Keep happy and healthy – on a diet of rabbit

Dostoevsky once wrote that "much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid". More than 100 years on, the makers of Rennie, the indigestion remedy, came to the same conclusion after carrying out a nationwide survey of dining habits.

The company found that people willing to speak up and complain in a restaurant when food or service is dismal are less likely to suffer indigestion than those who silently fume.

This hardly surprising snippet of information was revealed by the much admired, and equally feared, restaurant critic Fay Maschler in one of her weekly London Evening Standard reviews. She was writing about the Cosmo, and I am extremely happy to say she awarded the place, its food and its staff, the first, much-coveted star she had handed down for many weeks.

Healthy

What Maschler did not say, however, was that this accolade was only possible because of another line of healthy communication which has been the beneficial result of my wife Louise's adamant approach to training both the kitchen staff and the front of house to speak - to each other, to the customers, to the management - and in so doing both to voice their desires and to pass on their constructive criticisms.

It was not always thus. When we first arrived at the Cosmo, the atmosphere was almost totally demoralised, and communication was virtually nil. The waiters seemed scared of both the customers and the kitchen. The chefs appeared incapable of telling the waiters to slow down and not to rush preparation and service. All the staff generally seemed to expect new supplies of food, drink and laundry to arrive as if by magic, without anyone placing an order, and certainly without anyone telling the manager what was needed.

Communication is ultimately about responsibility. It is no coincidence that the words "responding" and "responsibility" have the same Latin root.

But that was then; this is now. The front of house staff increasingly appear to have no difficulty in asking every customer if they would like a drink when they first arrive in the restaurant. They no longer hold back from offering the wine list and encouraging people to choose something to complement their meal.

Similarly, in the kitchen, the chefs are more in control. They have been taught not to let plates go until the food is ready and the presentation is perfect. There is much more discussion about mise en place and how the food should look.

If this had not been the case, I do not believe Maschler would have been able to say of Theo Ioannou, the head chef, that he has managed "remarkably well" the balancing act of preserving the Central European dishes which have always defined the 60-year-old Cosmo while introducing ideas that appeal to a contemporary, health-conscious palate.

Indeed, so commonplace has the act of communicating at the Cosmo become that it is painfully noticeable when communication temporarily breaks down, as it inevitably still does from time to time. Mercifully, these moments are few and far between and, thankfully, there is a management that cares to kickstart the talking again.

The same does not seem to be the rule everywhere. Many is the time when we have visited another restaurant to be served in an almost disdainful way. The worst cases have been in some of the country's most expensive establishments.

In one Conran restaurant, for example, where the bill for our meal for two came to £120, the wine that was brought was not the one ordered. Worse, at the end of the meal, we found we had been billed for a bottle of mineral water we had neither ordered nor had.

Wait

In another, part of the growing Marco Pierre White empire, I arrived to discover that the booking that had been made well in advance had not been recorded. We then had to wait nearly an hour for our main course. When our food did arrive, it had been turned out in such haste that there was no flavour to it. And if that was not enough, the bill took a full half-an-hour to arrive, despite telling the manager that we were, by then, in a hurry.

When the boss announces that customers of another of his establishments will have to sign a legally binding contract when reserving a table, breach of which will incur a hefty fine, I would not blame any customers for communicating exactly how they felt in the strongest possible language - by withholding their custom. This would certainly preclude the possibility of suffering stress-induced indigestion.