This is especially true of the highest class of restaurant, for waiters travel about Europe a great deal, and the man who waits on you at the Carlton to-night may turn up at the Ritz in Paris next week, at Monte Carlo next month, and at Homburg next year. If he has cheated you badly, you will remember him (though not in the time-honoured waiter’s sense), and his good name will be gone once and for all.
I referred just now to the foreign schools for waiters where they are systematically, and one might almost say scientifically, trained for their profession, which is neither an easy nor, in the end, an unremunerative one. Many sons of well-to-do German, Swiss, and Italian hotel and restaurant proprietors, lads who have been to good schools and received a first-class education, are content to begin at the very bottom of the ladder, even as piccolo or boy attendant, and gradually to work their way through all the ranks even to that of maître d’hôtel.
A German lad who wishes to become a waiter goes, first to Radunski, at Frankfort, or to some other regular training school for waiters. At the end of two years’ hard work, if he has gained his certificate, he goes to an hotel or restaurant as an improver, without salary, for two years or more.
Then he comes to London, and, for the sake of learning English, enters an English family at a very small wage. Having mastered English, he is off to France to learn French on similar terms.
Finally, he returns to London as an “aid” waiter, and by attending to business he can rise to be a superintendent or a manager.
But the Englishman wants to undertake skilled labour and earn full money without a proper training. Look, on the other hand, at the case of the English butler. He is renowned throughout the world, but then he was content to begin as a page and pass through the second stage of footman.
A well-known restaurant manager once said to me: “Though we are patriotic, we cannot allow patriotism to stand in the way of efficiency. We must, for our customers’ sakes, employ the best men we can get, irrespective of nationality, although we should prefer Englishmen, of course.”
Some attempt has been made, is being made in fact, to establish a training school for British waiters, but its success is, I fear, problematical. And this for various reasons. Few, if any, professional men would dream of their boys being trained to be waiters; it would be beneath their shoddy suburban dignity. Also, the class from which the average British waiter is drawn seems to be constitutionally incapable of acquiring even the merest smattering of a foreign language. He despises any tongue but his own.
The British Waiters’ Association has done excellent work on the right lines, but very much remains still to be accomplished.
The average British waiter at the ordinary railway refreshment-room is usually a terribly slow and untidy individual. True, one has learned not to expect too much at a railway station. A la gare, comme à la gare!