A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City

Product Information

Bittersweet and enchanting, this serves as a potent look at the gritty underbelly of a glittering world. As he notes in the quote above, so little has changed since Orwell’s time, and you can’t help wondering what any Health Inspectors think of these conditions! Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.

Beyond the dining room, however, is a ‘labyrinthine world’ of kitchens with flaming hobs, corridors, locker rooms, cellars, bin rooms and sculleries, where the men (always men) ‘spend most of the day standing in water and rotting vegetable peelings’. Chisholm] brings the restaurant world to life as he relates the stress, pressure, and anxiety felt by all the workers. A Waiter in Paris has effective bits of dialogue that turn out as quick riposte that further develops the worry and tensions of a man without cash or friends. A Waiter in Paris had me hooked, after reading the Introduction and the Amuse-Bouche, I felt compelled to read on.

A Waiter in Paris is a fascinating read which plunges you into the manic and hidden world of Parisian restaurants; it’s vivid, immersive and unforgettable, and also demonstrates that the extreme distance between the rich and the poor has never gone away. Despite having little knowledge of the French language or experience as a server, he managed to fake his way into a position as a runner in an upscale restaurant, where he was labeled L’Anglais. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. On this week’s Earful Tower podcast episode, host Oliver Gee is joined by Edward Chisholm whose new book “A Waiter in Paris” is taking the world by storm.

An evocative portrait of the underbelly of contemporary Paris as seen through the eyes of a young waiter scraping out a living in the City of Light. If you like what you see, but are itching for more, become a Patron and get all the bonus content, including my PDF guide to Paris.He inhabits a world of inhuman hours, snatched sleep and dive bars; he scrapes by on coffee, bread and cigarettes, with a wage so low he’s fighting colleagues for tips. However, he’s hampered by a number of things, not least his inability to speak French; and when the relationship falls apart, he’s left with little alternative but to try to get a job in a restaurant. They have gathered together in Paris at Le Bistrot de la Seine from many corners and cultures of the world.

For all the infectiously intense moments and the genuine interest Chisholm drags out of his experience, it is still unclear why anyone would wish to become a waiter in such a bustling city.As the pages trickle by and we dig deeper under the well-worn cobblestones of Paris with Edward, the anecdotes become more personal, vivid and a wholly authentic representation of what the real Paris looks, feels, smells and tastes like. The hours are long, the work is hard, harder still if, like Chisholm, French is not a native language. Much the way that charity camp out for the homeless are not real approximations of what it’s like to be homeless because the participants are destined a warm bed the night after, Chisholm can’t really capture the struggle of being a waiter because unlike most of the other characters he’s not trapped in that life.