Edward Chisholm

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. A waiter's job is to deceive you. They want you to believe in a luxurious calm because on the other side of that door . . . is hell. Edward Chisholm's spellbinding memoir of his time as a Parisian waiter takes you beneath the surface of one of the most iconic cities in the world—and right into its glorious underbelly. He inhabits a world of inhuman hours, snatched sleep and dive bars; scraping by on coffee, bread and cigarettes, often under sadistic managers, with a wage so low you're fighting your colleagues for tips. Your colleagues—including thieves, narcissists, ex-soldiers, immigrants, wannabe actors, and drug dealers—are the closest thing to family that you've got. It's physically demanding, frequently humiliating and incredibly competitive. But it doesn't matter because you're in Paris, the center of the universe, and there's nowhere else you'd rather be in the world.

Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City

A Waiter in Paris

Tabea Lüth

Ifyou don't believe me, the next time you go down those narrow stone steps in search of the toilet in a Parisian bistro, take a look in the kitchen and tell me how many Sri Lankan or Black faces you see. They’re there for the same reason that I was up top, a Caucasian waiter. 

I don't particularly want to smoke at this time, but if I understand Lucien correctly, he's telling me it's the last break we'll have for the next few hours. “If you don't smoke... start”, he says in heavily accented English once we're outside. 'You sink you can take a pause if you simply say you want to stand... comment dire? outside? Never, mon ami. Never.”He laughs.

The truth is, a Parisian restaurant is an inefficiency-riddled structure: manned by underpaid and underfed slaves.

As a diner you believe that you are going to a restaurant to eat food but what the restaurant is really selling you is an illusion -it's theatre, pure and simple. And your waiter, as the first and last link in the complicated chain that connects you, sitting upstairs, to the poor sods sweating and swearing underground, is the greatest actor of them all. 

Pauline's job is to make sure that you, the diner, are seated where you belong. In that sense her job is unique: she is there to judge you. You could say it is the most Parisian of jobs - passing judgement - and you could easily imagine there being thousands, if not millions, of great candidates across the city, but it is not so.

 "The problem is the money. Always the money. In Italy, no work. We young people must leave our beautiful country to go and work in other people's. Like yours. In return, you - the English and the Germans - you send us your old people. Why? This is not a fair exchange. What did we do to you? Dai. It's actually very hard to be an Italian these days.“

The most beautiful people live where the tomatoes taste good.

Cassandra Tang

And nowhere epitomizes the world of restaurants better than Paris.

Paris is a city that inspires you to walk, and walk I do, everyday, without direction, just taking in the city. Getting lost in it.

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