Holidays over, I wonder how many people have returned to the Emirates from visiting France with tales of surly or incompetent service in cafes and restaurants.
My colleagues at The National, Abu Dhabi have kindly agreed that I can reproduce my weekly expat column, East West, at Salut! just as I do My Word each Saturday. East West often covers the same sort of ground that is explored by Salut! Since my priority is to write for a living, subjects that would once have been addressed only here therefore find a platform in the newspaper. A certain resident of Toronto (the lesser, Canadian version, not the bustling metropolis on the outskirts of Bishop Auckland) will recognise himself somewhere in this piece about restaurant and cafe service ...
In my experience, you have to be unlucky to receive impolite or inattentive treatment when out for a meal or snack in the UAE. In Europe, the rudeness of the French, and especially waiters, is a staple of post-holiday conversation.
But does service really come with a scowl in France? Well, the idea that it does is practically set in stone and, like most national stereotypes, contains elements of truth as well as exaggeration and downright invention.
Once, after hearing about a proposed charm school for London restaurant staff, a newspaper asked me to write about supposedly the rudest of all: Parisian waiters.
My instinct was to mount a modest defence. Yes, they could be brusque and respond poorly to random cries of garçon! as they passed with trays full of drinks or food for other tables. But they knew their job and regarded themselves as professionals. Moreover, with spectacular exceptions, service generally seemed no worse in the capital than in la France profonde.
A British-turned-Canadian friend went further. “The average English waiter is clueless about true service,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be servile and it should never be arrogant but is usually one or the other. Give me a Parisian waiter any day.”
Overlooking his hyperbole, he did identify the key to understanding the French – and not just the Parisian – waiter with his reference to servility. Whether or not he is right about the English variety, it is true that you will look in vain for a servile manner in a French waiter, and that may be at the heart of what foreign customers sometimes find so annoying.
For all the pride French waiters take in their work, the role of servant is one they find impossible to accept. To demonstrate that he is subservient to no one, and that to be otherwise would run contrary to l’esprit républicain, he deploys touches of haughtiness and the odd failure to hear requests for the bill, more water or a clean fork.
He is not necessarily to blame when problems do occur. The French system makes it costly to employ people, and difficult to dispense with them even with good cause, so restaurant and cafe owners hire as few as they can get away with.
But before I get carried away, let me acknowledge that the French waiter is the master of the sort of rudeness that appears out of nowhere.
At what was previously my favourite seafront cafe, a relative ordered coffee. And waited and waited as others, arriving later, were served. She asked if the waiter intended to serve her, and he exploded. Of the many words he used, the one that mattered was dégagez. More innocent translations exist, but he meant none of them. Not to put too fine a point on things, he was inviting her to get lost.
* My chosen picture is purely illustrative; what is shown does not relate to anyone or any premises discussed in the column.
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