The Weekly Screed (#587)

Paris waiters: A brief tutorial
by David Benjamin

PARIS, Café George V, Champs Elysées — My waiter here is a petty tyrant. But this is hardly surprising. This joint is smack-dab in the heart of a “tourist vortex.”

I suppose I should explain.

There are two types of Parisian waiters, the kind who operate in “tourist vortices” and the majority, who work in normal Paris, serving mostly French customers.

Your normal Parisian waiter in, say, the largely tourist-free Tenth Arrondissement, can be stern or vivacious, or somewhere in between, but he’s always faultlessly proper. He greets you in French and only attempts your native tongue (he can tell what it is) if he sees you in linguistic distress, and then, only long enough to smooth the waters and ensure that each dish lands where it belongs. French, after all, is the language of Paris and its pervasive melody is essential to the ambience of every bistro.

But the best thing is this: If you return a dozen times to his restaurant, the true Parisian waiter will suddenly remember you, Afterward, though a decade might pass, he will never forget. He’ll welcome you more warmly than you could possibly deserve, treat you like family and slip you the occasional free dessert. He’s like Jeeves in French and you will not find him — search though you might — in a tourist vortex.

The largest tourist vortex in Paris is the Champs Elysées. In square footage, the next biggest is probably the area stretching from the circle of restaurants at Trocadero across the Seine to the broad plaza beneath the Eiffel Tower — but not including the adjacent Champs de Mars. Tourists — slaves to guidebooks and checklists — barely set foot on the Champs de Mars. Almost instinctively, tourists observe clear, inviolable (but wondrously imaginary) borders. If you tiptoe across the invisible line and wander down the Champs de Mars — poof! They’re all gone. No muscular Germans with valkyrie spouses. No Japanese newlyweds wielding tripods. No actuaries from Missouri in plaid Bermudas with fanny packs, cellulite and sticky, whining offspring.

Your tourist waiter comes in three types. The commonest is the shattered nihilist who exhausted his patience long before you arrived in Paris — perhaps before Hemingway arrived. These guys are simply bad waiters who can’t get a better job. They’re not uniquely Parisian. Except for their accent, they’re the same rude soup-spitters who bungle your order in Manhattan or Chicago, L.A., Tokyo or Berlin.

The two other species of tourist-vortex waiters — your “saints” and your “bullies”— are more interesting. The closest thing we have in America are special-education teachers. The professional challenge is eerily similar. In both jobs, you have to deal with not just ignorance, but with sometimes profound disabilities in speech, temperament, culture, maturity, couth, manners, even clothing.

A “saintly” waiter is one with an apparently inexhaustible reserve of patience, regardless of his customers’ demands. My favorite was the head waiter at a café on the rue de Rivoli — which is the sort of hellish maelstrom of gawkers and shutterbugs that would have inspired at least a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. This saint was trying to help an American woman who wanted an omelette but who insisted, in a voice calibrated to penetrate body armor and shatter plate glass, that her omelette not be “RAW! I DON’T WANT IT RAW! YOU SAVVY! I DON’T WANT IT RAW! NOT! RAW!”

At nearby tables, frightened Frenchwomen wept. Across the street in the Tuileries, birds rose screaming into the sky.

The waiter spoke passable English. However, the repeated expletive, “RAW!” had him stumped. The closest French cognate is roi. But it made no sense, even for an American tourist, to demand three eggs gently sautéed and folded over a slice of French king. I knew she wanted a “well-done” omelette, but I’d forgotten the applicable French term, because no one in his right mind orders anything “well done” from even the lowliest French cook. To say “bien cuit” in Paris is to say, “Yo, garçon! Torch me a pound of garbage and serve me up the ashes with ketchup on the side.”

After three trips to the kitchen, the saintly waiter delivered to the woman a slab of brown leather redolent of scorched butter and burnt hair. After scraping away the salad that accompanied her “eggs” and dumping it into a napkin, the harpy lowered her snout and began to feed. Above the noise of her gnawing, her waiter, still the trouper, still sunny and solicitous, said: “Bon appetit, madame!”

The worst tourists here tend to be Americans, Germans and Russians, possibly because A’s, G’s and R’s tend to talk with a lot of volume. Or maybe it’s because each of these nation has entertained dreams of world conquest. Of course, by this measure, the British should be comparably obnoxious — but they’re not. They tend, rather, to be incongruously cute, like ventriloquist’s dummies or orangutans.

My waiter today, as I said, is a bully. He pounced on me and did his best, in English, to sell the petit dejeuner super-supreme. I cut him off, in French, and ordered the sort of modest breakfast — café crème and a tartine — that the French prefer.

Instantly losing interest in me, the waiter snagged off the street a trio of Taiwanese. French waiters prize Asian tourists, for their meekness, their innocence, their willingness to spend. My waiter bludgeoned them with English — which is less frightening than French, but still confusing. Wielding a menu like a cattle prod, he drovered them to the front table, where they would be visible to hundreds of other spendthrift Asians sheepishly wandering the Champs Elysées. Suddenly, before the three hapless T’s realized what they had ordered (had they ordered?), there it was spread before them, with nary a word of either protest or inquiry: a full “American” breakfast — coffee, tea and O.J., French bread, three types of viennoiserie plus American toast and sufficient confiture to gag a lumberjack. Also, omelettes all around, thin-sliced Parma ham, salad on the side and two liters of Chateldon to wash it down and pad the check.

The waiter, as his tourists dig into their epic repast, smiles enigmatically. But this can’t be a smile about a tip. Chinese don’t tip. This, as I looked again, is the smirk of a lion who — though he’s eaten his fill — still appreciates the sight of a fresh-killed zebra.