Joe McNamee: Is it time to subsidise Irish hospitality?
Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Richie in The Bear
Our shared and serious passion for music and film led my daughter and I to , a truly magnificent TV series (TV being the new ‘film’) set in a Chicago restaurant with Michelin star aspirations.
As a recovering chef, I can confirm its authenticity, at times almost as stressful as actually being back in a slammed kitchen, slaving under a sociopathic bully — it is why some chefs I know can’t watch it.
Flush with marvellously written characters, we struggle to pick our favourite.
We adore transcendently serene pastry chef Marcus and the sweetly naive Fak brothers; we flat out venerate jittery, driven head chef Sydney.
Jamie Lee Curtis’s monstrous matriarch is nitro-glycerine plonked next to an open furnace; her children, Michael, Natalie and Carmen Berzatto, three differing studies of the impact of her dysfunctional parenting.
Every single character, even minor, is fully realised. And then there is ‘Cousin’ Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who runs front of house.
A loud, boorish and deeply obnoxious character, we spent the first few episodes wishing him serious harm until, gradually, tiny slivers of his humanity and vulnerability began to slip through.
But he utterly transformed in our eyes when sent on a training internship to the fictional Ever, ‘the world’s best restaurant’, site of his Damascene culinary conversion.
Breaking through his innate cynicism, he comes to understand why high-end restaurants operate as they do and, most of all, learns to appreciate the complexities of service and its fundamental importance in a good restaurant.
After that, he could do little wrong in our eyes, even when he does — regularly — do wrong.
Over a decade ago, after a major food awards in Dublin, two of Ireland’s finest restaurant managers and I wound up in deep conversation about service, the lack of awards for service, wondering whether it related to the marked decline in service standards, from what was always a wildly varying benchmark.
Irish restaurant service has only worsened since; good service — the exception rather than rule — is an unexpected pleasure rather than automatic entitlement when dining out.
When Patrick Guilbaud first opened his now Michelin two-starred Dublin restaurant, it took him a while to realise most of his non-French waiters, many of them students, viewed their role as a mere staging post en route to a ‘real’ career.
Indeed, working as a waiter/server has rarely been viewed as a profession in this country even though innate Irish sociability makes for a natural-born host.
Service is about so much more than ferrying plates to and from the table and it takes time and effort to train even the good ones. Imagine the frustration when they then leave for a ‘real job’!
For all the advance ‘engagement’ — online, reviews and so on — a diner’s first human interaction with a restaurant is through service.
A good first impression is vital; sustaining it throughout the course of an entire meal, equally so. (Take note, all servers who seem to ghost a table once desserts are served.)
More worryingly, I see the decline in standards of Irish restaurant service as a canary in the coalmine for the Irish hospitality sector overall.
Many businesses operate on a fiscal model that wouldn’t last kissing time in other industries, while a dining public, ignorant of the harsh realities of hospitality, only ever registers the rising prices of eating out.
When the minimum wage was raised to €13.50 an hour last January, the best restaurateurs acknowledged the additional financial stress on their business models, yet never begrudged their employees the extra 80c an hour.
In Dublin, for example, many of the lowest-paid hospitality workers have to commute from far outside the city to afford accommodation — if they can find it.
There is one question that gauges the real viability of Irish hospitality like no other: as a waiter/server, will I qualify for a mortgage? (It applies equally to lower-paid kitchen jobs.) The answer is almost inevitably, no.
Which begs another question — is it time we start a conversation about subsidising the Irish restaurant sector, as we do with the farming sector?
A recent soiree at The Metropole Hotel to launch its newly designed reception/lobby area and a casual all-day menu sees a venerable old aristocrat of Cork hospitality substantially sharpening its offering in tune with the overall energy sense of energy that has imbued its home, MacCurtain St, in recent times, reminding that it is about so much more than just an annual venue for ‘The Jazz’.
In further reference to today’s main theme, belated congrats to the Market Lane group for their ongoing achievements at the Fáilte Ireland Employer Excellence Awards, voted on anonymously by employees, and, yes, the ML group does number more than a few well-supported professional waiters/servers in their ranks.
Vada café in Dublin’s Stoneybatter, may cleave to a very familiar formula for what is currently cool in casual dining but more than gets away with it on the back of some tasty food and a genuine commitment to sustainability and zero waste so, additional opening hours to serve dinner on Friday and Saturday evenings could be well worth checking out.
This week’s choice is more about food for the mind and soul than the belly, a handsome print from Blasta Books inspired by their latest authors, Izzeddeen Alkarajeh and Eman Aburabi, and the original version of the Free Palestine mural painted next to their Izz Café in Cork City.
Available in A4 (€25) and A3 (€38) sizes and shipped anywhere in the world, all profits will be donated to World Central Kitchen.
