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

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This astonishing book describes a cruel, feral existence and is worthy of standing on the shelf next to George Orwell’s Down And Out In Paris And London (1933) as another classic about human exploitation. The refugee Tamils washing dishes and skivvying are ‘adept at hand-to-hand combat and know how to plan and execute a guerrilla attack on an armed convoy’.

It’s the City of Lights with the lights turned way up so you can see everything- and realize that it was there all the time. From Edward’s own experience as a Parisian waiter, he shares his observations of the hidden underbelly of bistros, the corruption of money-hungry management, and the bonds formed between waiters as they battle being overworked and underpaid, while dreaming of the day they can leave the ruthless world of waiting. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Prostitutes out front, people sleeping in their cars on the street, shared bathrooms, paper-thin walls. I opened A Waiter in Paris to find a cultural dumpster dive - a deep, penetrating, spiral into the other side of the City of Lights.

In this revealing social commentary, Chisholm shares the appalling working conditions that he and his co-workers faced behind the facade of fine French dining . A Waiter In Paris is a searing account of what life is really like ‘at the bottom of the food chain’, and Chisholm’s prose positively delights in describing the graffiti, sodden cardboard boxes and litter-strewn pavements. Indeed, his fellow waiters are thieves, drug dealers, ex-soldiers on the run — a grotesque mob, unshaven with darting, ferret-like, bloodshot eyes. Waiters are always on the lookout for lost jewellery or dropped banknotes — and they fight for a share of the tips. Throughout, Chisholm renders the City of Light in vivid scenes of squalor and splendor, its romance and wretchedness mirroring that of the “great piece of theater” he starred in before eventually leaving the restaurant himself.Colleagues - including thieves, narcissists, ex-Legionnaires, paperless immigrants, wannabe actors and drug dealers - who are the closest thing to family that you've got. It started as a ridiculous notion as a non-French speaking English man with no catering experience decides to become a waiter in a busy Paris restaurant, where he is treated badly, victimised, and paid badly.

Newly single, non-French speaking, he is desperate for work, and running out of everything necessary to live in Paris: money. If you’re looking for a book that shows you real life in the service industry that is key to the tourism industry in one of the most touristy places in the world, you’ll eat this up (pun intended)! A few hours later after some terrible food poisoning, Edward's accounts came flooding back into my mind and I was imagining all the ways my food had been mishandled. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy.A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City by Edward Chisholm will be published in North America on August 9, 2022 by Pegasus Books, and in the United Kingdom by Monoray on May 5, 2022, and is represented by William Clark in association with Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown. The book also reveals much about the reality of what appears on your plate in a high-class, expensive restaurant; a waiter may glide to your table with a fancy looking plate of food, giving an impression of calm and serenity, but what’s gone on behind the scenes is enough to put you off eating out ever again. At another restaurant I went multiple times as the food was so good and one waiter was very friendly; I remember offering him a glass of Burgundy which he dutifully put on the bar for later and the manager promptly pounced on it and drank it off in a heartbeat. These colleagues include thieves, ex-Legionnaires, paperless immigrants, wannabe actors and drug dealers, and are the closest thing to family he’s got. I really wasn't expecting to be quite so gripped but the experiences that unfolded on the pages before me, drew me ever deeper.

in " The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly " Publishing This Week" newsletter.I feel like the author had so much to mine from and given the other food memoirs I've read this just didn't stack up. It's horrifying as you might expect in some ways (your food may or may not have been spilled on the floor and scooped up, wiped off, and put back grandly on your plate.