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

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Babygirl' is the new type of man that everyone loves - from Barry Keoghan to Jacob Elordi (although nobody can quite agree what it means!

There is such a strength and depth to the characters that he portrays, that this would be worthy of a TV series or film. 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. A whole sector of the service industry that goes completely unnoticed in our day-to-day, but Edward Chisholm rips out the carpet and exposes the dark underbelly of the waitering/restaurant business.There within the food and dining-related episodes, are the flesh-and-blood characters of the food service industry – complete with their humanity and inhumanity. If food and crockery topple over out of sight, with a sound ‘like a cliff collapsing into the sea’, the waiters quickly scoop up the duck breasts and haricots from the floor, plonk them on fresh plates, ‘and the table is none the wiser’.

The unsung heroes with chunky black wallets and disdainful looks keep our appetite for life going every time we get that 'let's go out to eat and drink and be merry! 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. himself takes a room in a hotel in an insalubrious part of Paris, and this too shows the gritty reality behind the glimmer and sparkle the City of Light likes to portray.

Paris and its pleasures always leave one wondering about the seamier side beneath the surface, and here it is. I saw another reviewer complaining that the author failed to paint a portrait of paris outside of the restaurant.

Edward Chisholm’s memoir of his time as a waiter in Paris goes below the surface of the city and right into its glorious underbelly. Edward's story took me back forty years to when I was a young Australian working in English hotels and on French farms during what was then a rite of passage for many young Australians -- the European working holiday. But it doesn't matter because you're in Paris, the center of the universe, and there's nowhere else you'd rather be in the world.Edward Chisholm's spellbinding memoir of his time as a Parisian waiter takes you below the surface of one of the most iconic cities in the world and right into its glorious underbelly. In fact, many move from restaurant to restaurant, looking for a better position, for promotion to head waiter, or just for slightly improved money or conditions. A young Englishman's journey into the merciless world of Parisian restaurants is propulsive, harrowing, and expertly observed. Chisholm has a great knack for capturing the essence of the individuals who make up this story and are the fabric of Paris - with each stratum represented, worts and all.

He eventually gets a job as a runner at an upmarket restaurant and this is when the true underbelly of Paris is revealed. What I found in A Waiter in Paris was not only these people’s differences defined, but their similarities reconciled into a microcosm. Edward joined the Earful Tower in the grand Belle Époque brasserie Bofinger to discuss the book, waiting in Paris, and the myths about working in French restaurants.

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. I'd advise readers to enjoy it somewhere warm and comfortable, and on no account to try it before a gastronomic weekend. We are introduced to a fascinating cast of characters, from the cooks in the deepest kitchens to the hostesses who grace the restaurant floor, and the portraits he paints of his fellow waiters are so vivid that by the end of the book you really don’t want to say goodbye to them. It is absolutely authentic in tone, its short chapters are ideally structured for the general reader, and the author's use of language is a joy. Inspired by George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, A Waiter in Paris is a brilliant portrait of the underbelly of contemporary Paris through the eyes of a young waiter scraping out a living in the City of Light.