Photos by Alexandra Funk and Sarawut Yuttanava

Not so long ago, some friends and I were chatting about a couple of restaurants we know and love. Both are elevated establishments led by talented chefs with a distinct vision, and both have won national recognition. One of them is busy every night, even though it’s a big spend at a time when everyone seems to be watching their pennies. The other, well, not so much. It just announced it was closing.

There are, of course, myriad reasons why restaurants fail these days. According to Restaurants Canada, we’ve seen a record- breaking number of restaurant bankruptcies the last couple of years, mostly due to weak sales, but also affected by new taxes, higher rents, crippling debt loads and increased costs of everything.

But what my friends and I were focused on was how these two restaurants make us feel. When we go to the one that is thriving, its staff greet us at the door, call us by name and check in frequently to make sure we’re having a good time. They keep our glasses full and never make us feel like they’re rushing us out the door. The other one? Let’s just say it hasn’t invested as much in its front of house as the back.

It all comes down to service, the secret sauce that makes a good restaurant great. And yet in North America, we don’t take service seriously. Service isn’t considered a career here, the way it is in, say, France, Switzerland or Australia — countries that train their servers well and pay them accordingly. And it shows.

Enter Sandrine Ramoisy and her bold, audacious plan to change the system, treat service workers like the professionals they are and bring hospitality back to the dining room floor.

TIPS Academy founder Sandrine Ramoisy, above, brings decades of fine dining experience and a fierce commitment to elevating frontof- house roles in Canada’s hospitality scene. Students at TIPS Academy receive hands-on training in wine service, table setting and the fine art of hospitality — skills that go far beyond simply taking orders.

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‘The missing link’
It was 2022, just as the restaurant industry was struggling to recover from pandemic-era restrictions, and Ramoisy had a problem on her hands.

She’d been working in restaurants since she was a 15-year-old back in Belgium, where she earned a diploma in hospitality management. In 1992, she came to Canada, where she continued to work in pubs and restaurants, eventually moving into fine dining, first at the much-missed Le Gavroche and then for 17 years as front-of-house manager at Le Crocodile. She is passionate about the industry, but she is also clear-eyed about its failings.

On that day in 2022, Le Crocodile was facing the busy holiday season and, Ramoisy recalls, “We were really struggling to find staff. No one was applying for work.” The few people who did apply often didn’t have the required skills or experience.

At the same time, a wave of refugees was arriving in Vancouver. Ramoisy is an energetic volunteer and created a course to teach these newcomers a skill set that would help them find work quickly. She ended up training 14 students how to carry plates, open wine bottles and take orders. The experiment went so well she not only hired the three people she needed for her own restaurant, but every single member of the group found a job.

“On New Year’s Eve, they all came to me and asked if I would be willing to teach other newcomers,” she says. “I was teaching every week for the next six months. Then somebody asked me, ‘Why is this course only available to help refugees?’ And then it came into my mind: If there is a need, why don’t I just teach this course?”

And so TIPS Academy was born, designed to close the gap between inexperienced job-seekers and employers in the restaurant industry.

“Education for me is the missing link in hospitality,” Ramoisy says. “We have amazing guys in the kitchen, but the people in the dining room, who represent the people in the kitchen, have no experience at all.”

The course takes place over 16 hours, taught in four sessions of four hours each, split over two weeks. By breaking it up over two weeks, she learns who is really serious about learning. “Nobody gets good at anything in 16 hours, but I want to see who is passionate enough to practise and study,” she says. “I want to see who is doing the program on their own time.”

The course is usually taught during off hours at JJ’s Restaurant at the Vancouver Community College campus or, depending on availability, at other restaurants. It starts with an overview of the industry and what its demands are. “I want them to understand what the expectation is so they don’t quit during the training,” she says.

Then students are taught everything from how to dress and how to apply for a job to table setting, bussing, wine service and tray-handling. There is plenty of role play and hands-on practise.

Those who complete the course receive  certification depending on their proficiency to work, say, in a café (Level 3) or in a fine-dining establishment (Level 6). In the future, Ramoisy says, “I’m hoping that when people hire staff, they don’t ask for two years’ experience, they ask for Level 2 certification.”

Paper-thin margins
This quest to put humanity back into hospitality comes at a particularly fraught time for an industry that has been forced to do a lot of soul searching in recent years. Think: #MeToo; mental health issues; a global pandemic; supply chain problems; the problem of the angry and abusive chef; and, perhaps most significantly, simply grappling with the economic realities of the industry.

Even at the best of times, running a restaurant isn’t easy. What were always tight margins have now become paper thin.

For solutions, restaurants have mostly turned to technology, which has been helpful in many ways, but not in others.

Take reservations systems such as Open Table, Tock and Resy. On the one hand, they make it a snap to book a table. Convenient, yes, but these systems not only cost restaurants money but have exacerbated two problems: they’ve led to so many no-shows that many restaurants now demand deposits; they’ve also turned making reservations for some popular restaurants into a literal Hunger Games.

(Go ahead. Just try to book a table at the famous Osteria Francescana in Italy. The next availability is for February 2026, and reservations open at 10 a.m. on Friday, August 1. Chances are they’ll be full by the time you even log onto the website. Good luck.)

Some restaurants have stopped taking reservations at all. Many have instituted time limits for diners, and surely nothing feels less hospitable than having to bolt your food while keeping one eye on the clock in case you run over your 90-minute allotment. No dessert for you, my friend.

At the same time, tipping percentages have crept up and up, from a once-considered-generous 10 per cent to 15, 18 and now- standard 20 per cent. Indeed, many card machines come pre- programmed with suggested tips starting at 22 per cent, which can feel a bit rich when the service has been less than stellar. Plus, Quebec’s new tipping law, which requires businesses to calculate suggested tip amounts based on the pre-tax totals, raises the question of whether tips are being calculated on the taxes here, and whether we’re paying even more than we think we are.

When you add all that to the rising cost of food and the convenience of home delivery, no wonder cash-strapped customers are thinking twice about going out to eat.

All of which goes to say that a return to service and hospitality couldn’t come at a better time, for restaurants, the people they employ and for consumers alike.

Service as a career
While the TIPS Academy’s 16-hour course is designed for beginners, Ramoisy soon saw another need in the market, and it’s what’s keeping her busiest right now. She’s started offering four-hour workshops for established restaurant staff, one for senior servers and the other for leaders, held on location in the restaurants where they work.

The senior server course offers training in practical skills such as how to greet guests and make them feel welcome, setting and clearing a table, presenting the menu, upselling gracefully, managing complaints with kindness, addressing mistakes and communicating clearly with colleagues and customers.

The leadership course, meanwhile, tackles topics such as creating a culture of enthusiasm and commitment, avoiding the “nice boss” trap, training servers to take ownership, correcting mistakes without losing morale and managing difficult customers.

Both strongly emphasize the importance of shifting the perception of serving as a career.

“Feedback has been extremely positive,” Ramoisy says. “The reason I’ve kept the 16-hour course going is because people keep asking for it. And for the four-hour ones, every one of my customers right now is a repeat customer, and I’m planning to do more this summer.”

Those customers include some of the most highly respected restaurants and restaurant groups in Vancouver, including the Glowbal Restaurant Group and Sequoia Company of Restaurants. Truffles Catering has her do a refresher every three months.

And it’s not just the big players that a program like this can help.

“I want to help the small mom-and-pop restaurants that have five or six tables and one staff member. They don’t know to train their servers because they are not servers. They are businesspeople,” Ramoisy says. “I want people to be educated so it’s not up to the business owner to train their staff.”

After all, she points out, “You are only as good as the person who trains you.” And, she adds, too often, even senior servers with years of experience “are totally clueless about hospitality. You have to create an experience. You have to play with their emotions.”

Changing the industry
There are plenty of benefits for a program like this. Students who complete this course and earn certification will “have an edge,” she says, putting them in line for better jobs. Restaurateurs get a source of professionally trained staff, plus they can take advantage of government grants to train recent immigrants. And customers have a better experience overall.

The restaurant industry is no small thing in this country. According to Restaurants Canada, it is the country’s fourth- largest private sector employer, serving 23 million Canadians every day in every corner of the nation and contributing a staggering $28 billion in taxes each year. The people who work in this industry deserve to be given the training they need to do their jobs properly, to make more money and to advance in their careers just as people do in other professions.

Right now, though, here in B.C. there are no standard training or educational requirements for servers, unlike the Red Seal certification for cooks (although that, too, is optional). And while some culinary and vocational schools offer some service training, none makes it a priority or offers the rigorous training of European schools such as the famed EHL Hospitality Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland.

That, Ramoisy thinks, is a challenge, and one she is ready to take on.

“I’m hoping I can prove that education is needed so I can go in front of the government and say we need education in this industry,” she says.

She emphasizes that the TIPS Academy courses are not just about taking orders and clearing tables; they are about taking ownership and accountability, learning from mistakes and understanding how the restaurant business works.

Most of all, they are about hospitality, not just service.

She adds: “We complain about bad service all the time, but what do we do about it? We don’t have that plan to fix it.” Well, this is that plan, and just in time.

TIPS Academy
tipsacademybc.ca | @tipsacademybc