Well, from a gastronomic perspective unquestionably….cooking programmes abound, we live in the era of the celebrity chef and Britain has some of the best restaurants in the world. You can eat in some of the best Italian, Indian, French, Chinese, Thai restaurants in the world here in the UK (I stopped at Thai, I could easily have gone on). We are without a doubt living in a high point of this country’s culinary evolution.

But I have found myself increasingly in recent times lamenting the fact that waiting has not evolved in the same way. In countries such as Italy, France and Spain, waiting is considered a proper job, a trade, something that requires training, development and experience to do properly. Part of the restaurant experience isn’t just the food, but how the food is served and how you are treated as a customer – in short, the waiting service.

Yet for all the advances made by the UK in terms of the development and appreciation of food itself, the same cannot be said for service. Apart from the very high end restaurants, most waiting staff do not know how to wait properly. In many cases, they have clearly not been trained in the basics of restaurant service. This would be acceptable in cheap and cheerful restaurants but I have been to two restaurants recently where the main courses were charged at around £20 (so hardly cheap and cheerful) where the service was very poor.  This is something I feel particularly strongly about as my parents owned a restaurants and I worked there during university holidays as a waiter so I have a fair amount of experience in this area.

In both cases I was served by young waiters who tried hard but just didn’t have a clue.  Please indulge my rant here, but this is a list of the basic things they either didn’t do or got wrong….

–         After serving wine, they didn’t once come round to pour wine for me and my guests. Not a big deal if there are only 2 or 3 of you, but given we were a party of 10, it was a real pain to keep passing the bottle from one end of the table to the other. Now, over bearing service can be as bad as inattentive service granted – having a waiter constantly pouring wine and asking you if you want more wine is just as irritating!

–         One waiter removed our wine glasses after the first course thinking we didn’t want any more wine?!?!? We hadn’t changed wines so there was no justification.

–         When the plates were cleared up, I had a waiter literally pile plates one on another right in front of me, moving the cutlery from one to the other. It was like being in a “caff”.

–         And my particular favourite was being asked for my coffee order whilst I was looking at the dessert menu and then bringing my guests’ coffees whilst they were still deciding on their desserts! I was suitably indignant by all of this and told the waitress that I would order my coffee after I’d had my dessert! You simply do not bring people coffee with their dessert unless they ask for it – coffee is how you end the meal. You certainly do not serve coffee before dessert! I did very well not to start ranting at the staff at this – the only thing that stopped me was that my waitress was clearly inexperienced and had not been trained properly so wasn’t really her fault.

Which brings me back to the main thrust of this blog…we seemed to have reached a point where our appreciation and knowledge of food and its quality has evolved such that the UK can quite legitimately claim to be one of the best countries for food in the world. Yet we are falling behind in terms of service in my opinion – it’s not enough to have a waiter come to your table 5 minutes into your main course and say “Is everything ok with your meal?”. Nor do I find it good service that a waiter will come to my table to take an order without writing it down??? Seriously, why would anyone do this? It’s a recipe for disaster – you increase the risk getting the order wrong. It doesn’t make the experience any better for the customer – I’d much rather have a waiter who would come promptly to my table when he could see I was trying to catch the attention of the staff, so that I could for example ask for the bill. Far better service than noteless order taking!

A good waiter can really make the difference in a restaurant – unfortunately from this perspective I don’t believe UK restaurants have improved.  It’s a shame as I think it undervalues many restaurants. Rant over!