I was expecting something between Orwell and Bordain with this memoir. That’s a hell of a lot to live up to! I was not disappointed.
It’s basically the story of a young guy who finishes university in London with no idea about what to do next, so he moves to Paris with his then girlfriend. Supported by her in the first place, he aspires to become a writer. But quickly their relationship breaks up when she announces she’s moving back to Britain.
He, however, decides to stay in Paris, and becomes set on a temporary job in a restaurant. He gets a position as a runner in a high-end French restaurant, and that’s where the story starts.
He charts his desire to graduate from runner to waiter to sommelier; to be accepted as part of the team; the long hours he and his fellow restaurants workers spend on their feet; the strict hierarchy between bosses, waiters, runners, cooks, kitchen porters; the racism woven through the whole restaurant system; the abuse each of them suffers all day, every day from terrible bosses; the petty theft, drugs, alcoholism, pilfering; the hours spent outside the restaurant drinking before returning exhausted and hungover for the next long day of service; the loyalty and disloyalty of the workers, all desperate for tips and work, showing solidarity with one another but forced to compete all the same; and so much more.
In the process he introduces us to his fellow workers – many of them immigrants to France from all corners of the world just trying to get by on their looks, charm, wits and capacity for hard work.
The writing-style makes this book. It’s gripping. You care about the people, their lives. It’s written with an urgency that’s infectious. It’s hard not to sympathise with everyone running around the restaurant, living on cheap coffee, stolen moments with a cigarette, snatched sleep. Chisholm may have been a good waiter; he’s a wonderful writer.
Up to around two thirds of the way into the book, Chisholm appears to be romanticising what for many is a pretty exhausting and ultimately unfulfilling life, running around between well-off guests and unhinged managers. He often seems unaware that though he might have felt it at the time, he wasn’t one of them. He was choosing to work as a waiter in a way that the Sri Lankan line chefs and North African waiters just weren’t and aren’t. At times it felt quite unreflective, quite unaware.
But then, towards the end of the book, as he leaves his waiter job, he does become aware, recognising that his experience is ultimately different to that of his fellow waiters, no matter how much he wanted to – and did in fact feel – a sense of fraternity with them. He writes the book, he says, in order to tell their story.
And what a book it is. It’s political, like Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. And it’s intoxicatingly spirited and funny like Bordain’s Kitchen Confidential. It tells truths about the hospitality industry. But more than that, it charts the working conditions of so many people who are forced to do hard and often demeaning jobs, and to vie with one another, because their livelihood is dependent on the whims of care-free diners and frustrated middle managers. In this way it tells the truth about work today.
Giles book reviews 