The honour of being a waiter

At the risk of sounding as pompous as of one of those outraged diners at the restaurant of Fawlty Towers (a British comedy series about a truly dreadful hotel), I'm still simmering after having one of the worst service experiences in my life a few days back, at a four-star provincial hotel in Oman (somewhere between Barka and Sohar, in case anyone is wondering which to avoid next time).

It was a pool snack bar and the menu offered a range of tasty-sounding dishes from fish and chips to chicken in a basket. My wife, my colleague and I ordered three starters, three main dishes and some soft drinks.

My side salad came after about 10 minutes and my main course after about 20. A bit slow, but the food was good. My colleague's rather dreary coleslaw came after about 25 minutes, rekindling hope that the third starter and two missing main courses were just a few minutes away. Alas, no.

 

I finally snapped after about 30 minutes in which my poor wife had been given absolutely nothing to eat and asked the waiter and the barman what the hell was going on. The waiter considered it a fine joke that he had repeatedly told me to wait ‘just another five minutes.'

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Eventually, on hearing the fuss I was kicking up, the outlet supervisor emerged and reassured us that the missing dishes would be brought over immediately. Great news! Except that after about another five minutes, the supervisor came to ask which dishes we had ordered.

After we had clarified that small detail, deciding that it would take longer to walk out of the hotel and find another restaurant than to go through with the current ordeal until the bitter end, still nothing happened. My colleague realised that the executive chef was sitting comfortably in front of us, chatting with some guests and rightly berated him for doing so while we had still not been served.

He muttered something unintelligible (evidently not an apology) and then skulked off to do something about it. Finally, after about 50 minutes, my wife and colleague got their main courses.

It's not that the food was bad - some of it was quite good, actually - or that the setting was unattractive. The weather on the Batinah coast is fresher than in Dubai, and sitting under the ceiling fans in the shade by the pool was pleasant. But the whole experience was ruined by the fact that nobody really cared how or, more to the point, when we were served.

The waiter had evidently not understood our original order and neither he nor anyone else had been concerned to know what in fact we wanted to eat. They apparently hoped we would simply forget about the unidentified main courses. It was also evident that there was nobody actually managing the operation that day.

The waiters were running around taking orders and hoping to goodness that the diners would be in enough of a holiday mood not to worry about the appallingly long delays in the kitchen. We left as two other disappointed guests asked where on earth their ice creams had got to.

I say this was one of the worst F&B service experiences of my life, but in fact it was representative of many I have had in the Gulf. And of course it is not just in Oman that these things occur, and not a hard and fast rule.

There are many GCC restaurants and hotels where one can have a superlative service experience. On the one hand, it did highlight the importance of training, of inculcating and applying those famous Standard Operating Procedures.

We also dined at the National Hospitality Institute in Muscat, which has a restaurant called the Class Room, for obvious reasons. It was a wonderful thing to see all the Omani students there, taking such care in the placement of fish knives, the gracious ladling of soup and the finely enunciated repetition of our orders. Not to mention the excellent food cooked by the student chefs.

But it's also a matter of vocation, which is a different thing. There are some countries around the world in which it is an honourable profession to be a waiter, and often a job for life

I would say Lebanon is an example of such a country; also Mexico, a place of which I have some knowledge. In those two countries, I have met waiters who are the epitome of professionalism and competence. They are there when you need them and invisible the rest of the time. Their explanations of the menu items show a genuine understanding of and enthusiasm for the food.

Their recommendations show a real desire to delight their customers. If you need a condiment or a toothpick, they appear out of nowhere before you've asked. I hope you have experienced this kind of service and met this kind of person, because it's a genuine privilege.

They give the vocation of waiter or waitress a dignity that one normally associates with jobs like doctors, judges and town mayors. To experience a restaurant with good food, a pleasant ambience and this kind of waiting, is one of life's rare gifts.

Unfortunately, in most hotels in the Gulf, the waiters and waitresses are simply biding their time before they move on to a better-paid job, often in a new and shinier hotel. Far from being a vocation and an end in itself, time put in as a waiter is viewed as a chore.

The real challenge for hotel restaurant and HR managers is not only to train and retain staff, but to help them see that they can love their jobs and derive a high degree of personal fulfilment from doing them well. That's the secret of true customer service excellence.

Guy Wilkinson is a director of Viability, a hospitality and property consulting firm in Dubai.