A'Barra restaurant room
“ Dinner will be served at the usual time, my lord, and I am pleased to say that there will be no perceptible trace of recent events left at that time... ”
It is a sentence of Sir Anthony Hopkins in what's left of the day , the fabulous film by James Ivory (based on a book by Kazuo Ishiguro) about the life—and the emotions, so suppressed—of an exemplary butler in post-Great War England.
He utters that (very British) phrase recounting the story of his father, also a butler, after shooting a tiger with a 12-gauge at a dinner party in India: “Excuse me Milord, it seems that there is a tiger in the dining room. You can continue with the tea."
A boutade that, however, is perfect to exemplify the perfect room service: humility, service, tact and dignity.
Santceloni, located in the Hotel Hesperia Madrid
Precisely for this reason it is a pleasure to see a room professional like Abel Valverde , head waiter and director of the restaurant for fifteen years Santceloni and considerate one of the best maîtres in Spain. He is also the author of ** Host, ** the definitive manual published by Planeta Gastro on “The importance of a good room service”.
I talk to him and I am surprised by a (sad) piece of evidence in his chapter The loss of protagonism: “We are not media, we are not referents and, consequently, in certain sectors and facing a little understood general public, begins to perceive the feeling that we are not needed. Our profession, therefore, is not popular and this has had repercussions, for labor purposes, in that the kitchen has eaten —and never better said— the living room”.
It should not surprise us, then, that in the ** Report on trends in Gastronomy and Hospitality 2018 ** (published by QualityFry with the signatures of Rafael Ansón, Juan Mari and Elena Arzak, Alberto Ferruz or Mario Sandoval) hardly a single mention of room service appears in his attempt to decipher what will be a trend next year and will mark the path of the gastro sector.
Sustainability, equipment, taste... but what about the room? Pablo Castelló, exemplary maître de ** BonAmb ** (two Michelin stars in Xàbia), points out that "gastronomy is destined to erase the border between kitchen and dining room as much as possible, to unite these two worlds into one". But I don't want a cook to serve me: I want him to cook.
We already pointed out the latter (we said it!) in our gastronomic resolutions more than a year ago: many gastronomes are a bit fed up with the excessive protagonism of the chef on duty. We want to recover our place and our throne: this was about our happiness.
Bon Amp Hall, the two Michelin stars of Xàbia
"SERVICE AS A WAY OF SEEING LIFE"
Faced with my kicking, which is that of so many gastronomes, the overwhelming good sense of Peter Monk , co-owner and maître de Via Veneto in Barcelona. “All of us understand service as a work philosophy, and I would almost dare to say as a way of looking at life, which focuses on the customer as main objective ”. The one about young (and not so young) waiters who should tattoo every word of Mr. Monk. And I am not your colleague, just a client who wants to be happy.
A titan of the room, Didier Fertilati , the smile of Quique Dacosta restaurant , winner of the Club de Gourmets award for best maître de Spain, Gueridón de Oro international award and gastronomic consultant from his project Fuego Amigo , affects the The importance of not leaving the room behind in this cathodic 'boom'.
“The next revolution, the room? Hopefully it will be like that. We already have an important need for gastronomy to turn to the room. I don't know if we can talk about a revolution as such, but we do need an important evolution in this sense: the dining room has been left behind more than anything because of the explosion of the kitchen and the passion that it has raised in young people. Now we have the difficult task of making a change so that young people have room work in mind and thus equalize forces a little" Fertilati explains.
Didier Fertilati, maître de Quique Dacosta restaurant
We also talk to Jorge Davila , director and head of the restaurant A'Barra, Room Award 2017 by the Madrid Academy of Gastronomy and one of the best examples (in my opinion) of how the perfect maître should be: discretion, sense of humor and empathy. That very difficult art of the ideal tempo in human treatment, neither burdensome nor scarce: the exact point.
“The next gastronomic revolution has nothing to do with the kitchen, it is the living room (This is my opinion) . And the fact is that I hear more and more words like 'revolution', 'post-avant-garde', etc. and they seem to me to be dangerous words. More than revolution, I think the correct term is change" she analyzes.
"Restaurants must offer a more complete experience to their customers . The great restaurants in the world are a sum of many details (I would say thousands) and the reality is that most of them are managed or should be managed by the room", continues Dávila.
Jorge Dávila, director and head of the room of A'Barra and Juan Antonio Medina, chef of the restaurant
"The important thing will not only be what is on the plate, but everything that surrounds that plate: If we take care of all the details of the set, we will be able to make it a more complete and satisfactory experience for the client. The client knows more and more, has more information and we must be more prepared than ever in many disciplines to be able to interact with him. Because in the end the important thing in a restaurant is the customer” he sentences.
And if he is asked about the way to attract the new generation of gastronomes to the restaurant, he has it clear. “Adapting to the sociological changes in our society: a restaurant must evolve with its clientele and never stop meeting their needs. For that, the best path is training” . And something almost more important: "We must learn from the mistakes of the past, the future lies in recovering common sense and giving value to the greatest treasure that an establishment has: the customer".
The A'Barra room team
RELAX AND ENJOY
The future? I am optimistic; a good symbol of hope is the existence of a meeting forum organized by the Basque Culinary Center to show **the best practices and new trends in the room, Host**. Things as they are: the speakers are overwhelming.
In short, I don't know if the room will be the next gastronomic revolution, what I have clear is that I cannot conceive of excellence in a restaurant without this essential extremity: affection. The touch. The heat.
And I can't imagine a better ending than going back to kazuo ishiguro and his idea of the perfect service: “Enjoy, friend. He has already done his job. Now relax and enjoy.”
One of the rooms of Via Veneto, in Barcelona