The waiting staff in a restaurant can make or break a meal just as much as the people in the kitchen. Yet they are rarely celebrated – and quite often traduced

Name a successful chef. That wasn’t hard, was it? Now name a successful maitre d’, or waiter, or anyone else who works front of house in a restaurant and isn’t Fred Sirieix of First Dates.

If you’re struggling, you’re not alone. For all our celebrity chefs and food fetishisation, most Brits still consider any restaurant job that involves dealing with customers as at best stop-gap, and at worst a last resort.

In continental Europe, waiting is a respected vocation: many kids grow up in their parents’ restaurants and see no shame in following in their footsteps. In Madrid, Paris or Vienna, says restaurant manager Tom Slegg, “you see 60-, 70-year-olds working the floor, doing it with skill, grace and knowledge”. Slegg himself has managed a Michelin-starred restaurant, co-founded two of his own and now manages a four-star hotel, the Angel, in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk – yet “99 out of 100 people will look disappointed when they ask what I do in restaurants and I tell them I work on the floor.

It’s a bit chicken-and-egg, isn’t it? You aren’t valued, so you’re demotivated, so you aren’t valued

“You can’t turn the TV on without a programme about food or being a chef, but there are no heroes to look up to in service,” Slegg says. Where waiting staff do appear, “they are often being ordered around by the chef, or shouted at” – hardly a big sell to prospective employees.

This stigma starts at a young age. The British Hospitality Association says there is “a deeply held antipathy towards the sector from too many parents, careers advisers and teachers”. “At school, the idea of hospitality as a profession is not even thought of,” says George Hersey, general manager of the Frog Hoxton, in east London. “You are told to get a degree, and in the meantime get a job in a pub or restaurant.” It took Hersey years – and a degree he has never used – to commit to his dream of a hospitality career, and his friends even longer to stop questioning when he would grow out of it. “They were always supportive, but I knew they were really wondering when I’d get a proper job. Then they came here and saw me running my team and they got it, slowly but surely.”

Few British families can afford to show their kids a good waiter or maitre d’ at work; nor is it something we see much of as adults, in a culture that prioritises speed over service. Many of us claim to be foodies, yet the twin pressures of time and money mean that foodieness is more likely to manifest itself at a street food stall or no-reservations, high-turnover joint than at a high-end restaurant like the Frog. “People want to be fed,” Hersey says, “and they don’t want conversation.”

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“We’re food-focused, but we want the food quickly,” agrees Caroline, a 31-year-old teacher – and an enthusiastic diner – from London. “Yet at the best restaurant I’ve ever been to, L’Enclume in Cumbria, it’s the service I remember best.”

Good service is a joy for everyone concerned, says Hersey. “The guests get into your vibe and then you have a better time because of it.” It’s also inspiring: “One of my most motivating experiences when I was younger was going to the Waterside Inn in Bray [where Diego Masciaga was general manager for 30 years] and being completely blown away by Diego’s presence, and the way he moved around that restaurant.” As his boss, the chef Adam Handling, puts it: “It is not about turning up and polishing glasses; it’s about the showmanship, the interaction. A restaurant is one big theatre, and if we want kids interested in this as a career, we need to show them that.” This is something he and his managers are working on with the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts outreach programme, Adopt a School.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘In Madrid, Paris or Vienna,’ says restaurant manager Tom Slegg, ‘you see 60, 70-year-olds working the floor, doing it with skill, grace, and knowledge.’ Photograph: Stéphane de Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images

Of course, one reason the image of service as undervalued, low-paid menial work persists in the UK is largely that it’s true. “The working conditions are pretty shocking from the off, and the money isn’t great,” Slegg says. “You’re going to be put off before you’ve even considered it.” According to a 2019 study by the workforce management platform Deputy, staff turnover in hospitality is 30% a year – twice the UK average – with unsociable working hours, low pay and lack of prospects cited as the top three reasons for quitting. “It’s a bit chicken-and-egg, isn’t it?” says Richard, a 25-year-old marketing director from Dorset who, like so many people, worked in pubs before ending up in an office. “You aren’t valued, so you’re demotivated, so you aren’t valued.”

You could make a case for the tipping culture that fuels the famously friendly service in the US, “but it’s quite over the top,” Caroline observes, “and the tipping can make it seem fake.” Not least because without the tips, the wages of most waiting staff stateside are very low. The solution, Handling urges, is to pay staff properly, remove the kitchen/front-of-house divide and for every member of staff to have “a set goal, an ambition”.

Something needs to change, and fast. Brexit is coming, and already the European staff upon whom the industry largely depends are leaving the country. A KPMG report for the British Hospitality Association concluded that, “in a scenario of free movement ending and no new immigration into the sector being allowed, the industry would need to recruit an additional 62,000 UK workers each year” – a goal it deems “deeply implausible”.

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“You can sit around and moan, or you can be proactive,” says Zuleika Fennell, the managing director of Corbin & King, a restaurant group that, like Handling’s, is pioneering change in the sector. “We have to capture kids’ imaginations and retain staff.” With school programmes, a £30,000 starting salary for senior waiters and regular “rewards for excellence” for employees on both sides of the pass, Corbin & King puts its money where its mouth is. Handling, too, is optimistic – but believes we need to let go of our veneration of French service and celebrate a British style of hospitality.

We’re a “young cuisine” and “an arrogant people, who see serving as a poor person’s job,” he says, but at its best “British food is about personality, rather than discipline. It’s exciting, it can be spectacular, but it’s relaxed: there’s no looking down on people.”

As Hillary Reinsberg, the editor-in-chief of the New York-based restaurant guide The Infatuation puts it: “Service these days isn’t about the provenance of your silverware or the formality of a meal – it’s about paying attention to what diners actually want and making them feel welcome.” Such intangible skills are hard to articulate, says Slegg, “but when you get it right, it’s like hosting a dinner party every night, without cooking”.