Which restaurants never fail when it comes to service? Share your thoughts below
October 1 is a big day in the story of UK restaurants. The so-called Tips Act comes into force (proper name: The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023) and new obligations are being imposed upon employers to ensure that tips are fairly allocated among workers. And it’s not just a law for the hospitality industry, all sorts of businesses – from cab firms to hairdressers, pubs and cafés – will see the act of withholding tips become illegal.
But it is in the hospitality trade that a real difference will be felt, which prompts the question: is the new law fair? Doesn’t this country have a fairly poor reputation for service?
Is this yet another barmy new law that will see money going into the pockets of shoddy workers who need not a tipping but a ticking off? Well, of course, the answer is yes and no. But as a restaurant critic, a writer who has deliberately, professionally, forensically and – it has to be said, joyfully – interrogated and described the British dining scene for almost exactly a quarter of a century I can say that the answer nudges towards the “no”.
My experience would suggest that service in British restaurants, pubs and other eateries is pretty good – and getting better.
And it’s not just centred in our cities, nor is it only dished out by foreigners, who, you might think, are traditionally more accustomed to the art of service than the average British waiter.
I, for example, witnessed a serious outbreak of warm, welcoming, knowledgeable and professional service on the Suffolk coast at the weekend. There, between the high street and pebbled beach of Aldeburgh sits the comfortable and affable hotel, The Suffolk. Presided over by restaurateur and hotelier George Pell, you will struggle to find another such immaculate collection of genuinely welcoming, practised and young servers, for whom no request seems too much trouble.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the town’s annual food and drink festival is considered one of the best in the country. That good service manifests itself where the product is decent.
Except it has been a journey to get here. And it has been a slog for this country’s finest maîtres d’ – the likes of Silvano Giraldin, Jesus Adorno and Diego Masciaga, at various times managers of Le Gavroche, Le Caprice and The Waterside Inn – to persuade this nation that service was as vital a part of hospitality as cooking. It does not go unnoticed that those preaching this lesson are, respectively, French, Bavarian and Italian.
But as The Suffolk shows, the Brits are now getting in on the act. They realise the value of the proper welcome and that, crucially, good service does not just make a place but can rescue it.
It was a waitress who rescued the Mayfair restaurant Socca. Impossibly posh, achingly pricey she, as I wrote at the time, “... was the tonic that saves [the restaurant] from disappearing you know where.”
As I also wrote in the same review: “Staff can make or break a place. Their cheerfulness can elevate the pedestrian, can rescue the dire, can pop the pomposity of the impossibly posh.”
My recent experience of a place called Marceline in Canary Wharf would have been ambivalent were it not for Jeffrey, the sommelier and waiter who, as you will read this weekend, raised our competent but middling meal to a sort of divine comedy.
Or I remember the service of Louise at Hitchen’s Barn, in Oakham, Leicestershire. While her husband, Neil, is the chef, a crafter of highly competent and delicious food, she was busy “dishing it up with charm and efficiency”. They were, I wrote, a “magnificent twosome.”
Similarly I’ve had wonderful service over the last 12 months at, among others, Ibai, in the City of London, at Native in Worcestershire, Skof in Manchester, The Blue Pelican in Deal, Climat in Manchester, Röski in Liverpool and Lovage in Newcastle.
Joyfully I can report that they mirror the majority of my experiences. Although it was also my duty to point out the endlessly smug and excruciatingly long lectures delivered by staff at Humo in Mayfair, the clueless and oily-fingered deliveries at Fish Game in Canary Wharf and of the Diglis House Hotel in Worcester, where I wondered if the establishment was “auditioning for a reality TV remake of Fawlty Towers.”
That the latter two places subsequently closed merely drives the point home that good service might (might) have rescued them from oblivion.
If it was not my job to record the food, then like most people my impressions of a place are largely driven by the staff and their serving skills, that knack, by nature and nurture, to deliver the very essence of the word hospitality.
We remember the wonderful characters on the doors of great hotels, or the young waitresses managing chaos with charm and aplomb.
So yes, as we get better at this it is important we enshrine the rewarding of it in law. Something that should then focus even more attention on the great art of service.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
