I eat I drink I work

Good floor staff don't forget.

Friday, 27 June 2008

The ice-cream oozed between my fingers. Chocolate syrup dribbled across the back of my hand. A nib of hazelnut lodged under a fingernail. The waitress had somehow hurled an ice-cream sundae across our table. It wasn't even ours. She returned with a cloth and wiped the table mostly clean, then vanished, somehow managing to ignore the sundae surprise still coating my hands. How people (think waitresses) remember tasks or a list of items is fun for psychologists to study, but a source of irritation for customers  who receive poor service. Minor issues or ones outside the normal realm of duties are easily missed. A moment of stress can erase low-  priority tasks. Have you asked for water as the last item when  ordering and then never received it? It's free and peripheral to the pri mary transaction. It doesn't get written down or entered in the order system. It slips away. Good floor staff don't forget. They notice things. They remember. They act. It's the stuff of "hospitality"; the difference between a simple job description and understanding the role. If you're "in hospitality" then your service or your establishment is meant to be hospitable. You have guests. Your goal is to have them stay or return, perhaps to spread the good word. In Tasmania recently, a restaurateur allegedly assaulted a patron for "trying to leave without paying", even though he had just ordered the patron to leave the restaurant for breaching the establishment's ban on mobile phones. Everyone has service horror stories to spice up their dining history, though this one was particularly juicy. While there will always be staff who are still learning what it takes, it's the professionals who fail that really disappoint. A restaurant owner saw how disappointed I was when he was booked out, unable to give me a table. He hesitated and then offered me a tiny table near the kitchen. He asked that, should I take the table, I be finished by 9pm. It was my choice to accept the inconvenience. I knew the terms and understood the favour he had done me. This was much more pleasant than the upmarket pizza chain in London where a waitress announced "you were told when you booked that you had to be out by 9.30pm" [we hadn't been told] and presented the bill. She had a table to turn. Much more honest than the French restaurant which accepted our advance booking and then squeezed us onto a temporary table at the top of the staircase to the loos. Customers constantly tripped on the last step ("it happens all the time"), flying headlong towards us. Meanwhile, the wait-staff would bang the table every time they squeezed past. Hospitality clearly suffers at the hands of profit as well as professionalism. The "welcome-drink" that appears unannounced on the bill. The bread on your table that bids you goodbye with a dollar sign. The establishments where "can I offer you" has nothing to do with kindness. There's a popular café in Melbourne that has waived any pretence to hospitality. The menu lists a minimum spend at lunchtime. Bills won't be split. Service is cold. But you are welcome to order what are probably the most overpriced sandwiches on this side of the Pacific. Treating your customers like an imposition, enforcing sittings so as to maximise the covers per night, or charging for things that should be free makes financial sense if your bottomline is more important than your reputation. Unfortunately there are (almost) always punters who'll tolerate crap. When we caught the ice-cream-tossing waitress's attention again, asking for some napkins, she snapped at us that there was a dispenser on the table behind us. There was no apology. No gesture to help. Perhaps she hadn't forgotten me after all. She just didn't care. Duncan Markham (c)

 

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