A Waiter in Paris

Edward Chisholm

Hachette

Otago Daily Times, July 16th 2022

“Restaurants, they’re not going to serve the good stuff. Why do it? They’d make less money. …We are beautiful people, doing bad things for money…you lie [because your job] is to make the diner believe they get special service.”

This blunt description of the hospitality industry, delivered to Edward Chisolm by a fellow employee at Le Bistrot de le Seine, perfectlyencapsulates the behind-the-scenes world depicted in his thought-provoking memoir of a year working in a Parisian restaurant. Despite his ignorance of the language and unfamiliarity with the trade, the young Englishman,  Inspired by Down and Out in Paris and London, takes a job in a middle-class restaurant as a runner, a menial role that encompasses everything from peeling potatoes to fetching and carrying for the professional wait staff and the ideal position from which to observe the inner workings of the business.

Waiters rely on gratuities to supplement their meagre wages and work hard to earn them, cajoling the hostess to assign them high-paying diners, bribing the men who work the Pass (where orders are assembled from individual dishes sent up from the kitchen) to prioritise their tables, liberating dishes from other waiter’s orders. Chisolm eventually masters the tricks of the trade well enough to become a waiter in his own right. However, the people with whom he works are the real heroes of this story, and his portraits of them and their various alliances and enmities are vividly and sympathetically drawn.

It is a running joke in the profession that waiters are simply waiting for something else, but like many jokes, it contains more than a grain of truth. Some aspire for escape –  Lucien is an aspiring actor, Salvatore dreams of free-diving, and De Souza of opening his own boxing gym. Others are engaged in more tangible forms of entrepreneurship: Adrien, the Maître d’, deals drugs whilst the duty manager (The Rat) actively undermines the Directeur in hopes of taking his job. And although they, to a man (and occasional woman), take pride in what they do, Chisolm suggests that they learn to love the job because they have been doing it so long that there is no other way out.

A Waiter in Paris is forthright about the difficulties of the job (14h days, 6 days a week with no meal breaks or overtime pay) and how the restaurant itself represents a cross-section of contemporary French society: front-of-house staff are European or North African, the men working the Pass are ex Tamil Tigers, the Prep kitchen (probably illegal) African immigrants. But it also celebrates the industry of these workers and the comradery and friendship forged through such adversity. Although Chisolm’s prose may not have Orwell’s brilliance, he paints a vivid portrait of what is sometimes a brutal,  exploitative industry, and reminds us why we should recognise – and reward – the Salvatores, De Souzas and Luciens of this world.