Are you being served?

      Hospitality has become a vital industry in Vietnam as a result of the fast-growing tourism sector.
Head into any mid-priced Vietnamese restaurant and you’ll find yourself suddenly assailed by an army of waiters and waitresses.
This well-meaning mob will hand you a menu of substantial girth that is filled with a fantastic array of dishes.
After pouring over the long list of edibles you may look up to find not one but three smiling serving staff hovering over you.
Due to the over-employment of waiting staff, especially at quiet times during the day, customers often suffer from excessive attentiveness, for example by being ushered to a seat in an empty cafe and told to sit down.
At the opposite end of the etiquette spectrum is too little courtesy.
An example of this is being asked, as a solitary diner, to move tables to allow a larger group to sit down.
Another is waiting staff answering their mobile phones in the midst of taking an order.
With the increasing numbers of tourists in Vietnam, it seems the time is ripe for some basic hospitality tuition.
Serving the servers
Wily entrepreneurs are no doubt already eyeing the sizable gap in the market with respect to the hospitality industry, so can we expect hospitality schools to start lining Ho Chi Minh City’s streets any time soon?
A number of NGOs and otherbenevolent ventures are already filling this gap by offering underprivileged children in the city the chance to learn valuable vocational skills.
At 38 Ly Tu Trong Street, you’ll find Huong Lai, a restaurant where the staff preparing and serving local Vietnamese delicacies all come from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Huong Lai offers both on-the-job English language and hospitality training.
Japanese owner Jin Shirai started the restaurant six years ago after visiting Vietnam to study its language and culture.
He wanted to give something back to the country as a thank you for his wonderful experience.
Sesame is a joint venture between the Vietnamese local government and Triangle Generation Humanitaire, a French NGO.
It operates as a catering and hospitality school for disadvantaged children, where young adults are trained for careers as kitchen or waiting staff.
The school can be found at 153 Xo Viet Nghe Tinh Street in Binh Thanh District.
The Thang Long English and Vocational School in District 4 was founded in 1994 and is sponsored by the Saigon Children’s Charity.
They offer a range of vocational classes for children from the poorest families in the local district, including skills in hotel and restaurant hospitality, sewing, hairdressing, art, computer studies and photography.
Different strokes for different folks
“The customer is always right” is still a consumerist mantra in the US, with those in the hospitality industry bending over backwards to placate the customer.
Countering this argument is the idea that visitors to a foreign culture should be more flexible in their expectations of customer service.
Most would argue that it’s absurd to expect the American “Have A Nice Day!” attitude to flourish in local restaurants in Asia.
Such expectations represent a kind of cultural imperialism.
One shouldn’t travel and expect to remain in a bubble of home comforts and habits.
Travel is meant to offer us a new experience.
As the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, put it: “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.”
This is true enough in many local environments, and patience, tolerance and sensitivity to local customs in foreign countries will ultimately mean one travels more happily.
The rub comes when the traveler opts to stay in a five-star hotel or eat in high-end foreign restaurants, and does so because they expect to receive customer service of a certain level and quality.
When it is not forthcoming and they are paying top dollar for it, irritation inevitably sets in.
With a growing range of schools offering vocational training in hospitality, it is to be hoped that when you pay for five-star service in Vietnam, you actually receive it.