A job well worth the wait

Equally - and there is a definite trend towards equality even in the restaurant kitchen - for a young woman with a career in catering in mind to mould herself on the sainted Delia Smith could obviously bring her powers beyond the wildest dreams of Baroness Thatcher. When Smith says poach a prune with your pork, the nation poaches and is gratefully regular as a happy by-product.

There are, however, no role models in the world of waiting, unless you count generations of Punch cartoons of the ``waiter there's a fly in my soup'' variety, and Manuel, who achieved martyrdom in Fawlty Towers.

In Britain, waiters are a joke, not a profession. We wait on tables in our summer holidays from school and college, and dine out for years on the anecdotes about the disgusting things we did to people's food in re-venge for diners behaving like our masters rather than our mates.

Actors wait when they are ``resting''. Struggling writers do it ostensibly to garner material about the human condition for their great works, but in reality to keep the wolf from the door. In short, everybody does it except the people who have an HNC in waiting.

The trouble is, too few people actually have an HNC, which encompasses the finer arts of the service side of the catering industry. Being a chef is sexy. Being a waiter is not. In England, this has reached crisis point and in June 250 representatives of the industry met to discuss the reason for catering colleges suffering a shortage of students wanting to learn the basics of waiting on table, serving behind the bar or managing the business. In Scotland, while they are not exactly searching the highways and byways for students, the attitude is the same.

Stephen Smith, a former chef at One Devonshire Gardens and Rogano in Glasgow and now head of school at the John Wheatley College catering department, says 85% of its students opt for food production. ``Perhaps waiting doesn't sound like a profession,'' Smith says, and goes on to bemoan the fact that students from Malaga, with whom his students recently did an exchange, are far more orientated to the food service side of the industry and view waiting in true European fashion as a position of great standing.

Smith can remember, however, when being a chef in this country was no great shakes. so perhaps there is hope yet for the person who aspires to selling and presenting food to discerning diners - the aspects of the job which the professionals stress but to which amateurs are blind in their conviction that waiting is nothing more than an ability to carry six dirty plates up the length of your arm without landing leftover raspberry coulis down the back of a pure silk blouse.

Smith says: ``Our two-year courses are split 50-50, half food service, half production. They go out of here with a Scotvec National Certificate. They learn bar service, silver service, wines and spirits, food production, food safety and hygiene, and so on.'' His own training was a different kettle of wild salmon in aspic. It was one of the last real apprenticeships offered by British Transport Hotels, a four-year mara-thon at the Central Hotel in Glasgow of silver service and flambeed steaks with day-release college input one day a week. A college course may be the next best thing, he says, ``but no-one can deny it was the way to go'', says Smith. ``You were better finished at the end of it.''

Gordon Yuill, general manager at Rogano, in Royal Exchange Place, Glasgow, believes he knows the reason why. ``There is still the stigma of it being a subservient job.''

His own staff, he says, are brilliant, because places of quality attract quality. But there is no getting away from the fact that while in the States waiting is looked on as a real profession and a real earner - ``They are paid commission while here waiters rely on tips'', Yuill explains - and in France people go to hotel school and come out with some status in society, there just is not the right attitude to the job in Britain.

This is not helped by the fact that the job has been de-skilled in recent years. No-one has the time or the inclination to suffer the formality of silver service. Nouvelle cuisine started the trend towards plating food and that continues despite the swing back to a decent square meal. Presentation happens in the kitchen, not in the flamboyance of a waiter's performance - although if you have experienced the drum-rolling extravaganza laid on by the staff at Glasgow's Buttery before you are allowed to tuck in, you may feel that a well-trained waiter is worth her weight in beef Wellington.

Yuill prefers to grow his own. He wants people who can develop a rapport with clients and have a good product knowledge of what is on offer from the kitchen. Ferrier Richardson, chef-patron at Yes! restaurant in Glasgow's West Nile Street and himself a veteran of such fine establishments as The Fountain, the Buttery, and Rogano, agrees.

Richardson says: ``The last thing I look for is a college qualification. We are looking for someone who is pleasant on the eye, and that doesn't mean a size eight, who is clean, fresh, has personality, can speak well and hold a conversation. After that we can teach them how to put down a plate.'' A lot of his waiting staff are part-time, some training to be doctors or lawyers. ``We are looking for someone with at least half a brain,'' Richardson says, but concedes that some of his full-time staff, including his brother, Simon, achieve the right touch, too.

The days of forelock tugging to customers is a thing of the past in establishments like Yes!. If customers treat waiting staff like idiots, the staff are given a long enough leash to be allowed to retaliate in the nicest possible way. They don't need to spit in the soup these days. Colleges, according to Richardson, are not providing what the industry wants. That is why he is getting together with the Glasgow Development Agency and 40 home economics teachers this autumn so that the educators can learn what catering as a career really is all about.

Bernadette Scott, lecturer in hospitality management at Caledonia University, says she believes catering colleges no longer exist in ivory towers and do know what the industry wants - or at least what they should get. Major people from the industry liaise with the university throughout the year and those sections of the industry which claim to train their own staff don't do a proper job of it, she insists.

``To me, the employee is the service industry, but managers put barriers in the way of good qualified people getting a job.''

At the glasgow Hilton, which has just been named the UK's top hotel, Guy Klaiman, food and beverage manager, says: ``I support college training but every restaurant needs to give employees their own tuning.'' He adds: ``When you go into a restaurant, you like to be known. If there is a high turnover of students waiting, you will never have that.''

Elena Salvoni is another award winner. Trained as a waitress by Joseph Pacini, a masterful maitre d' from Glasgow's old Malmaison who taught her all she knew at Cafe Bleu in London's Old Compton Street, Savoni collected the Caterer and Hotelkeeper Manager of the Year Award this month. Her 50-year career includes stints at Bianchi's, an Italian restaurant in Frith Street, and L'Escargot. Today she is restaurant director at Elena's L'Etoile in London, which Roy Ackerman modelled around her. She still works split shifts, clearing plates to keep her close to her faithful customers.

She employs people who turn up on the doorstep asking for jobs. ``No-one with a college qualification has applied,'' she says. ``You can tell right away if people will make it. Those who have been to college have too much expectation. They don't want to start at the bottom. You have got to like the job and like people. You have to make people feel welcome when they come through the door and through the meal. You can learn the technicalities as you go along.''

That is exactly what Alex Neary did when as a 17-year-old he blagged his way into the business. ``It was the glamour which attracted me,'' he confesses 10 years down the line. He got a job in the Ubiquitous Chip peeling carrots, looked out on the waiting staff, and said: ``I want to do that.''

He has worked for a year at the prestigious Rogano where captains of Scottish industry and a variety of celebrities dine. Mick Jagger, he says, tucked his knees beneath snowy white linen there just days before we spoke.``Waiting can be sexy and fun,'' he says, ``but we do need a lot more recognition because we create the atmosphere in a restaurant. I take a pride in maintaining standards.''