In the old days, patrons of halfway-decent restaurants were greeted by a smiling man or woman who looked for their pencilled name in a big, black ledger, and then, having smartly crossed it out, led them swiftly to their table. No longer. As if it isn’t bad enough that our buses, trains and streets are almost entirely populated with people who must seemingly stare at their Me Machines (© Joshua Ferris) for a minimum 18 hours of every day, touchscreen technology has now invaded the sacred world of the maître d’. Soon, his neck will be just as cricked as everyone else’s – which will perhaps serve him right.
The other night, I went to meet a friend at a small, much-praised new restaurant in a swanky part of London. I got there first. The young woman who met me at the door asked tremulously if I had a booking – her eyes were as wide as saucers, as if this was a wholly preposterous proposition – and then, when I gave her a name, picked up what looked very much like an iPad. After this, our connection ended. From here on in, she was all about her software. Head bent, she began furiously tapping the screen in her hand with her middle finger. This went on for a while: such a long while, in fact, that I assumed the internet was down (either that, or she was doing her grocery shopping). Only when I was on the point of making a sympathetic joke about BT did the saucers once again meet my eye, though I noticed that they’d now shrunk somewhat, having been cruelly compressed by the characteristic frown a person develops when online business is just too slow.
“Your table will be about 10 minutes,” she said. She sounded vague. Stunned by the computer’s blue light, she’d possibly forgotten who I was (either that, or Sainsbury’s was clean out of English muffins).
No doubt some of you are about to write in and tell me how much technology can help with the running of a restaurant. Well, save your fingers. I’m sure it is very useful in the matter of internet reservations and table turning (they spin so fast these days, it’s a wonder any chef still bothers to make a pudding). But it really shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with that moment when, queasy with excitement and longing and the slight fear that a mistake has been made, you give a maître d’ your name, and he smiles in recognition, and in an instant all is well. He or she should be smooth and soothing and just a little mysterious – a good maître d’ radiates unspoken power – not eternally distracted, as people tend to be when they’re ruled by technology. Add to this the fact that such technology is miles slower than pen and paper in the matter of identifying whether or not a booking has showed up and, well, I rest my case. Meet my eye, maître d’, or risk losing my patronage for all eternity.
The younger maître d’s out there – the ones who are delighted to be working in the kind of joint where the chef’s beard is longer than the blade of his knife – may not realise it, but they’re rapidly de-skilling themselves. We’re a long way from the 90s, when Terence Conran and co brought us restaurants as big as aerodromes. Thanks largely to rent rises, the new generation of dining rooms are tiny: the place I’m talking about is roughly the width of a corridor. He or she should, then, be able to cast one look around the room and know exactly which table is about to order, and which about to go, and thus the precise length of time a customer who has just wandered in will have to wait.
One of the greatest weapons in any maître d’s armoury is the old trick in which he magically produces a table for a walk-in out of a room that is seemingly rammed to the gills. A brief, slightly stagey frown and then… the Golden Words: “Yes, follow me.” The customer feels nothing but gratitude at the thought that he will not, after all, have to return to street in search of Pizza Express, and in the future, this memory will propel him back again and again to that wondrous place where he got so very lucky. Similarly, the old “how are you, tonight?” line. The customer believes he is remembered, that he is considered a regular; the fact that the maître d’ doesn’t actually know him from Adam is irrelevant in the moment. The glare of the screen, though, works against these strategies. All that prodding and staring. Theatre is about split-second timing, and if a dining room, even a very small dining room, isn’t a kind of stage, then I’m Dame Maggie Smith.
