posted on 03 Sep 2023

A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City by Edward Chisholm

When I first saw Edward Chisholm’s A Waiter in Paris advertised I lazily assumed that it was a sort of Kitchen Confidential for generation Z. But in reality it isn’t. It doesn’t have the buccaneering swagger of Anthony Bourdain’s memoir and thankfully nor does it have the privileged dilettantism of Bill Buford’s Heat. The more accurate model – and the one Chisholm himself invokes – is George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

In 2012, recently graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies, burdened with debt and lacking immediate prospects, Edward Chisholm decided to move to Paris. He was seeking a new life, adventure, but what he found were the starvation wages and labour exploitation of Paris’s urban poor. He became a restaurant ‘runner’, a rung below that of ‘proper’ waiter. Exhausted and emaciated, he worked fourteen-hour shifts without meal breaks in the squalid ‘lower kitchens’ where all the dirtiest work is done, and he lived in freezing, thinly-partitioned hostel rooms surrounded by dealers, pimps, prostitutes and undocumented workers until finding a ‘maid’s room’ for rent in the attic of a once-grand house in the 19th arrondissement. 

Like his hero Orwell, he hoped that this experience might provide the foundations of a writer’s life – and the fact that this, his first book, has been published and that he now earns his living in Lausanne as a freelance journalist, copywriter and screenwriter suggests a degree of success. Knowing this helps soften some of the bleakest and most miserable episodes in this often beautifully observed and well-written memoir.

While it is true that Orwell’s polemic about the economic underworld of Paris and London has clearly served as the inspiration, Chisholm’s book is different in some important ways, I think. For one thing, at over 350-pages it is substantially longer than Orwell’s and it has more of the personal memoir about it and less of Orwell’s didactic purpose. Paradoxically, it is also a love letter to Paris and the subterranean world of its labouring poor, for on a good day – when he has eaten for the first time in twenty hours, for instance, has plenty of tobacco, is drinking beers and grappa in a warm café and has a wallet bulging with grubby notes received in tips – Chisholm can’t help but find a certain outsider romance in this. While Orwell may be the book’s presiding conscience, the shades of Jean Genet, Charles Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud and a host of other famished, hallucinating poètes maudits are rarely far away.

He writes well about Paris itself and its unquenchable romance but his observations of the restaurant business, especially its arcane hierarchies, are also pungently exact: ‘To advance and be strong here,’ he writes, ‘is to ensure that others are weak, not that you are better.’ 

With the exception of one co-worker, an Italian communist, there is little sense of collective endeavour and even less of shared solidarity. As a runner whose job is to serve the waiters he realises that he can only avoid starvation if he can extract from them a proportion of the tips they receive – and he cannot achieve this by charm or affection; he is L’Anglais, The Englishman who knows nothing about restaurants and almost no French and whom most of the waiters would willingly see sacked in order to protect their own positions. He can only convince other waiters to share their tips with him by ensuring that without his help they fail.

And yet the waiters’ world is one he is drawn to: ‘…there is something ancient about it: waiting in Paris, with all the rituals – it intrigues me. And I am gradually being let in, becoming one of them, part of the brotherhood.’

Anyone looking for a ‘straighter’ sociological account of the low-wage economy – along the lines of, say, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001) or more recent analyses of the gig economy – may consider this book a touch too self-conscious, too literary, but personally I found this added to the enjoyment. Chisholm has written a twenty-first century updating of Orwell’s Down and Out while at the same time finding it impossible not to see some glamour in being part of a long and illustrious tradition of impoverished literary outsiders. And it is genuinely shocking – even Chisholm himself was shocked, I think – to find that no matter how different the world may now look, work at the bottom of the food-chain (figuratively and literally) has changed hardly at all in the ninety-odd years since Orwell was writing. 

What I would say, however, is that I did eventually find the book at least fifty and more like seventy pages too long. I enjoyed what I read of it very much indeed but found myself skimming the final chunk rather than reading it properly. At about 270-pages or so it would have been perfect. Others may well feel differently, of course.

Alun Severn

September 2023