Diary of a hotelier

Ashish Modak: hospitality students must be prepared for menial tasks.

Everything changes with time… doesn’t it?

The times are a’changing and sure enough the hotel industry is setting trends and patterns across the world like never before.

The world has evolved and ‘change’ is the mantra of today’s hoteliers.

From a period in time where facsimiles and trunk dials ruled the business, when hotels, inns and restaurants clustered around railway stations, from an era where there were fixed rules about service and table etiquette — from all that we have progressed to a fast-paced constantly-changing world where yesterday is old news tomorrow is already passé.
 
Nowadays, everyone likes to think — and more importantly proclaim — they are ahead of the curve. It’s as if the world of hospitality has gone a 360-degree change.

Or has it?

My first experience in a true hotel dates back to about sixteen years ago when, as a summer intern from a hotel school, I first entered a professional kitchen as a trainee commis chef.

As luck — or lack of luck — would have it, I was assigned to a banqueting kitchen for the first two months.

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So while all my friends bagged the lesser evils of kitchen duties, like working in the butchery or bakery sections, where a standard day shift was the nor, me and one equally ‘lucky’ friend of mine were on banqueting operations, where starting at 0900 hours was the norm and even thinking of clocking off before 2300 hours was a crime.

Of course there was a scheduled three hour break in the afternoons — but not for trainees; they were just kids fooling around in the kitchens and hence needed to work through the afternoons as well.

Coming back to my first day, my friend and I entered the kitchen at 9am sharp in new white and grey uniforms, proud to be getting our first taste of the real hotel world.

We were met with a look of disgust from the senior chefs, and told to wait in the corner by the pot-wash for the head chef to arrive.

The chef soon arrived, gave a smile and a knowing nod and said: “Wait here and observe! What goes on in a real kitchen; I want you to make mental notes and tell me this evening everything you have seen.
 
“Do not even think about moving from here till I tell you to.”

And on that note, he left us.