The maître d’ runs the dining room. He or she stands at the front door, seats the guests, directs the captains and waiters through service, and carries the restaurant’s memory of who its regulars are and what they like. The kitchen answers to the chef; the floor answers to the maître d’. Between the two of them sits the pass, and the quality of the evening depends on how well the two sides talk.
A note on what follows. My three books are built from interviews with general managers and chefs, and none of the eighty subjects held the title of maître d’ when we spoke. The role appears in their accounts the way the floor appears from the pass or from the general manager’s office. I have kept to what they said and to what I wrote about the role in The Luxury of Attention, and I say so where the material runs out.
A day in the role at the highest level
The day at a serious restaurant turns on one meeting. In the chapter on knowing your guest I describe the half hour before doors open, when the chef, the maître d’, the sommelier and the captain go through who is on the books that night. The table celebrating an anniversary will get a small acknowledgment with dessert. The regular who always asks for an extra portion of the sides will find the proportion inverted without having to ask. The critic the team has identified will be served to a standard lifted a notch above one that is already unforgiving. The maître d’ runs that briefing, and the next two and a half hours are the execution of it.
The briefing is now supported by a CRM that surfaces every allergy, preference and prior service note in seconds, and in the chapter on technology I argue that this has changed what the maître d’ is for. For most of the history of the trade, the maître d’ at the front door who remembered the regular’s preferred table was the keeper of the restaurant’s knowledge of its guests. The software now remembers more than any one person can. What has not transferred is the judgment about which welcome, which acknowledgment and which measure of warmth will land for a particular guest on a particular evening. The maître d’ is no longer valued for recall. The job is to decide.
The other part of the day is recovery. The pass exists to catch failure before it reaches the guest. The floor exists to catch what escapes the pass, and the maître d’ is the person who has the disappointing course replaced and the wine repoured before the diner has decided whether to say anything. The comp that follows is sized to the failure and delivered without ceremony, and it is extended before it is requested.
What the people in the book say
Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin in New York described what makes the whole arrangement work.
“The key to achieving this is communication: between the front of the house and the kitchen, between the maître d’, the captains, the waiters, the sommeliers, and anyone else who may “touch” that table.” Eric Ripert, in A Wealth of Insight (2019)
Guy Savoy of Restaurant Guy Savoy in Paris gave the clearest picture of where the dining room sits in the chef’s mind.
“Today, I view my role as being similar to that of both a rugby captain and coach: my forwards’ domain is the kitchen, the dining room is that of my wingers and centers, and my role is to choreograph the play.” Guy Savoy, in A Wealth of Insight (2019)
George Cozonis, then general manager of The Plaza Hotel in New York, told me about a morning early in his career when he was an assistant restaurant manager, half his team had called out and a long line of guests was waiting to be seated. His food and beverage director walked past and remarked on how busy it was.
“I asked him for help and he simply walked away without a response, and made absolutely no effort to call in support. I will always remember that day.” George Cozonis, then general manager of The Plaza Hotel in New York
Cozonis kept that morning as the lesson in what the senior person in the room must never do, and anyone who will one day stand at the front door with a full book and a short team should keep it too.
The path to it
The books have almost nothing to say about how a person becomes a maître d’, and I will not invent it. What they show, over and over, is the dining room as the starting point for people who went on to run hotels. Axel Bethke’s first job was an internship as a waiter at a luxury hotel in Hamburg. Brian Gullbrants started as a server at The Ritz-Carlton, Phoenix. Marc C. Brugger began as a waiter on the terrace of the Royal Savoy in Lausanne, and Marc von Arnim as a banquet waiter at the Hyatt Regency Coolum in Australia. Stephen Ansell waited tables at the swimming pool between shifts on reception. Philip Barnes, who went on to run The Savoy in London, said that until he became a Four Seasons general manager his mother thought he was going to be a waiter. Aaron Kaupp, now a regional vice president at Raffles, traces the whole of his career to a morning spent refilling a coffee cup and the feeling that the energy of a busy dining room was, in his word, priceless.
Tom Roelens, then general manager of Four Seasons Resort Lanaʻi, remembered the hierarchy from the bottom: as a young runner he was only allowed to bring out the food and beverage and hand it to the captain or maître d’, who would then engage with the guests. That is the ladder in one sentence. Runner, waiter, captain, maître d’. The chefs confirm it from their side. Nicolai Nørregaard worked as a waiter in various restaurants before he started cooking on the side.
If you want to see where that ladder can lead, read the question on how to build a long career in hospitality and the question on how to become a hotel general manager.
What it asks of you
The role asks you to read a room and read a table, because the failure that reaches the floor is caught in a face at the second bite. It asks for the discipline to prepare, since the briefing is only as good as the attention paid to the book that afternoon. It asks for authority that holds under pressure, the kind Cozonis needed and did not get from above. And it asks you to be the bridge Ripert describes, the person both the kitchen and the floor trust to carry what the other needs to know.