Service Without a Smile

On the morning of my 16th Birthday, in London between the two world wars, my mother, who was a snob, decided that her beer man was no longer giving satisfactory service and fired him. He had begun his week's work every Monday morning by delivering several gallons of light beer that was used exclusively to wash our polished-wood floors, thus bringing up their color and grain. On that particular morning, she had caught him in her drawing room drinking the beer from the pail instead of using it on the floor. When she reprimanded him, he merely smiled. My mother thought that was altogether too forward a gesture. She was convinced that servants should ''keep their distance'' and provide service without a smile.

Then she presented me with my birthday present: my first formal outfit of white tie and tails. With it came her gratuitous advice: ''Whenever you appear in public, always remember that you are being watched, especially by the servants. Learn to demand quietly and to expect the proper service from them. But never expect too much. Always be slightly distant. The servant knows his place and is proud of it. You must know yours and be equally proud.''

With this Victorian credo ringing in my ears (a credo that I deeply resented---I was already steeped in the revolutionary writings of Thorstein Veblen and Beatrice and Sidney Webb), I was launched into the last social whirl of the ''old days'' in London, Paris and The Hague. At private and public parties, the ratio was about four servants to each guest. I remember one charity ball in London where my date and I walked up a great curving flight of stairs lined on either side with perhaps 100 footmen in powdered wigs, brocaded coats, white knee breeches and silver-buckled shoes. I handed my gold-edged invitation to the footman on the bottom step and the card was passed up, hand to hand, exactly parallel with our upward progress in the procession of guests. Finally, at the precise moment when we passed through the great ballroom doors on the upper level, our card was handed to the master of ceremonies and our names were announced in stentorian tones. It was a smart trick of timing.

Service, in those days, was intense and highly personal. On Thursday afternoons, I would often drive out to the country for a weekend house party. Even in an upper-middle-class home, the degree of service offered to guests was, by modern standards, extraordinary. When I swung into the driveway and pulled up at the front door, a footman carried in my suitcase and one of the chauffeurs took over my car, washed it, waxed it and filled it with gas. Meanwhile, the footman had unpacked my suitcase, laid out my dinner clothes, drawn my bath and was prepared to shave me. He also stood behind my chair at dinner, woke me each morning with a tray of tea and biscuits and ministered to every detail of my personal needs throughout each day.

I called him by his last name, Jenkins, and he called me sir. Yet there was not the slightest sense of servility in his manner. He saw himself in terms of a long tradition of high skill and professional standing. He deferred to me as if I were the master, but he looked me very straight in the eye and matched his senior self-assurance with my much younger and less solid confidence. In fact, I often felt that I was on trial before him. He knew all the rules of the social game I was playing and was quite prepared to pull me back if I were about to make a faux pas. He even advised me on the various girls at the party.

Jenkins belonged to what in England is still known as the servant class---a term implying no sense of inferiority whatsoever---a class of highly skilled professionals, very proud and independent. Jenkins once said to me, ''The other day, the master asked me if I would go out and dig some potatoes in the vegetable garden. Of course, I refused, pointing out to him that I was a house servant. I gave him a bit of a row for it and I think it did him a deal of good. I don't believe I'll have any more trouble with him.'' This type of man might equally well have been a fine waiter in a great restaurant or a room clerk in an outstanding hotel or a steward on a luxury liner. Perfect service was such a normal way of life for him that a smile would have been redundant.

A few days ago, just about 43 years after I last saw Jenkins, I experienced the full impact of the change in the concept of service between then and now. I lunched in the automated cafeteria of a suburban New York department store. All along one wall were seven-foot-tall machines, with clear-glass fronts like giant jukeboxes. I put in my quarters, pushed the button for beef in Burgundy and the interior stainless-steel wheels started turning. Small doors opened and closed. A turntable rolled around and my dish came into view, gently slid down a chute and was in my hand, still ice-cold. The food was on a square plate made of an unburnable, unsoakable, indestructible plastic foam produced by one of the giant gasoline companies. On the wall adjacent to the gastronomic jukeboxes was a row of small infrared ovens. I pushed the timing button marked Meat Stews. After about 30 seconds, the door snapped open and my meat was steaming hot, while the plastic-foam plate remained cool enough to pick up. From other machines, I obtained a bowl of tomato soup, a carton of strawberry ice cream, bread and butter, and a plastic cup of coffee. I was given a disposable cardboard tray, a paper cup of water, plus disposable plastic knife, fork and spoon. At the end of my meal, I complied with the signs posted all around the room: Please Clear Your Table and Place Your Garbage in the Can.

In this cafeteria, I was told, 300 people are served lunch every day under the control of one human manager. During the lunch rush, he gives change, clears the disposable garbage from the few tables where the customers have refused to cooperate with the signs and, presumably, dutifully kicks any of the machines that might suddenly refuse to operate.

After lunch, I thought about the historic concept of service---of one man earning a dignified and honorable living by serving another. Is the concept dead? If good service still exists, how can one find it? And what can one do to bring it out?

The word comes from the Latin servitium, or slavery. There is the key to the problem. In ancient times, one tribe went out and conquered another and held its people in lifelong and unsmiling bondage. Through later centuries, service by slaves (which meant bondage to a particular person) was supplemented with service by serfs (which meant bondage to a piece of land), in many forms and under various names. Service by compulsion was practiced in every part of the world.

In Europe, the ultimate refinement was the feudal system, which began to disintegrate when the cities were built and the young peasants found at least some freedom by leaving the land to work in the new factories. In England, the most significant development in terms of service was the formation of the guilds, which included apprenticeship training as butlers, cooks, footmen, house stewards, gardeners, coachmen, grooms, etc. These British guilds had much to do with the development of a proud, professional service class, which remains the secret ingredient of the great hotels and (continued on page 134) Service Without a Smile (continued from page 112) luxury restaurants of today. Outside Europe, the concept of service was generally imposed by colonial administrators. During their phases of empire building, Englishmen, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Belgians and Portuguese carried their ideas about service to native peoples.

The Britisher was always the most obstinate in imposing his traditional way of life. No sooner had the rubber planter settled down in his faraway job than he sent to London for his regular brand of afternoon tea and favorite orange marmalade. He trained the natives to serve him in the English manner. Indian girls became ayahs---English-style nursemaids---for the children. African boys learned to wait at table. Chinese cooks were taught how to prepare English plum pudding.

The Dutch colonial was a good deal more adaptable. He accepted many of the traditions of the Eastern countries where he lived and worked. This is how the rijsttafel, or rice table, the marvelous 50-course Javanese feast, became one of the national dishes of Holland.

On Sunday afternoons, the Dutch planters on Java would gather at the soos, the societeit, or club, to begin the entertainment with solid slugs of heavily iced Holland gin. The big round tables had a large circular hole in the middle. When you wanted your next drink poured, you would kick gently under the table and up through the hole would rise a djongo, a Dutch-trained Javanese boy waiter, in an impeccable white jacket. Having poured more drinks, he would again disappear downward to squat invisibly under the table.

When the gong sounded, everyone walked into the dining room and sat down, at long tables for the rijsttafel. The snow-white tablecloth was of Dutch linen from De Twente, the Dutch china from Maastricht, the sparkling Dutch glasses from Leerdam. The double doors of the kitchen swung wide open and the procession of djongos, led by their mandor, or foreman, marched in with military precision. They wore brilliantly colored Oriental sarongs of batik, with kebajas (the original Nehru jackets) and brightcolored turbans.

The table service was utterly precise and completely silent. Throughout the meal the boys hovered, watching the guests with total concentration. It was a perfect example of service without a smile.

The American concept of service is different. It has been molded by two overwhelming factors: The first was our traumatic experience with slavery. We have never forgotten Abraham Lincoln's admonition that no man shall say to another man, ''You toil and work and earn bread and I will eat it.'' We still seem to feel that servant and service are vaguely entangled with slave and thus with a sinister implication of inferiority.

One can trace the roots of this feeling in the reports of visitors from Europe in the early 1800s. One of the most perceptive and sensitive of these early travelers was Mrs. Frances Trollope (the mother of the great English writer Anthony Trollope), who traveled around the U. S. for four years and set down her experiences in a book titled Domestic Manners of the Americans. Mrs. Trollope said that she found everywhere a horror of any kind of service because of ''the reality of slavery.'' She found ''hundreds of half-naked girls'' working in the Cincinnati paper mills for less than half the wages they would have received in service. Mrs. Trollope concluded that the natural desire for one person to give service to another was being ''paralyzed'' by the example of slavery. A little of that paralysis seems to have remained as a permanent part of the American character.

The second factor that has molded the American philosophy of service is the egalitarian vision of the immigrants who landed on our shores in search of freedom. ''Every man a king,'' said Huey Long. The only way you can persuade a young American to do a service job is to tell him that he's on his way to becoming a manager. It is inconceivable that anyone here should consider himself a member of a servant class. This egalitarianism was also sensed by Mrs. Trollope. She felt that Americans were convinced that ''any man's son may become the equal of any other man's son'' and she found, on the part of people in service, such a deep resentment, such a sense of inferiority, that they were angry and short-tempered, rudely patronizing to their customers and were continually in a state of ''ever wakeful and tormenting pride.''

It is the same thread---thinner now and often gilded, but still the same thread---when the manager of a famous American hotel says, as one said to me recently, ''People need not be given what they want, provided they can be persuaded to want what they are given.'' Or when the sommelier in a fancy restaurant sizes up an inexperienced patron, sells him that superexpensive bottle of wine, which he waves around like a baseball bat before oh, so gently placing it in the wicker basket.

Obviously, there is good and bad service everywhere---and usually a lot more of the latter than the former. Yet one is bound to say that the highest expression of luxurious personal service---the service that comes naturally, without a smile---is still most often found in Europe. Not long ago, while flying the Atlantic in the first-class lounge of a BOAC jet, I tried to get to the essence of it in a relaxed after-dinner discussion with the chief steward. With a slightly satiric twinkle in his eye and just a trace of Cockney in his accent, he said: ''First off---it takes professional training. I was apprenticed for thirteen years before I became a chief steward. You have to begin by making the customer feel comfortable, relaxed and confident about your skill. So you act very calmly, speak in a low tone and are precise with your movements. You must know when to leave him alone, but you must be watching. You have to anticipate. You have to know what he wants a fraction of a second before he knows it himself. You have to be self-assured about your own job and yet you have to make him feel that he's in charge. You might call it an art. We British have been doing it for centuries.''

I have found these guiding principles expressed in dozens of ways in such truly great hotels as Claridge's in London, the Ritz in Paris and the Gritti Palace in Venice. Perhaps Marcel Proust said it best when he expressed his preference for the Paris Ritz: ''I prefer to be in a place where there is no jostling.'' He was right. An absence of fuss, an imperturbability, is the mark of a great hotel as against a merely good one. From the moment one steps into the lobby, one is flattered and made to feel welcome. Every problem is instantly smoothed over.

One evening in his suite at the Gritti Palace, Ernest Hemingway and a group of friends began playing baseball. They used the long-handled, ornamental doorstop as a bat and a rolled-up pair of Hemingway's socks as the ball. With the first swing, the lead weight on the bottom of the doorstop flew off and crashed through the arched window out into the Venetian night. There was an angry shout from the bank of the Grand Canal below.

When he checked out the next day, Hemingway offered to pay for the broken window. ''Ah, yes, the window,'' the manager said. ''The flying lead weight barely missed the nose of a gentleman who is, unfortunately, a member of the city council. This gentleman, trembling with rage, came into our lobby with the weight in his hand. However, we calmed him successfully. As for paying for the window, in the 300-year history of the Gritti Palace, no one, to our knowledge, has ever played baseball in any of its rooms. In commemoration of the event, Signor Hemingway, we are reducing your bill by ten percent.''

The great hotel provides the unexpected or unusual service without batting an eyelid. When Peter O'Toole registered at the Dolder Grand in Zurich, he called room service to say (continued on page 187) Service Without a Smile (continued from page 134) that he always liked an English kipper for his breakfast. The request was at once reported to the manager, who telephoned his London suppliers and had the kippers flown in on the night plane. Next morning, O'Toole had not the slightest idea that he had caused any trouble.

Service without a smile demands many unusual qualities on the part of the staff. One of the chief among them is tact. Without it, there is always the danger of disaster. Lasserre's, a famous three-star restaurant in Paris, had a regular customer who often brought his dark-haired wife for lunch but was more often seen dining with a somewhat younger woman, a stunning blonde. One day, after lunch with his wife, when the check was brought by the captain, the customer complained about the price of the wine. René Lasserre, busy at a nearby table, wished he could sink through the floor as he heard the captain say: ''It is not as expensive, monsieur, as the Château Margaux you enjoyed so much last night.''

Few hotel men are more tactful, more solidly reliable and resourceful than Alberto Scialanga, the manager of the Grand Hotel in Rome. One day, a chambermaid brought him a lady's black-silk nightgown that had been found in the room just vacated by a fairly obscure Belgian count and his wife, who had never stayed at the Grand before. Scialanga had the nightgown carefully wrapped and sent to madame la comtesse at her home in Brussels. Three days later, she called him in a furious tone of voice. What about that nightgown? Hadn't the count been alone at the hotel? Scialanga made a lightning decision. He said how happy he was that she had called. He had just been trying to reach her. The nightgown had been sent to the wrong address. Would madame la comtesse kindly return it and the hotel would pay the postage. The wife asked what did he mean, the wrong address? He said that the nightgown had been found in room 737. Monsieur had been in room 773. He hoped madame would forgive the most unfortunate mistake.

As to supreme service in restaurants, it is ridiculous to discuss only the luxury establishments. Even the smallest bistro can provide the finest service when one is a regular customer, when one's regular waiter knows exactly which is one's favorite table and which dish on the carte du jour one will choose before one has chosen it.

At the end of World War Two, quite soon after Paris had been liberated from the German Occupation, I returned after an absence of more than ten years. That day, Paris was poor, cold, gray and strangely deserted. Full of my own memories, I walked along the Left Bank and, suddenly, I saw one of my favorite cafés, just off the Place St. Michel, which I had known since my days as a student at the Sorbonne. I went in. The electricity was off. The tables were dimly lighted by small, flickering oil lamps. The place was almost empty.

I walked to my favorite table, in the corner near the front window. A man came toward me in a threadbare tuxedo. It was my old waiter. He was so thin that he looked a foot taller than I remembered him. But there was the same expression on his face---the same unsmiling formality. He nodded deferentially: ''Your usual café au lait and glass of Perrier, monsieur?'' Without waiting for my answer, he limped toward the kitchen. He brought my coffee and mineral water, remembering that I always liked the glass on the left side of the cup. He bowed slightly and walked away. He asked no questions as to where I had been. He offered no comments as to what he had been doing. I closed my eyes. It was as if I had never left Paris.

In the Paris of today, such service is hard to find. Most of the great three-star restaurants have simplified their menus to cut costs. On every horizon, there is the bleak rise of automation---not only the automation of computers but also human automation. More and more service people are being trained and rehearsed with pat, stock phrases, to make each contact with a customer as instantaneous and as impersonal as possible. The stewardess on the transatlantic plane no longer talks to you as she races to serve 100 dinners. She asks, ''How did you enjoy your meal?'' but does not listen to your reply. She has already moved on to the seat behind you to ask the same question in exactly the same tone.

What of the future? Fewer and fewer men and women are being trained for service jobs. The number of chefs beginning their apprenticeship in French culinary institutes is falling every year. Here, the American boy does not want to become a cook. I discussed the problems with Joseph Baum, the brilliant restaurant consultant, who is now planning the multitude of eating facilities in the new World Trade Center in New York and who, when he was president of Restaurant Associates Industry, the giant operating corporation, directed more than 300 restaurants (including such luxury establishments as The Four Seasons and Forum of the Twelve Caesars in New York), neighborhood bistros, hotels, motels, snack bars, office lunchrooms, factory cafeterias, kiosks in parks and sports stadiums and college cafés. He admitted that most restaurants today are caught between a veritable explosion of demand for more restaurants where more people in every income group can dine and an increasing shortage of skilled and willing help. He believes that there is absolutely no hope of finding the personnel to cover the very great expansion that he foresees over the next 20 years. The only answer, he is convinced, lies in automation.

Baum believes that within ten years, U. S. restaurants will be divided into two groups. About five percent will be luxury restaurants where fresh foods will be individually prepared for each customer by talented chels at astronomical prices. The other 95 percent will serve preprepared, preserved foods (canned, frozen, dehydrated, irradiated, etc.), prepared on production lines in mass factories.

This type of cafeteria of the future was installed, on a trial basis, in a suburb of Minneapolis, several years ago, by the computer engineers of the American Machine and Foundry Company. In this restaurant, there was no captain to take your order. Each item on the menu had a code number. Through a ''dine-a-phone'' on your table, you signaled your order to the Orbis (order and billing system) computer, which instantly signaled your order to the robot kitchen, wrote out your check, added local taxes and kept a record for accounting and for inventory control. Activated and controlled by the computer, one of the food-preparation machines seized a chunk of ground beef for your hamburger, weighed it precisely and shaped it, added a slice of cheese, grilled the patty in the oven, put a dollop of the correct sauce on top and stuck it into a bun. Another machine whipped up your milk shake, poured your coffee, added the exact amount of cream and sugar you have ordered and scooped out your desired flavor of ice cream. When all the items were on your tray, bells rang, lights flashed and the waitress sped your tray to your table. The entire process, from the moment you lifted your phone to the moment the food was set down before you, took exactly four minutes.

However, the A.M.F. technicians made one significant confession. They said that when there was a big jam of people and the machines fell behind, the delivery time wasn't met---for then the computer automatically memorized up to 1000 back orders and laboriously processed them in strict rotation.

The cafeteria closed in six months.

How does one go about cultivating the best possible service today? It is not enough to travel with pockets full of money and spread it around at every step. Admittedly, supreme service is almost always supremely expensive. But money alone is no guarantee. I remain convinced that the secret is in my mother's advice on my 16th birthday. One must, first of all, know what service to expect, and then insist on getting it. The expectation varies from country to country, so it is not enough simply to take a few lessons in the language and to study the best hotel-and-restaurant guidebooks. I always feel that I must also know something about the character and temperament of the people. For example, in a London restaurant, it is vital to know how intractable the staff becomes if one shows off, raises one's voice or makes a scene.

Once one knows what to expect, it is all-important to be a sensitive judge of psychology and timing. Obviously, while the stewardess is racing back and forth to get out her dinner trays, it is ridiculous to ask her for a special personal favor. I always keep in mind that to today's young men and women in service jobs, coping with mass transportation, mass feeding, mass everything else, I am, at first, one of an almost faceless crowd. In some way (and at the right moment), I have to step forward and show that I am more interested, better informed, more concerned about quality, more willing to take the initiative in making a human contact than the next person in the crowd. I try to act in such a way that I will be remembered as an unusual customer. This is my philosophy for earning good service and I find that it works equally well in the grandest establishment of a great city and the simplest village bistro.

It is a cliché to say that a good hotel or restaurant can quickly be ruined by bad customers. Yet, as more of us find greater opportunities to travel farther, it seems as if we know less about what to expect. Many of today's travelers and diners, who accept bad service without complaint (and thus, in fact, get the service they deserve), make matters worse for those of us who follow.

Irreparable damage has been done by tourists in the great Paris restaurants who sit around for an hour before dinner guzzling double martinis and saying ''Later, later'' whenever the maître de approaches with the menu in a vain effort to give the chef enough time to prepare something special. Almost invariably, such people then suddenly decide that they want to eat quickly---and begin snapping their fingers, demanding service within five minutes.

Conversely, whenever I go to a restaurant in France and demonstrate immediately that I know the spécialité de la maison, that I know the name of the chef and respect his skill, that I have come to try to construct the finest possible meal and that I am prepared to give them all the time necessary for its perfect preparation, then at once the owner and his entire staff are at my feet, and the more complete is my conquest of that restaurant.

To earn good service, as I said, you must make an effort to bring it out. But sometimes the effort is hardly worth while. Many years ago, I dined in Vienna with the late Ludwig Bemelmans, one of the finest writers on great dining and great drinking. I had no idea at the time that it was to be a special occasion that he would make famous, later, in one of his short stories.

When I met Bemelmans that evening, he was in a state of furious irritation. He had discovered a restaurant with a name so obviously dishonest that even the thought of it had put him in a temper. The restaurant was called Chops from Every Animal in the World. He said: ''Let's go there and cut them down!''

Bemelmans called the restaurant and reserved a table for two, using his name and mine. I discovered later that this call instantly threw the restaurant into a panic. The terrified chef called the owner, who was at home but who immediately threw on his dinner jacket and arrived just a minute before we did to meet us in the lobby with a deep bow. He was, obviously, a man with money; equally obviously, he had no artistic taste whatsoever. The latter was apparent from the fact that the name of the restaurant was printed across the front of the building in five-foot-high floodlit red letters.

We were seated at the best table and the owner approached with the menu. Bemelmans imperiously waived it away and, in a very quiet voice, said: ''We will each have an elephant chop. . . .''

The owner's body jerked slightly and his face turned ghostly white. But he instantly steeled himself and asked: ''And how would monsieur wish the elephant chops to be prepared?''

Without a second's hesitation, Bemelmans replied: ''Oh, lightly sautéed, rare, in butter, à la milanaise, served with a covering of risotto, crossed anchovy fillets and a black olive at the center of the cross.''

''That will be very good, monsieur.'' The owner bowed again and almost ran to the kitchen. For five minutes we calmly sipped our Campari-and-sodas. Bemelmans whispered: ''I'll bet any money you like that the name of this restaurant was the idea of the chef and now the owner is out there screaming, 'You fool! What are we going to do?'''

We did not have long to wait. The chef appeared from the kitchen, in sparkling white from the tip of his haut chapeau to the hem of his long apron. With calm, deliberate steps, he approached our table, bowed and leaned over us: ''Monsieur has ordered two elephant chops?''

''Yes,'' Bemelmans hissed.

''Sautéed á la milanaise, with rice, anchovies and an olive?''

''Yes.''

''And les messieurs have no beautiful ladies with them tonight?''

''No.''

''And les messieurs expect no other guests tonight?''

''No.''

''And les messieurs wish only one elephant chop each?''

''Yes. Yes.'' Bemelmans' baby-round face and his bald head were red with rage. ''Why all these impudent questions?''

The chef drew himself up to his full height: ''Because, I am very sorry, monsieur, but for only two chops, we cannot cut up our elephant.''