Chef Magazine 2014 Paulo de Tarso A new dynamic

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FRONT OF HOUSE “It used to bother me when our waiting staff would get poached… Now I take it as a compliment to the quality of our training.”

Paulo de Tarso Chefs may be the stars of the restaurant business, but if anyone doubts that a top maître d is worth their weight in truffles, then Paulo de Tarso might be the man to put those doubts to rest. Indeed, he could represent a new dynamic for the industry, one in which the guardians of service – the people diners actually interact with, after all – could be the new stars.

By Josh Sims

Continued over ...

“... the cosmopolitan culinary destination ...”

64 | FRONT OF HOUSE

f“The food is important of course,” says the Americanraised Brazilian, who has been at Daniel Boulud’s Bar Boulud since 2010 – having worked his way up as a 15-year-old dishwater to become manager at Beverley Hills’ The Ivy, before starting from scratch again in London in 2005 at Daphne’s, The Wolseley and Scott’s. “The food has to be good. But that’s a given these days in so many places. Service, however, isn’t.

And it’s every bit as important. Diners have bought a ticket to a show when they dine out and they want it to be right. Life is about moments and you’re attending to someone’s moments. People cry over meals. They get engaged. They get divorced. I’ve seen it all.

Service is about attending to their memories of the occasion.”

Suffice it to say, perhaps, that de Tarso was, cleverly, selected to be the face of Boulud’s restaurant given the chef’s then low profile in the UK – he and his team won awards for best front of house the year the restaurant opened; and the telling fact that, he says, most of his customers followed him from Scott’s.

Indeed, he says that such is the explosion in restaurant openings in London now – at last its “new foodie society” is trumping New York as the cosmopolitan culinary destination, he suggests, such that, despite nice offers, he can’t be tempted to leave the city – that service standards have necessarily rocketed and competition for top service staff has become intense. “It used to bother me when our waiting staff would get poached, which happens all the time,” de Tarso says. “Now I take it as a compliment to the quality of our training.”

If the sharp-suited de Tarso appears to have done one thing during his various tenures in the UK, it has been to import a more American service style. “There we recruit for personality and give people the skills later, and here there’s a tendency to try it the other way round – it’s not so easy,” jokes de Tarso, a man keen to underline just how much the restaurant scene has shifted in the last five years away from the stuffy obsequiousness of formal dining towards an atmosphere of friendliness and fun (providing the waiter has read the table’s mood appropriately, he stresses – those divorce jokes may not be a good idea right now).

He is, after all, a man whose intensive training programme includes everything from food and wine knowledge, of course, through to telephone manner, local cultural knowledge, who’s who (and, no, not just the rich and famous) and even art appreciation – never mind the specials, the front of house staff at Bar Boulud could, if quizzed, tell you something interesting about the tables. And as for the differences in service culture – as superficial as the US approach can sometimes

“I alway says that if what you do front of house doesn’t come from the heart, then go do something else – follow your dream, because this isn’t it...”

PAULO DE TARSO

seem to Europeans – he puts that down to two simple things: passion, and working conditions. One he’d like to encourage, the other improve.

“I alway says that if what you do front of house doesn’t come from the heart, then go do something else – follow your dream, because this isn’t it,” he says. “Unfortunately there is something of a generation gap. Young people today want an easy life, or want things too quickly – they move jobs too quickly in order to move up a little rather than learning through loyalty to a company.” But that attitude at least in part stems from their lack of a sense of reward, which de Tarso is at pains to correct.

“Put simply, in the US waiting staff keep their gratuities – their effort is directly rewarded,” says the man who, as one might imagine, is quite ready when eating out himself to dock the service charge and take

the waiter aside to explain precisely where he or she went wrong. “In the industry here you have long working hours, bad contracts, tip pooling and these are all issues that the industry is going to have to address to bring front of house standards up. Waiters need better salaries, a better work/life balance, and inspiration. Chefs are inspired to become the next Boulud, Atherton or Blumenthal. Waiting staff need to know there are opportunities to manage.”

He lives his philosophy. Because of his family, "It is important for me to be with them." he does not and will not work weekends" – he has three small boys to manage and football to play (well, he is Brazilian, even if he has been dubbed ‘The American’ by regulars).

Besides, happier staff make for happier diners and the creation of regulars. Tourists are all very good, he suggests – and he works in Knightsbridge remember – but it's local people who make the business. Some 82 percent of Bar Boulud's regulars are in twice a week. Knowing that they like an espresso pronto, or a newspaper while waiting, makes for what de Tarso calls the 'Cheers' effect ("everyone knows your name") that diners buy into as much as any acclaimed food. It won't surprise anyone to hear that he keeps customer profiles – even of first time diners, if he can pick up a bit of relevant info about them when they book – that would keep the CIA happy. "It's not about being invasive," he counters. "It's about making every individual feel like they belong here."

For his staff to belong they need to grasp a small nugget of advice – perhaps the best single piece of advice any restauranteur might give their waiting staff, and which any diner might be pleased to hear. “You want to know the most important thing about service?

It’s not necessarily training or attention to detail, or all the rest of it. It’s a readiness to move on. The customer says the wine is corked. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Who cares? What matters is that the customer thinks it is. Let it go. Move on.”.

BAR BOULUD