Server down

Finding good waiters is an increasingly tall order, restaurateurs tell Antoine Lewis.

The tables have turned on the restaurant business. Faced with an economic slowdown and rising costs of ingredients, power and fuel, it isn’t just customers that hotels and restaurants are desperately trying to attract to their tables. They’re looking just as hard for waiters.

With attrition rates running at approximately 30 per cent a month, restaurateurs say that they can’t afford to be picky about the waiters they hire and are wary of firing non-performing staff. As a result they’re spending more time and resources on training employees, even though they know that a competent waiter is likely to leave in a few months.

As management gurus would put it, the number of hungry mouths has increasedeven though the size of the pie has stayed the same. The massive growth in BPO industries and in the retail sector has increased the demand for employees adept in face-to-face customer interaction – skills that waitstaff already have. These sectors have raided restaurants and offered waiters much higher salaries.

A captain – as waiters with five years’ experience are known as – starts on a monthly salary of between Rs 8,000 and Rs 10,000; tips add up to between Rs 3,000 and Rs 5,000. In comparison, the starting salary for a BPO employee or a retail-chain employee is Rs 14,000 to Rs 16,000. Some retail firms have even been willing to double salaries offered to waiters, said Nitin Tandon, a partner in Water Blue, which runs Pot Pourri, Lemon Grass and banqueting services. He recently lost a newly hired assistant banquet manager to a supermarket chain.

Concerned about persistent staff losses, Tandon approached a hospitality consulting firm to find a solution. They told him that the hospitality sector was going to haemorrhage staff to the BPOs, malls, supermarkets and telecom sectors for at least three years because though the service sector is growing, there are no new training institutes to equip students with the necessary skills. That’s why, students from catering colleges and restaurant staff have become easy choices.

City restaurants are even having a difficult time finding new recruits. While many English speakers have been absorbed into the telecom industry and call centres handling international clients, potential non-English speaking recruits have been hired by courier companies and domestic call centres.
Dominic Costabir, director of the Hospitality Training Institute, which conducts training programmes for the hospitality and allied industries, notes that working conditions in retail can be easier than the gruelling physicality of a restaurant. “A person who would’ve worked as a waiter now prefers working in a shop because they don’t have to work long hours, they don’t have to work shifts,” he said. “It’s a nine-to-five job that doesn’t involve any heavy work.”

However, older restaurants like Paradise in Colaba or Gypsy Chinese near Shivaji Park have not been affected by the crisis. Rahul Limaye, the owner of Gypsy Chinese, said that nearly 70 per cent of his staff has been with him from the time that he opened 25 years ago. The reason his staff have remained isn’t the money, he said. “My staff is not very highly paid and yet I have never had a problem,” he said. “That’s because I’m always accessible to everyone, right from the sweeper to the manager.” The relationship between owners and employees underwent a change in the late eighties due to union pressures. Many restaurateurs refused to make their staff permanent, preferring to give them a break every three months. This saved owners the cost of paying statutory dues such as gratuity, provident fund, medical and leave travel allowance. However, Limaye makes sure that everyone gets their proper dues, and when necessary, even advances soft loans for weddings or other personal expenses.

At Paradise, Mehru Kadkhodai treats her staff like family. “My husband and I didn’t want to take on a partner, so we treat our staff as partners,” she said. Most of her waiters who started with her when the restaurant opened in 1952 stayed on until they retired or passed away. Among the loyalists are Pudanik Naik and Boju Poojari, who have been with Paradise for 30 years.

Unlike New York, where heavy investments are made in training and constantly ensuring high service standards, few restaurants in Mumbai pay quite as much attention to their waiters. New York restaurateurs like Floyd Cardoz at Tabla encourage their waiters to eat at other high-end restaurants, so that they get a sense of their competitors’ standards.

Costabir believes that the restaurant industry shares blame for the shortfall. Instead of a concerted sector-wide effort to develop training programmes and courses that will produce large numbers of staff, individual organisations prefer to give employees on-the-job training. None of the restaurant bodies like the Association of Restaurants and Hotels or the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India are interested in putting together waiter-training programmes.

Tandon is one of the few restaurateurs who trained his staff before opening his fine dining Asian restaurant Seijo and the Soul Dish in 2004. “We’d have management mentoring programmes at the shop- floor level every day. We had people from other hotels, other leading restaurants coming to talk to them,” he said. “ For three months, they’d have management training for three hours and service training for three hours during which period they received a full salary, but no tips.” Despite this, three of his staff members left to join a new five-star hotel when they learnt that his restaurant’s opening was slightly delayed.

The pressing issue at the moment is not about finding new people, but about retaining trained staff, said Tandon and Limaye. Earlier generations of waiters, being mostly illiterate, had few job options, but workers today can choose from a variety of service-related opportunities. Waiters’ salaries are steadily increasing, but standalone restaurants like Lemon Grass and Mocha believe it is important to have Human Resources teams that chart out growth opportunities and regular training programmes. Even though Tandon believes that the retail bubble will soon burst and salaries will be rationalised, low wages and long working hours for waiters will also become a thing of the past.

Published in Time Out Mumbai November 28 2008