Going to a Restaurant in France

Going to a restaurant in France is always exciting because you never know if you’re going to grow old and die of natural causes before getting the bill.

In America, waiters are financially dependent on tips, a custom that is both cruel and extremely effective (Take too long with those buffalo wings, and good luck feeding your family tonight…)

But in France, the waiters actually make a living wage, which strips the customer- who in America is King- of any leverage.

It’s complete anarchy.

In one restaurant I went to in Paris, I ordered an appetizer, or as they call it ‘entree’ because they are wrong, and the waiter- a gay and/or just French man named Marcel- said it would be out momentarily.

Right as I was about to call the police to file a missing person’s report an hour and a half later, Marcel returned with my entree.

“It came out quicker than expected Monsieur,” he said, placing down my plate of steak tartare. “Not many other customers today.”

Now I was terrified: if the steak tartare took an hour and a half, how long would it take if I ordered a meal that involved even more preparation than putting raw ground meat on to a plate.

I decided to go with the fish soup, thinking that this meant simply pouring it out of a huge pot in the kitchen.

I waited so long for the soup I was convinced Marcel had rushed down to the Seine with a fishing pole, while someone else used a kiln to forge a clay bowl.

I had been at the restaurant for three hours. The only possible way you would be at a restaurant in America for three hours is if someone took the place hostage.

Now I desperately needed the bill, but Marcel was busy taking a quick nap on a sofa next to the coat room.

He soon woke up and began floating around the restaurant, trying to bum a cigarette off one of the customers. I tried to make eye contact with him, which he either didn’t or pretended not to see. And then, finally, having no choice, I committed the height of rudeness: I motioned him over.

In France, rape would be a more diplomatic approach than flagging down a waiter.

He came over and brusquely asked what I needed.

I looked around. No one else in the restaurant seemed to mind the phlegmatic pace of the waiters. A big reason for this, I realized, was drunkenness. In France, people will have a glass of wine with a mint their chewing, so everyone is too inebriated to be on any kind of schedule.

They also take their time enjoying the food and the wine, which gets to the root of the problem: People in France actually enjoy life, and this kind of appreciation slows things down terribly.

At the end of the day Americans always need to be on a tight, semi-overwhelming schedule to keep from realizing they’re unhappy, and France’s leisurely pace just can’t keep up with this hyper-kinetic, mass delusion.

I finally left the restaurant at 2 in the morning. I hadn’t been out this late since my days of doing coke. I watched the light from the lamp posts sashay lazily on the slow-moving Seine.

Tomorrow for dinner I would go to MacDonald’s. It would probably only take an hour there to get my meal.