Paris yesterday, cold and bright. Cream stone, pursed mouths, a brown ribbon of river. I’ve been here every year since my late teens, I grew up in a Swiss village a mile from the border, my dad still lives in France – but I’ve only recently begun to realise something about the locals. You know what a Frenchman thinks of you not by his acts or words but by the look he gives you. And I like that: the clean, steady vivisection of personality.
Waiters, for instance. Supercilious garçons are a sweat-sour tranche of froggy folklore, as much a European travel cliché as the Orient Express, grand tours and Dutch girls’ bacilli. The penguin-suited human smirk, peering disgustedly above a Bergerac nose and a ludicrous pout, doing very little, but doing nothing more successfully than relentlessly, vigilantly ignoring.
French waiters are grandmasters of the passive aggressive. No eyes are more blind, no ears more deaf than theirs. Say it’s time for the bill. You give them your practised eyebrow-raise. Doesn’t work. You motion a brief wave of consummate discretion. Nothing happens. A polite “excusez-moi” thuds to nothingness. These boys shower the tables with all the otiose devotion their wives give their armpits.
Not so long ago, I was in a cumbersomely-starred Paris restaurant. We sat in a room of ornate joylessness and ate mushy overpriced fish. And though we never wanted for anything, and 18-year-olds in ill-fitting suits appeared every three minutes to sweep away non-existent crumbs, and when my friend spilled a drop of red wine on the tablecloth someone scurried over to lay more linen on top of it, lest our view be sullied by the besmirching dot – despite all these, it was a sad, dreary meal. Good service is about more than serving. The waiters presented food without fanfare, topped up our glasses, left us alone. But they offered no engagement: just studied detachment and a base, baseless suspicion.
Even coming from England, where waiters tend not to be good at much beyond farting, dropping stuff and piercings, you wonder at the breathtaking performance of some serveurs in France. American restaurant staff, by contrast, are bubbles of ecstatic, grating perkiness, laughing like puppets on magic mushrooms. It can get annoying, but at least there’s a hint of punter-provider respect behind the assault and flattery.
French waiters, you’ll have noticed, almost never smile. And, dissociated from the experience, we can almost appreciate that – at least they’re emotionally honest. But restaurants aren’t places for emotional honesty: they’re about hospitality. If we wanted to be patronised and mocked, however honestly intended, we’d go to Tate Modern. Despite its bouts of social unrest, France remains a curiously retiring, coldly aloof place. Manners are a costume there, permitting distance and satire. They’re sword and shield at once.
When the French visit London restaurants, do they throw their hands to their faces and cry ‘Quel horreur!’ when waiters here (as indeed they can be) are polite, affable, courteous, and pretend to be pleased to see them? I doubt it.
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