The cramped service lane outside Delhi University’s Sri Venkateswara College in Satya Niketan is dotted with cafés and restaurants.
One eatery, however, has a unique experience in store for its diners.
When you enter Echoes, a smiling waiter hands you a card that reads: “Eat, engage, energise with the café managed by differently-abled staff. Let’s lead by actions together”.
Opened in December 2015, the restaurant is run by six hearing and speech impaired waiters.
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On each table are a couple of placards that read: ‘water please!’, ‘refill please’ or ‘bill!!’. A customer can hold these up to get quick service.
Bells and light bulbs
If a diner wants to call a waiter, they can press a bell attached to each table.
The bells are connected to a series of bulbs marked with the number of the corresponding table. The waiters can identify the table once a bulb lights up.
The restaurant offers Continental, Italian, Mexican and Chinese cuisine. To minimise confusion, each food item on the menu has been assigned a code that the customer can write on the pad at their table.
Bridging the communication gap between the customers and the waiters was the biggest challenge for the owners, but the solutions they came up with are what has made the café stand out and become a symbol for a social cause.
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“We wanted to be different from the others. So, we thought of designing the place on the theme of ‘motivation’,” said Kshitij Behl, who opened the eatery along with his friends Shivansh, Sahil, Sahib, Prateek and Gaurav.
“But we still felt that something was missing. It then struck us that maybe we could create a benchmark by getting hearing and speech impaired people to run the café. Coming from the hospitality sector, we saw differently-abled people do back-end jobs. Our aim was to bring them into the spotlight,” Mr. Behl said.
In the future
The owners started out with the waiting staff, but they have bigger targets. “Our chefs are not differently-abled. We are looking to change that. Also, we are looking to hire some women who are hearing and speech impaired,” said Mr. Behl.
“Ultimately, our objective is to see a café run entirely by the differently-abled — right from serving to cooking to managing. Until that happens, there is no stopping us,” said Mr. Behl.
