much in demand (because they know the names of the guests), that restaurants compete to get the best ones. Good restaurants recognise that nothing makes a guest feel better than being greeted by name at the door and being showered with warmth on arrival.

 

   Alain Ducasse, the world’s most celebrated chef, says that the first five minutes after a guest reaches the restaurant are crucial. If guests are not made to feel welcome, then they won’t enjoy anything about the experience even if the food is excellent. This is something that Indian hotel managers also understand mainly because they are told again and again that the welcome to a resident guest is crucial to how he or she will regard the entire stay.

 

   Remarkably, whoever teaches these hotel training courses forgot to tell Indian hoteliers that the same is true of restaurants as well. The welcome principle is not restricted to check-in. If guests are not greeted with warmth when they enter a restaurant, it is likely to colour the entire experience. And yet, at India’s best hotels, the restaurants often offer welcome greetings that are so tepid as to be cold and so confused as to be convincing evidence of incompetence.

 

   Let me give you two examples from last week. I went to what is probably the most popular and elegant casual-dining restaurant at any Indian hotel. The hotel in question is outstanding. It is certainly one of India’s best and I think it’s easily one of the world’s top city hotels.

 

   But even though I can’t be the first person to have pointed this out, the restaurant makes no effort at all with its greeters. The job is always given to poorly paid, untrained young women, often from small towns in the east, who have not been in Delhi very long and know very little about the restaurant business. They don’t recognise guests, they don’t know how to read their names on the reservation lists, and they seem permanently struggling to cope. It’s not their fault. It is the hotel’s for making them do this job.

 

"How much would it cost the hotels in question to hire competent people or experienced staff to handle the greeting? Not a lot, I would imagine. And yet, nobody bothers."

   On this occasion, I was expecting a guest to join me for lunch and had told him to ask for my table. I had also told the restaurant reception that he would be coming to join me so could they please direct him to my table. Of course, they didn’t tell him where I was sitting. He was led to another table and, the two of us stared at each other familiarly across the room before realising what had happened. This is the third time this is happened to me at that particular restaurant and I have not made any secret of it, but nothing has changed.

 

   And yet, to be fair, once you do get seated, the food and service are both fine. But nobody does anything about the problem at the entrance desk.

 

   The second instance comes from what must also be one of Delhi’s finest hotels. Its coffee shop is strangely designed so you go through a narrower passage area before you reach the main body of the restaurant. At the desk at the front of the passage is a barely-trained young person who neither knows the guests nor the restaurant. The only way to find a table is to be rude, to walk past the desk, go through that passage to get to the main body of the restaurant and to then ask to be seated. The reception may as well not exist.

 

   How much would it cost the hotels in question to hire competent people or experienced staff to handle the greeting? Not a lot, I would imagine. And yet, nobody bothers. I still haven’t worked out why.

 

   There is also a general drop in service standards within top restaurants. Last week, I had lunch at a members-only club on the rooftop of one of Delhi’s most successful hotels. When they took our order, they asked many questions about our drinks. Did we want Diet Coke? Did we want ice? Did we want lemon? And so on.

 

   This was truly impressive, except that no Cokes arrived. We did not get our drinks while we were waiting for the food. We did not get our drinks even when the first course plates were removed. It was only when they were serving the main courses that we asked what had happened to the drink order, at which stage the Cokes finally made an appearance. (They didn’t ask us what our drinks order was which means they knew what it was but had just forgotten to serve it.)

 

   Nobody is perfect. It is okay that the server forgot. It happens. But most hotels have a failsafe mechanism to ensure that something like this is not allowed to happen. At any good restaurant, somebody from the supervisory staff, or even the server himself or herself will come and ask if everything is okay when the first courses have been served. On this occasion, nobody came. In fact, till we left the restaurant, nobody in any kind of supervisory role from the service team approached our table.

 

   It’s a small thing. My host was a member of the club and has always loved it. I have great affection for the hotel and know many of the staff by name. So, we were not upset or angry. But it struck me that even five years ago, this would never have happened.

 

   It is all too easy for service standards to slip. And when they start slipping, the decline is pretty irresistible unless somebody makes an attempt to arrest it.

 

   People always tell me that I cannot judge the service at restaurants because many people in the business know who I am. That is not an invalid criticism. (In all three of the above instances, the chefs came and said hello at the end.) But look at it this way: If even I get bad service at a restaurant what happens to guests who are not recognised? Yes, I am a little suspicious when I get very good service because I know I may have been singled out for special attention. But when I get bad service, then there’s nothing to be suspicious about!

 

   The truth is that when service begins to decline at a restaurant, it is impossible to conceal this for very long however much the staff try and suck up to VIP guests. A good restaurant is like a well-oiled machine and when the screws get loose and the mechanism begins to slow down, no amount of sycophancy will cover that up.

 

   I’ve talked to hoteliers about this decline. Their view is that it is not the fault of the staff at the lower levels. It is usually the fault of the managers and the supervisory staff. When people who are in charge of a restaurant, don’t look at the reception area to see how many guests are waiting by the entry desk, then there is a problem. When nobody bothers to check if guests at a table are content, that’s when drink orders go missing, and servers simply forget to do their jobs.

 

   I know why hoteliers offer this explanation. Such is the explosion in size in the industry that supervisory staff are sometimes over-promoted, or hastily recruited and not adequately trained. That, unfortunately, may be inevitable in the middle of a boom.

 

   At the restaurant supervisor-manager level in most hotel chains, there is no real concern about losing your job. Even if you do not get promoted as quickly as you want at one hotel company, you can always leave and get a job at another. The boom has meant that there are so many opportunities for staff because hotels have dropped standards when it comes to recruitment. They just want the positions filled.

 

   Perhaps this is just a phase; perhaps when things settle down and the industry is not expanding so quickly, we will begin to value service again. But, a little voice in my head tells me that the industry will keep expanding. The boom will never end, and hotel companies will always be hungry for staff.

 

   In that case, it’s probably important that our bigger chains start paying more attention to service standards.

 

   Because there is now a genuine problem.