People all over the world appreciate Asian service. Those who babble are mostly Westerners who cannot imagine a situation in which relatively low-paid service workers (low-paid by Western standards) who do not depend on tips when they are at work. They smile happily and seem genuinely happy to serve their guests.
I also admire the so-called Asian service, but one of my reservations is that it depends on following strict operating procedures. In countries like Thailand or Singapore, any deviation from normal can unbalance the servers. They have been trained to expect what is expected. And when unexpected situations arise, they are never sure what to do or how to handle the situation.
On the other hand, Indian service, at least in my view, is far superior to Asian service (Asian is, of course, synonymous with East Asian) because Indian service generally involves greater use of discretion. When things go wrong, as they often do, Indian servers rarely panic and make corrections immediately. This does not happen in Bangkok or Macau.
Having said that, I have the disappointing feeling that even at the top end of the market and in the larger metropolitan hotels, our service standards are falling. Indian service is still better than most of the services in 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’s good to see that the industry is expanding and, of course, it’s great to have many more options than we had a decade ago. But the flip side of expansion is that there is a shortage of trained staff due to the demand for new restaurants and hotels. Supervisory employees are often people who are not yet ready for the job and have been promoted excessively due to the desperate need to find people to fill the positions.
I’m generally more forgiving of staff at standalones because independent and non-hotel restaurants, notoriously, don’t always pay servers as much as they deserve. Let’s say, the situation is better than it was two decades ago, but too many restaurant owners expect servers to skimp on tips and not pay them fairly. (This is an international practice. Servers in New York restaurants are not paid enough and customers are expected to make up the difference by leaving large tips.)
However, five-star hotels are different: almost everyone working there is paid a fair salary. Most of the staff members have gone through training programmes. And their bosses and supervisors have usually risen through the ranks and therefore understand the requirements of the restaurant or hotel at all levels.
So why are service standards declining? Well, there are other reasons besides staff shortage, most of them the fault of hotels and restaurants.
Let us take an example. Everywhere in the West, and increasingly in the East, restaurants invest a lot of time and money in ensuring that the welcome is a high-class experience. In top restaurants in Paris or New York, you will be made to feel special as soon as you walk through the entrance. In cities like Los Angeles and New York, receptionists, or doormen, are in such high demand (because they know guests’ names), that restaurants compete to get the best ones. Good restaurants believe that nothing makes a guest feel better than being greeted by name at the door and warmly welcomed upon arrival.
The world’s most famous chef, Alain Ducasse, says that the first five minutes after a guest arrives at the restaurant are very important. If guests aren’t welcomed, they won’t enjoy the experience, even if the food is excellent. This is something that Indian hotel managers also understand primarily because they are told time and again that the welcome of a resident guest is crucial to how he or she will be treated throughout the stay.
What is noteworthy is that whoever teaches these hotel training courses forgot to tell Indian hoteliers that the same is true for restaurants as well. The welcome principle is not limited to check-in. If guests are not warmly welcomed when entering a restaurant, it is likely to affect the entire experience. And yet, even in India’s best hotels, restaurants often offer welcome greetings that are so bland as to seem cold and so confusing as to be convincing evidence of incompetence.
Let me give you two examples from last week. I went to probably the most popular and elegant casual-dining restaurant in any Indian hotel. The hotel in question is excellent. It is definitely one of the best hotels in India and I think it is easily one of the top urban hotels in the world.
But even though I’m not the first person to point this out, the restaurant doesn’t spare any effort for its receptionists. The jobs are always given to low-paid, untrained young women, often from small towns in the East, who have not been in Delhi for very long and know little about the restaurant business. They don’t recognize guests, they don’t know how to read their names on the reservation list, and they seem to be permanently struggling to deal with it. It’s not their fault. It is the responsibility of the hotel to get this work done from them.
On this occasion, I was expecting a guest to join me for lunch and I had asked him to ask for my table. I also informed the restaurant reception that he was coming to join me, so could they please invite him to my table. Of course, they didn’t tell him where I was sitting. She was taken to another table and, we both looked at each other familiarly across the room, before we realized what had happened. This is the third time this has happened to me at that particular restaurant and I’ve made no secret of it, but nothing has changed.
And yet, honestly, once you sit down, both the food and service are fine. But no one does anything about the problem at the admission desk.
The second example comes from one of the best hotels in Delhi. Its coffee shop is strangely designed so that you pass through a narrow passage area before reaching the main part of the restaurant. At the front desk across the way is a barely trained young man who knows neither the guests nor the restaurant. The only way to find a table is to be rude, walk past the desk, walk through that way to reach the main part of the restaurant, and then ask to be seated. Reception may not even exist.
How much will it cost the respective hotels to hire competent people or experienced staff to handle the greetings? Not very much, I would imagine. And yet, no one bothers. I still don’t understand the reason.
There has also been a general decline in service standards in 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 several questions about our drinks. Did we need Diet Coke? Do we need snow? Did we need lemon? And so on.
It was really impressive, except no Coke came. While we were waiting for our food we did not receive our beverages. Even when the first course plates were removed we still didn’t get our drinks. While they were serving the main course we asked what happened to the drink order, at what stage the Cokes finally arrived. (They didn’t ask us what our drink order was, which means they knew what it was, but they forgot to serve it.)
No one is perfect. It’s okay that the server forgot. it happens. But most hotels have a fail-safe mechanism in place to ensure that something like this is not allowed to happen. In any good restaurant, someone on the supervisory staff, or even the server himself, will come over and ask if everything is OK after the first course is served. No one came on this occasion. In fact, no one from the service team came to our table in any kind of supervisory role until we left the restaurant.
This is a small thing. My host was a club member and always liked it. I am very fond of the hotel and know many of the staff by name. Therefore, we were not upset or angry. But I felt that even five years ago this would never have happened.
It is very easy for service standards to slip. And when they start slipping, the fall is quite irresistible unless someone makes an effort to stop it.
People always tell me I can’t rate service in restaurants because so many people in the business know who I am. This is not an invalid criticism. (In all three examples above, the chef came over and said hello at the end.) But look at it this way: If I also get poor service at a restaurant, what happens to the guests who aren’t recognized? Yes, when I get great service I get a little skeptical because I know I may have been singled out for special attention. But when I get bad service, there’s nothing to doubt!
The truth is that when service begins to decline at a restaurant, it is impossible to hide it for very long, no matter how hard the staff tries to cater to VIP guests. A good restaurant is like a well-oiled machine and when the screws get loose and the mechanism starts to slow down, no amount of sycophancy will cover it up.
I’ve talked to hoteliers about this decline. He believes that it is not the fault of the lower level staff. This is usually the fault of managers and supervisory staff. When the people in charge of a restaurant don’t check the reception area to see how many guests are waiting at the entrance desk, a problem occurs. Drink orders go missing when no one bothers to check if the guests at the table are satisfied, and servers forget to do their jobs.
I know why hoteliers give this explanation. The industry has exploded in size so much that supervisory staff are sometimes highly promoted, or hastily recruited and not adequately trained. Unfortunately, this may be unavoidable amid a boom.
At the restaurant supervisor-manager level in most hotel chains, there is no real worry about losing your job. Even if you don’t get promoted at one hotel company as quickly as you would like, you can always leave and find a job at another hotel company. The boom means there are plenty of opportunities for staff as hotels have dropped their standards when it comes to recruitment. They just want to fill the position.
Maybe it’s just a phase; Perhaps when things settle down and the industry is not expanding so fast, we will start valuing service again. But, a little voice in my head tells me that the industry will continue to expand. The boom will never end and hotel companies will always be hungry for employees.
In that case, it’s probably important that our big chains start paying more attention to service standards.
Because now there is a real problem.
