Rags to riches as Rita hangs with rock stars

City Lives – Denise McNamara meets Rita Gilligan, the public face of the Hard Rock Café

Her day job involves donning a white pinafore resplendent with shiny badges, and smashing guitars in some rather glamorous locations. At 73, she must have the most rockin’ job on the planet.

Even though she no longer waits tables, Rita Gilligan is probably the most famous waitress in the world.

The Bohermore woman has been the public face of the café, restaurant and resort chain Hard Rock Café since 1996, when just minutes before the group’s 25th anniversary, she was told she was coming off the floor.

But instead of hanging up her apron, the boss told her she was to become cultural attaché for the Hard Rock Café group, travelling the world opening new outlets and motivating staff. At last count she has opened 180 of the 187 branches.

Rita credits her training in Galway’s Great Southern Hotel for giving her confidence and nurturing her personality, two key ingredients in her success.

The daughter of the Ryans of St Finbarr’s Terrace, she left Fr Griffin Road Tech to work in a factory hand-painting china. But the paint fumes affected her stomach, so she decided to walk the streets of Galway asking for work.

She arrived outside the steps of the Great Southern and asked the doorman if there was any work. The first question she was asked was where she was from.

“Sure at that time Bohermore was the Ballymun of Ireland so he said no. As soon as he was gone helping someone with their bags I snuck in. I spotted this chap with a dickie bow, I thought he must be important so I asked him for work. I told him I’d do anything and I wouldn’t leave until I got one. He said to come back at 6am the following morning. I think I was there at 4am I was so afraid of sleeping in.”

That man turned out to be the manager Brian Collins and she was soon firmly ensconced in the kitchen washing dishes before being moved to the ‘still room’ to make tea and toast.

“I couldn’t wait to tell my mother. A promotion like that was better than going to Harvard. The hotel was very much Upstairs Downstairs and this was a move upstairs. They then made me a waitress and you’d have eight forks and knives per setting. At home we were eating with a teaspoon.”

She recalls how one famous resident took a shine to her.

“[Writer] Brendan Behan asked for me to serve him every morning. I’d bring up his breakfast and he’d catch hold of my hands. I’d say, I have to go to Mass. He would give me 10 bob a morning – it was a fortune. I was only earning 19/6 – under a pound a week.”

She spent four happy years in the hotel, which is now the Meyrick.

“I’ve opened some of the best hotels in the world but you’ll never beat it. It was beaten into us. We were delighted to have a job, delighted to have work. You came in with pride. People say ‘Rita, the Hard Rock made you’, but it was the Great Southern that made me and I’ll never forget it.”

She left for more exciting climes in London, where she worked for a number of different silver-service restaurants. She also married and had two kids.

In 1971 her husband Anthony spotted a large advert in the paper, looking for “matronly waitresses”, aged late 30s, early 40s.

She decided to head down to the Mayfair, around the corner from Hyde Park and opposite Buckingham Palace and she spotted a man at the door with long hair and a pair of jeans.

It turned out to be the group co-founder Peter Morton.

“I was used to interviews where it would be ‘yes sir, no sir, how do you served the beef?’ Here was this 21-year-old drinking from a neck of a bottle and he was smoking what must have been a joint. I was 29 but told him I was 32. He said ‘you’re too young’. I said ‘I’m best you’re going to get, you better take me’. He looked at me, put the hand out for what I know now is a high five and I had the job.”

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were among the earliest customers of what Rita calls the first classless restaurant in the UK – where the staff were encouraged to have plenty of attitude.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.