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Eating French
When foreigners complain of being intimidated by “the French” what they usually mean is French waiters. You hear words like “haughty”, “indifferent” and, most of all, “rude.” Dining out is one of the pleasures they came to France to enjoy. They’re bitter about “the French” because the waiters wrecked their fun.The trouble is that these tourists don’t speak French, greet French, flirt French and above all, eat French. An American reader wrote that he watched a group of cyclists, all his compatriots, ages 12 to 44, arriving for lunch in a small hotel on the Loire:
“They didn't want anything on the menu, above all no omelettes,” he wrote. “They complained loudly and in English that they wanted sandwiches, and they wanted them made of ingredients that, the waiter tried to explain, were already chopped up for the omelettes: tomatoes, cheese and ham. So the waiter tried to keep them happy while the cook ran desperately out to the village baker and the charcuterie to get baguettes and the ham and cheese and tomatoes for the sandwiches. But when the sandwiches were served, made in the baguettes, the cyclists complained that they were too big. They only wanted to take—and pay for—half of each.”
The cyclists of course had no idea of the drama of the cook scurrying around for the sandwich fillings they wanted. My reader was sad for the waiter. “Instead of pleasing his customers,” he wrote, “he had to take back half the sandwiches to the distressed cook. As for me, I had to hold on to my napkin for dear life, as a 12-y ear-old cyclist went around collecting them all.”
Tourists need to know that restaurants in France aren’t just places where food is cooked and served. Restaurants are poetry. They’re both the stuff of myth and legend and part of a Frenchman’s life. They’re there to enhance your life too. But like poetry, they take some effort on your part, if you’re going to savor the best they offer. Restaurants are not like a theatre, where it’s the actors who do the work while you sit there watching, except that, as in the theatre, everything is staged, with its own choreography. Nothing is left to chance.
What you have to learn is your part in what can only be described as a ballet. Your waiter is the star dancer. He knows his steps. He has learned them through years of rigourous discipline and application. Just how superbly he excels depends on the quality of your pas de deux.
Eating French means getting to a restaurant not earlier than 8:00 pm, preferably 8:30 (the kitchen staff are having their dinner before that). In Europe, the man enters the restaurant first, the idea being to protect the lady from the unknown inside the restaurant, and also, to take care of arrangements with the maître d’. A woman entering first is immediately recognized as American and therefore not likely to be someone terribly interesting gastronomically. So your pas de deux starts right here. Begin by appreciating your waiter’s reserve, which is only self protection in case you want to order your ice cream before your roast beef. Take your time looking at the menu. Bring a dictionary if necessary.
When you’re ready, discuss the possibilities with the waiter. He knows all about them and is only too happy to fill you in on the details, probably even in English. Since French waiters have been through those years and years of arduous training, the first thing is to show that you understand his professionalism and his deep knowledge of food and food combinations. If you can show some knowledge of your own, that would excite him.
One evening after Ande, my husband, and I had been hiking in Versailles, we stopped in at a rather chic restaurant looking dressed for the woods, not a promising appearance for a waiter. Ours, tall and immaculate in his dinner jacket, looked like an ambassador from central casting, heavy-lidded and aloof. I prepared for the Worm Treatment. This happened to me soon after I moved to Paris. I ordered a first course of fish and a second course of fish. The waiter, in a show of pride at working at his fine, if not famous, restaurant, gave me a long look of disgust. ”Madame, vous mangez mal!” (Madame, you eat badly) he said. Just three words for informing me that I ate incoherently, didn’t have the first idea of the fine art of blending tastes and how courses should be connected and savored, resulting in the true joy of the palate, which is what all the fuss is about.
This could have happened in Vienna, another city where food and waiters are taken very seriously. The story is still told of an incident at Meissl & Schadn, a celebrated restaurant serving only a staggering variety of cuts of boiled beef, and only boiled beef, to extravagantly demanding customers. One day, to the shame of Heinrich, the proprietor, himself a famous character of Vienna, the favorite cut of a high civil servant which was daily reserved for him, a Tafelspitz, was spoiled in the kitchen. Heinrich was obliged to have him served a slightly different cut but just as enticing and delicate, called Hieferschwanzl. Shocked and appalled, the high civil servant called for his hat and cane and said, indignantly, “You might as well have presented me with a veal cutlet!”
Our evening in Versailles turned out better than that. Ande had noticed a leg of lamb roasting on a spit as we passed by and asked the aloof waiter if he could have the souris. (knuckle-joint), considered the piece de resistance by many gourmets. The waiter was thrilled. You could see him straightening up. Our service was sublime.
Eating French means having at least two courses. All restaurants have a fixed-price menu as well as à la carte choices. Many now offer what they call a “formule” of two dishes: an entrée (the first course, not the main course) and a main course, or a main course and a dessert. Eating French means having wine, not Coca Cola or coffee, with lunch or dinner. Don’t be bashful about ordering water, too. If you simply must have a coke or some other soft drink, try to make a joke about it with the waiter. They love jokes. However, it may be hard to make him laugh if you insist on having your coffee with your main course instead of at the end of the meal.
Nelson Lees, a world-traveling executive, realized that ordering a Coke with his lunch on his arrival in France would not go down well. “I knew I was hanging myself if I ordered Coca Cola in this country of splendid vineyards,” he said, “I watched French people talking to waiters at the other tables, and they all seemed to laugh and have a great time. So I made a joke out of my Coca Cola habit. After a while, when waiters whom I had gotten to know saw me, they joked about it too. And if I was lunching with French executives, they’d say, ‘Here comes Nelson, bring out the coke!’”
Nelson’s skill at charming waiters made him many friends—and many sublime meals. This is his conclusion:
“Humor is the best ice-breaker with waiters,” he said. “It’s very effective, even if in broken French. If the attempt is made, it pays off. It is fundamental to be polite and engaging in France. People notice it. The waiters in France are not at all snooty. They’re used to American struggles to communicate and they recognize that the meal, which is so important to them, is, to us in the US, something to run through. They’re very happy when they see us trying to learn about food, and taking time to enjoy it and the conversation around it.”
Smart visitors to Paris keen on their food make a point of having at least one dinner in a hall of gastronomic fame before they leave. If their budget is tight, they forego lunch a few times. If they ask my advice, I ask them if they want the poetry of beauty as well as the poetry of taste and elegant service, and if they do, I send them to the Ritz. There are other palaces in Paris with opulent decor and a talented chef, but the Ritz is in a class by itself. The Espadon, its restaurant, is a song of lyrical, voluptuous, refined elegance as royal as Versailles with its crystal chandeliers and 25-foot high mirrors between three tall French windows draped in delicate folds of beige silk, trimmed in light blue, with tables comfortably set apart from each other. We were invited there recently by an executive of Big Oil. A violin and a harp played softly as we savored one enchanting smooth delectable taste after another, paired with a wine that enhanced it and helped it to linger in our memory.
It was nectar of the gods, served by a team of waiters with a grace and efficiency that was its ultimate blessing and as essential to the effect as the beauty and taste of the arrangement on the plate. Every wish of the diners was sensed without being expressed. The waiters were solicitous, attentive, warmly, quietly charming without being in any way obsequious or obtrusive.
Over coffee and liqueurs, the Big Oil executive, who had been too busy savoring each taste to talk much during the meal, leaned back in his chair, looked around the room, at the harpist and at the waiters, sighed, and smiled a blissful smile. “This is beauty,” he said. “This is poetry. Well, I guess this is what they mean by civilization.”
The wizard behind the magic is a charming Frenchman called Jean-Marie Marcadier, the Director of the Ritz. Before that he was Director of Food and Beverages for the whole hotel, one of the most difficult food jobs in France: the supervision of the Espadon, of le Club Ritz, the Bar Vendôme, the banquets, the Ritz cooking school, the 24-hour room service. The Ritz serves an average of 550 meals a day.
Marcadier started his career in Bordeaux at age 14 as a busboy. He climbed up the intricate levels of waiter proficiency first in the south of France, and then around the world in Australia and New York, learning also to be a sommelier as he went along.
“There is more respect for the profession of waiter in France than anywhere else in the world,” he said. “It makes the aspirants ambitious to improve, to know everything about food and about their profession. Any maître d’hôtel in France knows ten times more than a mâitre d’hôtel in the United States. He can tell you when the morels come out—those special French mushrooms we call morilles—when and where the truffles are best and if the Vacherin is good that month. He knows most of the wines of France and which food they best accompany. Our sommeliers can tell the vintage of a Burgundy or a Bordeaux by the color.”
When you’ve got the knack of speaking French, greeting French and eating French, plus flirting French and reining in your public smiles, you’ll find that Paris is one big intricate network of strangers looking out for each other, tenderly. Yesterday I dropped a roll of wrapping paper on the sidewalk without noticing. “Madame! Madame!” a woman called to me. “Votre papier cadeaux!” Ande, biking around Paris in a gale shortly after, lost his stalking hat twice to the wind. And twice, Parisians picked it up on the street and came after him, running fast.
Paris
is not only beautiful. For flexible foreigners making an effort for
people with a bone in their nose, Paris is also tender. And if you went
to the same café every day for a month, they’ll remember you when you
come back in five years. Enthusiastically.
Polly Platt is director of Culture Crossings, a crosscultural training consultancy, and the author of the bestsellers French or Foe?, just out in its third edition, and Savoir-Flair! 211 Tips for Enjoying France and the French.
