Nobody believes that the best food is at expensive restaurants. Yes, there are many things that distinguish expensive restaurants in India from their cheaper counterparts: Fancy décor, more expensive crockery, heavy, ornate menus and lighting so dim that you can’t read these ornate menus. But it’s not necessarily the food.
Expensive restaurants in India focus on fancy décor and high noise levels, neglecting food quality and service standards.(Pixabay)
Sometimes, when they want to indicate that they are crowded, buzzy places, these restaurants design their interiors to include hard surfaces that do not soak up sound (no soft furnishings, for instance) so that the noise levels are always high. This annoys people like me who want to hear what their lunch or dinner companions are saying (and can’t in these so-called ‘buzzy’ restaurants) but that’s okay: Many people who pay these prices don’t really believe in conversation anyway. When they are keeping quiet, they are actually just speaking their minds.
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I don’t mind that the food at cheaper places is often so much better. But what always surprises me is the level of service. At cheaper places, the waiters are underpaid and untrained. They make up for the lack of training with hard work and enthusiasm. At expensive places, where you should expect world class service given how high the prices are, you will frequently be disappointed.
For a country with a tradition of hospitality, it is surprising how badly run our restaurants can be and how crappy the service often is.
Let’s take some examples.
The Welcome
The hotel industry will tell you that the welcome is the key: Guests make up their minds about the hotel even before they get to their rooms. So, hotels train their reception staff accordingly. Sadly, they forget that the same principle also applies to restaurants: Guests want to be welcomed. And as for standalone restaurants, they rarely bother with welcomes anyhow.
This is in sharp contrast to the West where men like Will Guidara and Danny Meyer write bestselling books about how they have worked to make guests welcome. In the UK, at any restaurant in the old Corbin and King empire, staff are judged by how welcome they make guests feel.
In India, we don’t give a damn: Even at many top restaurants. The ‘greeter’ or the person who does the welcoming will usually be a young person who has just moved to Delhi or Mumbai and barely understands the job. They will not recognise regular guests, will struggle with the names on the reservations and will have no understanding of the finely choreographed ballet that running a packed restaurant must be. I usually feel sorry for these young people who have to fend off guests, answer the telephone to take bookings, check the reservation list and keep track of how many tables are empty/or are likely to soon be empty.
Of course,