Waiter (to diner): "There's a fly in your sauce"
COMMENTARY
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By Mari Manninen
The waiter came over to the table and put the steak plates down in front of the diners.
"The sauce will take just a moment. On the way to the table I noticed that there was a fly in the sauce-dish, so I took it back to the kitchen", said the waiter proudly.
This was not a joke. It actually happened last summer in the stylish restaurant of a well-known hotel at a Finnish beauty spot. I was present and overheard the exchange from a neighbouring table, while the American diners split their sides laughing at the waiter's remark.
As for my table, well, they had forgotten to lay an extra set of cutlery for the main course, I had to order water three times before I got any, and the waiter only responded to large waving gestures. Dirty plates sat waiting to be collected from a nearby table throughout the length of our dining experience.
At another waterfront restaurant, which has numbered among its guests the King and Queen of Sweden, I asked the waiter what sort of wine a certain bottle on the wine-list might be. The waiter glanced at the name on the list and told me: "It's a red."
I felt bad on behalf of the Finnish tourist trade. It is in places like those that tourists get their brutal contact with Finnish service.
Even so, I could forgive it somehow. It was summer, and a good many of the waiting staff were seasonal stand-ins.
Come the autumn, I no longer felt the same sense of unstrained mercy.
In the ornate dining room of a well-known country house establishment, the waiter comprehensively humiliated the host of a group at a nearby table, after the diner had complained about the wine. The waiter tasted the wine and declared in a loud voice that it was excellent. There then followed a hullabaloo lasting several minutes and drawing everybody's attention to the incident, before the bottle was duly replaced with another.
In a much-lauded Italian restaurant in Helsinki, it turned out that the waiter was unaware that there were in fact many other types of grappa than were to be found from the two bottles in his restaurant.
If dinner costs quite as much as it did in all of the restaurants mentioned, then I want service. I am not demanding the ultimate in expertise, but I do insist that in restaurants putting themselves forward as better than the average, the table staff must be able to manage the basics of service. And to know a little about food and drink.
At this point many a good waiter or waitress will bellow that the great majorirty of us DO know the basics, and more besides!
True. Many times I have received quite excellent service in restaurants, and on most occasions I have had nothing to complain about.
But there have still been too many occasions when I have had cause to grumble.
The work of a waiter takes in a large and demanding palette, and the learning of it requires lengthy training. I have come to the conclusion that there are simply not sufficient professionally-skilled waiters to staff each and every one of those Finnish restaurants that aspires to something like quality, particularly outside of the Helsinki area.
Or maybe it is that the restaurants imagine that the winning smile of some temporary stand-in is enough to patch over the gaps in service-skills.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.3.2006
The writer is a journalist with Helsingin Sanomat's consumer section, "Price and Quality"
MARI MANNINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
mari.manninen@hs.fi
