LET ME TELL you about Poppy. She was waiting tables in a London French restaurant when I noticed her. She was slight, very young and (as the young have a tendency to be) good looking. She also knew precisely what she was doing.
Front of house service is an art form, just as much as cooking is. A restaurant can offer great food, but without the quality of service to support it, it’ll be just another expensive refuelling station. In France, where gastronomy is buried deep in the national DNA, they know this, and - for the most part - respect waiting staff. In the UK, we’re still learning it.
Poppy moved through her restaurant casually, comfortably and hyper-attentively. She noticed when glasses were empty and when a diner dropped a fork. Crockery and cutlery disappeared as soon as they had served their purpose. And Poppy smiled and chatted when customers wanted her to, and maintained a respectful distance when they did not.
We chatted (it’s what I do). Poppy is 22 and clearly well educated. She has a beautiful Home Counties accent, and she has chosen hospitality as her career. In England, we assume young waiters and waitresses are working to fund their studies - or because they have none to fund, and this is all they can do. It’s rare - and rewarding - to meet somebody so young, so well-educated who has chosen front-of-house as a way of life. Without going into the detail, I quickly discovered that she has good reason to - it’s all part of her plan.
Front-of-house is not an easy choice of career, the pay isn’t great and the hours are often dreadful, and it’s not just one thing either: the style of delivery varies from place to place.
I’ve dined in Michelin-starred restaurants where elegant - and, to my mind, faintly transparent - beings fade in and out: they’re there when you need them, and very-nearly invisible when you don’t.
Then there are the neighbourhood restaurants where the welcome is warm, a really ‘pleased to see you’ sort of greeting (even if they’ve never met you before). These are the places I love, especially if I’ve been there before. The service is friendly and sometimes almost familial. I know a few of these places: El Pirata in Mayfair’s Down Street; Kumquat in The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells; Notto on Piccadilly; the café at Knowle Grange Spa outside Frant in East Sussex. It’s a great thing to be recognised as well as welcomed. It’s like going home.
Bad service, though, is horrifying. You can always spot it. In an hotel restaurant in Eastbourne, we watched a waitress avoiding work on a busy Saturday. She took her time shoving chairs under tables and repositioning menus on tables or moving around the salt and pepper shakers - a millimetre here, a millimetre there. And she did all of it in slow motion, while her colleagues zapped around clearing tables and fulfilling orders. Eventually, a manager caught her and threw her back into service.
Sometimes, waiters are just untrained. In a gastropub in Surrey, a young man spent forever folding napkins so that he didn’t have to look at customers. He didn’t seem to me too bad at his job, just rather shy. He’d improve with training.
The worst service I’ve seen recently was … performative. Diners were supposed to see it, as if it were a cabaret. Trust me, it wasn’t.
I won’t name the restaurant because I don’t believe bad reviews are helpful - there are bad days in restaurants just as there are in hospitals and supermarkets and estate agencies. Things go wrong.
On this occasion, I had taken the Mrs B out to celebrate an anniversary. There was a pleasant welcome, if a little formulaic, and some friendly front-of-house staff. If I had a complaint about the service, it might have been that too many different members of staff asked how we were enjoying the food. That is until the couple at the next table left.
What happened next might just have involved puffs of smoke and cloaks. The young manager had the table cleared, and then began polishing it as if it had insulted his mother. Elbow angled like that strange chap on University Challenge, he pressed down on the table as if intent on pushing it into the ground. Then, heaven preserve us, he got down on his knees and began inspecting the carpet for escaped detritus, peas and breadcrumbs. He stood up, and began polishing the by now capitulating table again, paying special attention to the edges for some reason. Then he relaid it to within an inch of its life, holding a dirty fork balletically out behind him, Mo Farah style, to be replaced by a silent lackey with a clean one. Then he relaid the table again. And then he punched the cushions into a Pokemon shape, with noisy gusto.
We were sitting a metre away, trying to enjoy our food. His performance had nothing to do with our evening’s enjoyment, and it was hugely disruptive.
The food - under the brand name of a well-known chef - was good, but I’ll never go back to that restaurant again. I like to dine in peace, and funnily enough I like to have a quiet chat with my wife while I’m doing it.
The restaurant where Poppy worked wasn’t cheap (although, to be fair, my pal paid) but I will certainly go back there. The food was good, the welcome was good and the service was absolutely excellent. And that, right there, is the difference. The food in Poppy’s restaurant might not have been as august as that of the named chef’s, but the welcome, the ambience and the service made all the difference.
It’s not always about the cooking,
NB The image at the top o this piece was created by AI.