Celeb chef calls for character in restaurants

Georgio Locatelli: Dubai outlets need more character and less subservience

Michelin-starred celebrity chef Georgio Locatelli has denounced the service in many of Dubai’s hotel restaurants as “subservient” and “like slavery”.

“It’s all about subservience — service hasn’t got attitude here. It’s more like slavery; that’s what passes for good service,” he asserted.

“The problem is that the majority of restaurants [in Dubai] are part of a hotel. Often in a hotel, the property itself overshadows the restaurant and it gets swallowed up; staff aren’t allowed to rock the boat.

“The noticeable exceptions to that are the independently-run outlets in hotels,” Locatelli continued. “That’s what Dubai needs more of: real restaurants, where the guys who are in charge are really in charge.

“You have to allow your staff to be in charge and in control. The guests are not in charge just because they pay — the waiters should be in charge, not the customers.”

Locatelli said the problem in Dubai came down to staff not being sufficiently empowered. 

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“All too often, staff here will face a situation where some idiot is complaining about not being able to have something that’s not on the menu. So why does he not go to one of the other 250 restaurants nearby? Why does he choose this one? But as an employee following certain guidelines, they can’t tell him to go away,” he commented.

“In Europe, good service means real quality; the person who serves you is proud, knows exactly what he’s serving and you better be nice to him if you want him to be nice to you, because if you say something to him that he doesn’t like, or you’re rude to him, then he’s allowed to deal with that.

“In my restaurants, if a customer is impolite to my staff I would just go and clear their table and get them out. And I have had to do that many times,” Locatelli added.

“Outlets here need to empower their staff. And the problem is that the owners are not in these restaurants so they are not in a position to lead by example.

“But there are enough people to change the set-up here now,” he continued. “So I think restaurants with character, independent ones, could be the next big thing.

“If you go to Zuma, for example, which isn’t in a hotel, the service there is the closest to Europe that I’ve seen.

“If you put them in a hotel, they’d have millions of complaints. Guests would say ‘oh it says this on the menu, but can I change this,’ and they’d tell them ‘no — this is on the menu, this is what you have; this is how it’s supposed to be made’.