Waiting Skills

Memory is a necessity for us all to function effectively in life. If we lose this human faculty then our lives become more difficult for us and those around us.

The Guardian newspaper (18th August 2009) carried an interesting piece on waiters, in Buenos Aires, and their ability to memorise customers’ orders. The article, by Marc Abrahams, quotes a study, in the journal Behavioural Neurology:

“Typical Buenos Aires senior waiters memorise all orders, from clients and take the orders, without written support, of as many as 10 persons per table. They also deliver the order to each and every one of the customers who ordered it without asking or checking.”

This tremendous skill won’t be practiced in your local diner, surely. No you’ll have to go to the Argentine capital for that type of total recall. The research behind this report was gathered by scientists based at academic centres in Buenos Aires and Cambridge. The article delves deeper to give the reader a better insight into the incredible skills the waiters’ possess:

Interviewed afterwards, waiters said they generally paid attention to customers’ location, faces and clothing. They also disclosed a tiny trick of the trade. They “did not pay attention to any customer after taking a table’s order, as if they were protecting the memory formation in the path from the table to the bartender or kitchen.”

The scientists who were responsible for this astonishing report continue:

A remarkable waiter who had trained himself to “recall as many as 20 dinner orders (meat or starch) and link it to the location in the table. He also used acronyms and words to encode salad dressing, and visualised cooking temperature for each customer’s meat and linked it to the position on the table.”

This is mind boggling stuff and proof of the wonders of mental agility. The Guardian article ends by informing readers of the best waiter at memorising customers’ orders:

The one who delivered drinks correctly even when customers had swapped seats – claimed that, unlike his colleagues, he ignored where customers sat, and paid attention only to their looks.

Could the culinary skills of Derry Clarke, Gary Rhodes or Antony Worrall Thompson be matched by waiters with the memory skills mentioned above? I think not. Even in the most expensive restaurants, here, waiting staff may not be as good at recalling orders as their contemporaries in Buenos Aires. Are you being served?