One of the few Bermudian restaurateurs to win international recognition is predicting a gloomy future for the tourism industry unless overall standards are improved.

With fewer and fewer locals entering the business, Mr. A.W. Llwellyn Harvey, proprietor of Once Upon a Table, is warning that Bermuda will be forced to rely more -- not less -- on imported labour to service the hospitality industry's requirements.

Latest enrolment figures at Stonington bear him out. There are currently only 28 Bermudian students at the state-of-the-art, South Shore training establishment. The College relies heavily on its non-Bermudian students, with 19 of them bringing the total enrolment up to 47.

Mr. Harvey's concern is underlined by the fact that while there are 12 locals in the chef training programme, only one Bermudian has stayed on for the second year of the Front Office programme, there are two second year students in the associated arts degree Hospitality Management course, and in the Associate in Hospitality Management, first year, there are no Bermudians. He is also sharply critical of current standards at the Bermuda Hotel and Catering College.

"Students no longer take the City and Guilds examinations, which I think is a very great pity. Standards have dropped drastically since they did away with them. The quality of teaching has deteriorated greatly -- we seem to be taking in anyone from the hotels. We need proper teachers. There are visitors coming here who expect service on a par with Europe -- as it used to be. Even the Americans base their training on European standards, so I don't know why we've abandoned it. The City and Guilds exams demand a certain standard -- there is no better training. We've got to go back to challenging exams that will produce better quality people if we want to maintain standards,'' he insists.

Mr. Harvey believes the push towards Bermudianisation "at any price'' is "a huge mistake.'' "I am very much against Bermudianisation just for the sake of it. You don't hire a person just because he's black -- and then sit back and hope it will all work out okay -- because it won't. People have to be qualified, whatever the business, or Bermuda is going to suffer the consequences. We are living in a very competitive world, and with this attitude, Bermuda is going to lose out to its competitors.'' He is puzzled, he says, by the fact that so many Bermudians seem to consider working in the hotel business as demeaning in some way.

"This seems to be a problem peculiar to Bermuda. There's a huge demand for training in this field in the States, and they are producing some very good people now. Being a waiter is considered a good job anywhere else in the world -- but in Bermuda, everybody wants to be a lawyer!'' He says the Hotel College at Stonington is no longer living up to its purpose -- that of training Bermudians to work in the industry.

"There are some students who've been at the Stonington hotel for about 15 years,'' he claims. "Stonington should be staffed by professionals and students only used for six months or so. But when they let students stay on, the only experience they have is Stonington! "I don't feel that Stonington should be able to pick and choose people like this. They're supposed to be training people for the whole Island -- not just to run Stonington.'' Mr. Harvey notes that fellow Bermudians, from what he calls his "era,'' have gone on to become very successful in the hospitality business, "people like Perry Robinson, Michael Daniels, Bruce Fraser, David Dodwell, Roger Pedro, Fred Ming, Nigel Prescott, to name but a few. But we're not going to be around for ever and we're not producing Bermudians who are trained to replace them.'' Mrs. Jan Doidge, public relations officer at the College, agrees that interest in the hospitality business has been waning for a long time.

"Ever since the '70s, with the influx of international business, it's been that way. In spite of our efforts, service careers are still considered to be servile. Every year, we invite all fifth-formers to a special exhibition, with lectures and visits to hotels. We would certainly like to hear from anyone who has ideas as to how we can attract more Bermudians,'' she says.

Somehow, says Mr. Harvey, Bermuda must be made to understand the hospitality industry and international business rely on each other.

"One of the attractions of setting up here has been the fact that people could take their clients to good restaurants, stay in good hotels, use a good taxi service -- and a lot of these people return with families.'' Part of the problem, he feels, lies in the overall lack of discipline that seems to permeate society.

"This starts in the schools and carries on through the college. Everybody wants the top jobs, but no one seems to be prepared to work their way up, as we all had to. They feel foreigners are taking their jobs, but we are not preparing our young people to take over. You can't take somebody off the street and turn him into a waiter overnight. It's a long, specialised training especially in a gourmet restaurant.'' He should know. Educated first at Francis Patton and then Prospect Boys School, Mr. Harvey wanted to be a lawyer.

"But it was very difficult in those days to have ambitions like that. Anyway, I decided to go to the Hotel School (as it was called then). I was only 15 at the time, so I stayed there for 2 1 years.'' He admits he was a rebel, more interested in cricket than study.

"They threatened to throw me out. I wanted to leave when I was 16 and go out to work, but my mother wouldn't let me. Once I was under the discipline of Neil Hansford-Smith I started to excel. After failing the first year exams, I then won the Pink Beach Trophy for `best restaurant student'.

After that, he began the climb upward, working at the Inverurie Hotel, doing reception and waiter work at Pompano Beach Club, White Sands, Coral Island Hotel and then back to Pompano as captain. For 13 years he worked as maitre d' at Ariel Sands, leaving there to become restaurant training manager at Stonington for two years.

"I did everything. And it was hard work, and tremendous discipline. If you were late, you were either sent home, or made to work a shift without pay. If we're not prepared to make our young people accept discipline and work hard, as we had to, then we are never going to be able to cope without foreigners. I started out as a bus boy and worked hard to get where I am today. I didn't come out of Hotel School and decide, `I want that foreigner's job'. I had to take a lot of criticism and work extremely hard but I had a plan to get where I wanted to go.'' That was Once Upon a Table.

"It used to be a fine old home, so that's how it got its name. I felt, by that time, I was as well versed in the restaurant business as anyone out of Europe, so I thought, `Why shouldn't a Bermudian open up a real quality restaurant?' I wanted a place that would be uniquely Bermudian and something that Bermuda could be proud of.'' He was never worried about its location -- on the edge of town -- pointing out that some of the world's best restaurants are tucked away on back streets.

Almost 14 years later, he was thrilled that his restaurant was chosen as one of the establishments recently featured on Burt Wolf's "A Taste for Travel'' on cable TV's Travel Channel.

Mr. Harvey specialises in many local dishes, especially for overseas groups and likes to use some of the more unusual ingredients such as Surinam cherries, prickly pear, nasturtiums, guavas and loquats.

"We should be growing local produce for hotels and restaurants and also packaging some of these things as luxury items. You can do a lot with bird peppers and guava.'' One of the reasons for his success is that Mr. Harvey is always prepared to work as hard as his staff.

"They were really shocked when they saw me working in the kitchen, but I didn't waste those years I spent at the Hotel School, and I love to cook. It's my hobby! My whole family comes from that background. I'm related to Fred Ming. He used to work on the Queen of Bermuda with my father, and he used to come over and look at my hotel books and went to the Hotel School about two years after me. I think I had a lot to do with his success today!'' And the future of tourism? "We have fewer beds now than we've ever had, and we can't even fill those. A lot of smaller places have closed down. The competition is much greater and, unfortunately, Bermuda is not the place it was 20 years ago. Claims that hotels are making a lot of money are simply not true. Operating costs -- mainly because of exorbitant utility costs and the expense involved in bringing in foreign labour, is crippling them. We have a different class of traveller coming here, which is reflected in the very limited shopping on Front Street. Tourism needs to come up with a new approach because it should be obvious to everyone that their approach is no longer working.'' He would like to see more Bermudians engaged in the selling of Bermuda.

"When they have these promotions overseas and bring travel agents in, they should have some taxi drivers, maids -- people the visitor is actually going to meet! I understand there are only about two hoteliers on the Tourism Board.

We need to have people on that Board who deal with tourists on a daily basis.

We have this top-heavy civil service, all of whom earn huge salaries -- what good are they doing?'' He wants to see greater co-operation between management and unions.

"The days of the big stick are over, because people know that jobs aren't so easy to find. I think we need to realise that in the real world, workers have to double up on certain jobs. As a matter of fact, this is how I learned so much, because I was made to do this, do that! If people could develop a better attitude to work, we would have a better Bermuda. And that would benefit all of us.'' `SHAPE UP!' -- Mr. Llewellyn Harvey, outlook gloomy