“When I started out, any mother would have been happy for their daughter to marry a waiter,” he says, speaking at the back of the restaurant in central Madrid where he is maitre d’. Castellanos, 58, a stocky, jovial man, with a quickness of thought honed by decades on the job, remembers how common it was a couple of decades ago to find good waiters who combined cordiality, calmness, efficiency and the intelligence needed to read a client’s mind — all appealing traits to a potential mother-in-law.

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