Bernd Mayer joins Vita Nova staff

Bernd Mayer

3:59 p.m., Sept. 28, 2004--If air-conditioning had come to Europe’s five-star restaurants earlier, Bernd Mayer might have been a great chef. Instead, he took the classic advice about what to do if you can’t stand the heat.

“I specialized in restaurant service. I couldn’t take the heat in the kitchen—literally,’’ Mayer said. “In those days, the kitchens were not air-conditioned.’’

Mayer spent three years as an apprentice in the mid-1950s and graduated from the Hotel Trade School in Bad Uberkingen, Germany before becoming a waiter at Europe’s five-star hotels.

He worked almost a half-century in the restaurant business in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Bermuda and the United States, and oversaw 4,000 events a year as longtime banquet manager at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington.

Now, as dining room manager at Vita Nova, Mayer is preparing UD’s 400 HRIM students for careers in restaurant service in the U.S. and overseas. He works with Joe DiGregorio, Debbie Ellingsworth and Julie Fagan on the team of professionals that oversee the student-run restaurant Vita Nova.

“At this point in my life and my career, I couldn’t think of anything more important than giving something back for tomorrow’s professionals,’’ he said.

Mayer lauded restaurant training operations like UD’s, which give students experience in the kitchen and in the dining room as classes rotate through posts in the student-run restaurant Vita Nova, in the Trabant University Center.

“These students have an opportunity to work in the back and the front of the house at the same time,’’ he said. “In the U.S., tremendous progress has been made in the industry in the past 10 years on the culinary side, but not so much on the service side.’’

Mayer recalled his experience in Europe in the 1950s, when he was not allowed to enter the dining room, except between meals during his first six months as a working waiter after his apprenticeship.

“You don’t just put on a bow tie and white shirt and off to the races you go,’’ he said. “For the first six months, I was not allowed in the dining room for fear that I would make a mistake.’’

Mayer, who met his wife at a Bermuda resort where he was working and she was vacationing, said his advice to HRIM graduates is to work around the world and across the United States.

“You first go out in the world,’’ he said. “I bounced around for almost 18 years. I worked at six to eight five-star hotels, then I looked for a place where I could put my roots in the ground.’’

Article by Kathy Canavan
Photos by Kevin Quinlan

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