There are certain faces in a city that begin to feel like constants. For me, Manohar Kumar is one of them.
Forty three now, he has spent more than half his life in hospitality, beginning at seventeen. At a premium fine dining restaurant tucked inside Delhi’s Khan Market, he stands at the ground floor desk, a steady presence amid the evening rush. You notice him before you reach him. Not because he is loud, but because his warmth travels ahead of him. There is a clarity to the way he greets you, a way of making you feel expected even when you have walked in unannounced.
There are days I have found myself persuaded to stay, or to try my luck for a table, simply because of him.
On one such afternoon, in that rare lull between services, I asked him a question that now feels almost naive. Did he like what he did? His response was immediate, almost instinctive. “Of course, ma’am. Iss job mein last nahi kar sakte aap agar aapko roz pasand na ho jo aap karte hain.” You cannot last in this work if you do not like it every single day.
Kumar comes from Pauri in Garhwal. He speaks of hospitality not as a profession, but as inheritance. As something that runs in pahadi veins, effortless and instinctive. It shows in the way he listens, in the way he holds space, in the composure with which he absorbs the unpredictable theatre of a dining room.
And then, just as quickly as that moment of stillness arrived, it broke.
A man walked in, carrying with him the unmistakable air of entitlement. He demanded a table for six. Kumar, composed as ever, explained that it would take around thirty minutes. It was a simple, factual response. It was met with hostility. Sharp words followed. Then a threat, delivered casually, almost as an afterthought. “I will take care of you later.”
I remember standing there, startled less by the incident and more by how unsurprised Kumar seemed. When I asked if this was common, he smiled, not dismissively, but knowingly. “Ma’am, you have no idea what we deal with. Especially in Delhi.”
That sentence has stayed with me.
There is, increasingly, a particular kind of guest that our city is producing. Impatient. Performative. Armed with the belief that paying for a meal entitles them not just to service, but to submission. The language of dining out has shifted from appreciation to expectation, and from expectation to demand. Somewhere along the way, basic civility has become optional.
We live in an age of immediacy. Food arrives in minutes, cabs in seconds, responses in real time. The gig economy has trained us to believe that everything, and everyone, is available at the tap of a screen. But restaurants are not algorithms. They are living, breathing ecosystems, held together by people who absorb the chaos so that your evening can feel seamless.
When a dining room is full, it is full. No amount of insistence can produce a table out of thin air. When a dish goes wrong, it can be replaced, remade, reimagined. What it cannot withstand is humiliation.
At bars, the fault lines deepen further. Alcohol loosens restraint and amplifies entitlement. “I have been threatened many times,” Nandita Ghosh, part of the operations team at a leading bar in Greater Kailash, tells me. “Especially when we inform guests about last order timings. The idea that we cannot serve beyond a point is often taken as a personal affront.”
There is something unsettling about this pattern. Not because it is rare, but because it is not.
What does it say about us, that we have normalised speaking down to the very people who are trying to make our evenings joyous? That warmth is met with aggression. That patience is tested, repeatedly, by those who refuse to extend even a fraction of it in return.
Hospitality, at its core, is an act of generosity. But generosity is not servitude. And somewhere between the two, we seem to have lost our way.
I often think back to Kumar’s conviction. You cannot last in this work if you do not love it every day. Perhaps the more urgent question is this. What happens when love for the work is met, day after day, with a lack of basic human regard?
Delhi prides itself on its food, its restaurants, its dining culture. But a city is not defined by what is served on its plates alone. It is defined by how it treats the people who serve it.
Right now, that reflection is not a flattering one.
