n Paris last week, we went to this rather nice Italian restaurant which was packed with what seemed like regulars. Unusually for a small restaurant, there was a valet outside to park your car. Not unusually for a small restaurant, there was minimal staff inside, each one busy attending to multiple tables.

An elegant middle-aged lady busy serving customers, turned out to be the owner of the place. The attractive young woman taking our order was her daughter. Two young men completed the full complement of the restaurant’s staff.

Catch the owners of any of our restaurants working on the premises like ordinary people! That’s the difference, I suppose, between equal and unequal societies, and the difference between societies in which manual labour is accepted rather than delegated. This is not a complaint; it’s an observation.

A little digression here. Years ago when I was even less knowledgeable about the finer points of cuisine than I am now, an English friend of mine took me to a Michelin star restaurant in London. This was small, really small, and the décor was minimal. It was owned by a French couple, the husband being the chef, the wife being everything else. “Order that,” my friend told me, pointing to a particular kind of steak on the menu. “It’s the specialty here.” I did as I was told; my ‘knowledgeable’ choice brought a smile of satisfaction to the lady of the house as she took my order. The smile went out like a light at my answer to her next question which was “How would you like it done?” After that it was Bang! when she plonked the mustard jar on the table with some force. Bang! when she hit our table with the salt and pepper shakers. Bang! when she thudded our plates on the table. “What did I say?” I asked my friend, “She seems really mad at me.” “She is,” he replied, “You asked for the steak to be well done.”

That wasn’t going to happen at this Paris restaurant, that’s for sure. For one thing, I wasn’t going to order steak. For another, the restaurant was run by Italians, not French head bangers.

Another observation is that our restaurants feed a lot of people. I don’t mean the obvious, that is, customers eating their fill; by feeding a lot of people I mean the large number of people each restaurant employs. Take a look at a place like Trishna, Mumbai’s most popular seafood eatery. It’s always crowded, the seating space is not for those with bulging tummies, and it’s even more cramped because of the number of serving staff crowding its narrow passages.

There are waiters and waiters and there are ‘captains’ and ‘captains’, several men whose only job is to take an order, convey it to the kitchen, then wait for the table to be free so they can take the next order. Since there are likely to be a maximum of three sittings in an evening, these men are obviously paid to do very little, seemingly only to hang around in their black coats.

Sure, it’s great for generation of employment, but does it make financial sense? You see the same principle at work in any shopping outlet, whether it’s an old-fashioned mom-and-pop grocery shop, or a more modern store selling the latest electronic goods. To give you an example, I am always staggered by the number of sales people at Croma: howsoever crowded it is with customers, the girls and boys behind the counter always outnumber them. The principle obviously at work here is that customers should not have to wait.

Which leads me to another observation: urbanisation makes people — especially if they are Indian — impatient. In villages, everyone is perpetually waiting: for the bus, for their turn at the well, or on the khatiya waiting for nothing in particular. In towns, on the other hand, we refuse to wait for anything: whether it’s at a shop, or at a traffic light, or to cross the road…everyone seems to be in a blind rush to get there first. Get where? Quite often nowhere in

particular. But that’s immaterial.

We obviously need to get to nowhere before anyone else.