Being a waiter at fifty

Bar Vint-i-quatre is looking for waiters and requires them to be over fifty years old. This is an unusual job offer, especially in a sector like hospitality, where the opposite is usually sought: young or very young staff. Chef Carles Abellán, advisor to this establishment, states in an interview with Betevé that older workers "have a way of doing things and knowing how to be that is very difficult to find" in younger waiters, I would add. The chef and businessman also admits that they struggle to find senior professionals to fill the vacancies left by retiring waiters.

That Bar Vint-i-quatre, precisely, is looking for waiters with this profile, makes perfect sense. For those who don't know, this gastronomic project took over from Tapas 24 a few months ago, the establishment that Abellán himself opened in 2017 on the corner of Diagonal and Tusset to, in turn, replace the legendary José Luis.

The José Luis on Diagonal with Tusset belonged to the Madrid group founded by the businessman José Luis Ruiz Solaguren, inventor of the traditional Spanish omelet skewer. In fact, José Luis was always much more a Madrid restaurant than a Barcelona one. Not only because of the menu and the wines, but also because of the service. For decades, at José Luis, waiters impeccably uniformed in white jackets and corded shoulder pads attended with dignity to a very loyal, select clientele whose shoes were left spotless by a shoeshiner on the establishment's payroll while they snacked on Roman-style calamari, tripe, or chopitos.

However, we would be wrong to think that this kind of waiters of a certain age, with experience, who master the keys of the trade perfectly, who know how to be attentive without being overly cloying, who know the menu and the clientele and precisely for that reason can advise them, are the exclusive heritage of the most classic or traditional restaurants, not to say musty.

The professionalism of the waiters at Flash Flash, a paradigm of gauche-divine modernity, is also well known, from the very moment it opened its doors, back in 1969. You can want to be modern and casual without mistreating the clientele. A few years ago, the great Llàtzer Moix dedicated a very aptly titled article to them, The Human Factor. And it is precisely this human factor, that of the front-of-house staff, that many of the new, trendier bars and restaurants opening in the city neglect. Establishments with a sophisticated culinary proposal, a designer space with an investment of hundreds of thousands of euros behind it, but with inexperienced, ill-tempered, terrible service.

For the most part, they are waiters who do not want to be waiters. Students doing a job to get by until they finish their degree, immigrants willing to work all the necessary extra hours to send money to their home countries, third-tier instagrammers full of tattoos who have to pay for their yoga classes and trips to Bali.

You have to be able to be a waiter all your life, be proud of it and, of course, be able to live well

Being a waiter at fifty years old is not a failure. Neither professionally nor personally. If everyone had that clear, perhaps at Bar Vint-i-quatre you would find them in droves. You have to be able to be a waiter all your life, be proud of it and, of course, be able to live well. And this does not only happen because waiters have decent salaries and attractive working conditions, but because society values them as the professionals they are.

Until being a waiter is as good a way to leave the labor market as it is to enter it, restaurateurs will continue to struggle to find professionals who "know how to do and know how to be." I am sorry to say that we have, they have, the waiters we deserve.