News

Waiters or service crew are the intermediary between the chef and the diner. While the cooks or chef ensure the safety of the kitchen and the tastiness of the food, waiters ensure that the correct orders are taken and ensure that the customer can have what they need for a pleasant dining experience. The skillsets required by waiters differ from restaurant to restaurant, but some core skills are the same. One core skill needed is the skill of handling customers. At the basic level, waiters need to know how to smile, take food orders, and in general not be rude to the customer. At a more sophisticated level, waiters need to know how to deal with aggrieved or even difficult customers, who will surely come by from time to time. Fine dining restaurants would generally prefer waiters who are trained and experienced in handling and de-escalating such situations with customers. Another core skill is how to handle food and present it to the diner. While most restaurants are unlikely to require waiters to rollerblade around to serve food, most waiters will still need some level of dexterity to avoid dropping plates and bowls. Some restaurants or cafes may also require waiters to serve a separate function such as barista or bartender. Depending on whether they require staff to be formally trained or have certificates, they may offer more remuneration for that role. Most restaurants need the bulk of their labour during lunch and dinner. It does not make financial sense to hire a full-time waiter who may not have much work during the lull hours of the day. Hiring part-time staff allows the restaurant to muster more manpower during the busy periods of the day. Nevertheless, part-time manpower can be quite unreliable in terms of availability depending on the time of the year, so restaurants cannot fully rely on part-time staff. In general, for restaurants like Pastamania, Long John Silvers and Guzman Y Gomez, part-time waiters are paid between $10-15 per hour. There were no available job listings at time of writing for part-time waiters for more expensive restaurants, but it can be reasonably assumed that the salary is likely to be higher, alongside the job requirements. An entry-level full-time waiter could be paid between $2,000-$2,600 per month. For experienced waiters, restaurants such as German restaurants, as well as Japanese restaurants and banquet restaurants are offering a higher salary of up to $3,500 per month at the time of writing. Waiters will not always be stuck serving tables. With more experience, a waiter could be promoted to restaurant manager, who is usually put in charge of managing the service crew, crew schedules, restaurant consumables, and sometimes even finances. While it may still require some table-serving depending on the size of the restaurant, restaurant managers are there to play a supervisory role. This would entail problem solving through difficult situations in the restaurant, especially including dealing with difficult customers. Depending on the type of the restaurant and the number of service crew under their charge, a restaurant manager could earn between $3,000 – $5,000. Large restaurant chains may need an operations manager who coordinates resources, staff training and SOPs across branches. Operations Managers may also be tasked to take charge of managing profit by tweaking the menu offerings and managing bottomline cost. An operations manager could earn between $6,000 – $8,000 per month depending on the scope of duties. Some attempts have been made to automate the job of the waiter. Perhaps the earliest we might be familiar with is the conveyor belts found at sushi restaurants. More recently, restaurants have utilised digitalised order menus and also deployed wheeled robots to deliver food. Despite these efforts, human waiters are still necessary, whether to deal with requests that the automated systems cannot handle, spillages, or even performing basic troubleshooting of the automation systems, which will surely face problems from time to time. With that said, technological advances in robotics and automation is only sufficient to supplement the waiter’s job at this point. Automation mainly plays the role of lowering the waiter’s workload, so that the waiters can focus on providing better service to customers. Nevertheless, it is costly and challenging for high-end restaurants to implement automation solutions without sacrificing customer experience, whether due to the unreliability of the technology, or the lack of human interaction. Waiters are unlikely to go extinct for as long as diners value the human touch.