THE FRENCH WILL tell you that ‘le client est roi’. The customer is king. But we all know what they did to their kings. Louis XVI’s guillotined head ended up bouncing across the Place de la Concorde, with several thousand French people laughing at it.
And Louis’s wife, Marie-Antoinette, is still a hate figure in France today because when the starving mob protested that they didn’t have enough bread to eat, she said that they should eat brioche, a sort of sweet milk bread. Yes, she was executed for recommending an upgrade.
Basically, ‘le client est roi’ is as empty a phrase as My Tea Is Rich. And my main worry about the tea room’s long-term prospects was that the staff had started living by the real mantra of French service industries – that is, ‘the customer is a waste of time’.
This attitude has given rise to some classic techniques in bad French customer service. Benoît was a natural at the most common of them – ignoring the customer totally. If he was polishing the tea urn or refilling salad bowls when a client came in, he would steadfastly deny their existence unless they leaned across the counter and grabbed him by the ears.
If they were less violent than this, and just said ‘excuse me’, he would inform them politely that he was very busy and would see to them as soon as he’d finished the vital task he was doing.
I had to explain to him that there was no point refilling salad bowls if he scared away all the prospective salad buyers, and it was only after I’d given several demonstrations of how to stop doing a routine task and say hello to a client that he actually admitted I might have a point.
Even after my lesson, Benoît and all the other counter staff could not help lapsing into another habit that they seemed to have got from the Three Musketeers – ‘All for one and one for all.’
Let’s say that a customer returned to the counter after paying and told Yannick or Jeanne that they hadn’t got exactly what they ordered – they’d been given a cheese-and-tomato toastie when what they’d actually asked for was a cheese-and-armadillo toastie.
Suddenly everyone else behind the counter would stop what they were doing and join in a general debate about how this could have happened, and whether ‘tomato’ and ‘armadillo’ were differentiated clearly enough on the menu, before going on to reminisce about the lunchtime when someone had ordered a jacket potato with baked beans and got a jacket potato with baked spleens.
Meanwhile, the other people in the queue could damn well wait.
All my eager workers – even the friendly Katy – looked forward with particular relish to a daily routine of customer abuse just before lunchtime. At eleven fifty-five on the dot, they took it in turns to savour the pleasure of booting any remaining drink- and snack-only clients off their tables. Buy lunch or get out, they’d tell them, whisking away half-full teapots and practically stuffing uneaten biscuits down the customers’ throats.
I had to talk them through it again. No, I said, the message is, ‘Are you thinking of staying for lunch? If so, our special today is an armadillo – that’s armadillo, not tomato – tikka kebab.’ And then see if they take the hint. We only eject them – apologetically – when we physically need the table because someone is standing there looking lost with their lunch tray and nowhere to sit.
If the ejected customer whinges about how in a real French café you can stay as long as you want over a cup of coffee, the staff should smile, I said, and ask the client if they’d ever dared to order a drink in a French café while sitting at a table laid for lunch. I’d tried insisting on my customer’s rights like this once and been told to fuck off to McDonald’s.
We want our clients to return, you see, I told my staff. It sounds obvious, but it’s a message that hasn’t got through to the whole French service sector.
However, sometimes it wasn’t the staff’s fault. Occasionally I had to admit that le client was a bit of a dickhead.
The tourist was about thirty, and was kitted out with everything the English-speaking visitor in Paris needs for a long weekend in hostile foreign territory. A hurricane-proof anorak, a guidebook with a finger inserted at the chapter dealing with this neighbourhood, and a permanently suspicious expression. He also wore a gigantic moneybelt-cum-parachute with a pouch for a little water bottle that had a long plastic tube protruding out of it, so that he could stuff it in his mouth and suck rather than having to stop behind enemy lines and actually pull out the water bottle, which might leave him open to ambush. The tube was flapping about in front of his chest like the aerial on a satellite location system. Which may well have been its second function.
It was about eleven thirty on a Friday morning. He walked into the tea room, looked warily about, and edged towards Benoît, who was standing there daydreaming with his cheek pressed to the warm tea urn.
Benoît had fallen in love with the tea urn and adored fiddling with its tap, or just polishing its rotund stainless-steel body. I had nothing against this unnatural infatuation. On the contrary – I was pleased that he was showing enthusiasm for something. He’d always seemed such a total drip.
‘Quelles sont les options végétariennes?’ the tourist asked. He had a strong English accent but his pronunciation was very clear. This was obviously one of the life-saving phrases that he’d practised before crossing the Channel, along with ‘appelez l’anibassadeur’ and ‘où est mon anorak?’
Benoît stopped foreplaying the tea urn and gave his attention to this new intellectual challenge. He’d never been asked about vegetarian options before. Being French, he hadn’t even imagined that things like that might exist. But he coped well. He pointed up to the menu on the wall and told the guy in slow, clear French that there was lots of veggie stuff there – cheese toasties, salads, baked potatoes – he just had to take his pick.
The tourist gave this a moment’s consideration.
‘Mais pourquoi vous ne marquez pas les options végétariennes avec un signe végétarien?’ he asked.
‘Signe végétarien?’
‘Oui.’ The guy mimed writing a V on the menu.
‘Ah.’ Benoît leaned forward and confided to the guy that we wouldn’t dare mark anything veggie because that would scare off the French customers. He caught my eye and winked. He was learning fast.
The tourist wasn’t convinced.
‘Est-ce que vos pommes de terre sont végétariennes?’ he asked.
No, I thought, the potatoes are carnivorous. You try sticking your fork in one of them and it’ll have your arm off.
Of course I knew what he meant. Were the fillings veggie? But then a dish of baked beans is a dish of baked beans. He must have known that they weren’t frog’s kidneys in a horse-blood sauce.
Initially, Benoît was stumped. His logical French brain had crashed when confronted by someone asking whether a vegetable was vegetarian. Fortunately, though, French schoolkids study philosophy until the age of eighteen, so he was able to perform a spectacular leap of lateral thinking.
‘Why don’t you just have a cheese-and-tomato toastie?’ he suggested.
‘Est-ce que le fromage est végétarien?’ the veggie asked.
This time, Benoît almost fainted with mental exhaustion.
I knew why. Vegetarian cheese? The French could not get their heads round this concept if you offered them a swimming pool full of champagne every day for the rest of their lives.
I came over to catch Benoît in case he actually passed out.
‘No, it’s French cheese,’ I said, in English. ‘You never know whether the rennet is animal or vegetable. But if you’ve eaten one mouthful of cheese over here in France, then this is exactly the same.’
‘Hmm.’ The tourist stood there mulling this over. The only sign of life he gave was a slight twitching of his water-bottle tube.
It was lucky, I thought, that it was early and we didn’t have a queue of people to serve. Half an hour later and every member of my staff would be gathered around him doing their ‘all for one’ problem-solving thing.
It was at that moment that I understood French waiters.
They’re in a rush to serve twenty tables at once and they get confronted with a guy like this asking about vegetarian options. A French waiter in a hurry would quite naturally think, vegetarian option number one: ram his head down the toilet.
Because apart from the time-wasting element, there’s also a kind of impoliteness going on here. A chef spends years at catering school, months planning a menu, hours buying ingredients and cooking them, and then a family of tourists orders three plain omelettes and a plate of spaghetti. With ketchup. It’s as if Michelangelo had sketched out the Sistine Chapel and then the Pope wanders in and says, ‘You know, I think I’d prefer a plain coat of eggshell all over.’
‘Look, you speak really good French,’ I told the guy, ‘but there’s no point speaking the language if you use it to say things they’ll never understand. They honestly don’t care about vegetarianism. They think that anyone who doesn’t orgasm over undercooked beef is a total philistine. To them a vegetarian coming to France is like someone who takes a vow of chastity and then goes to live in a harem. They think vegetarians are nuts. No pun intended, of course.’
I knew that I’d fallen into the trap of treating a customer like a dickhead, but I really thought the guy needed to understand the country he was visiting, otherwise he was in danger of starving to death as soon as the emergency rations in his utility belt ran out.
‘But you should mark the vegetarian options on your menu,’ he replied.
‘I can’t. It’s against French law,’ I told him, falling back on stereotype.
‘Are you sure?’
‘No, you’re right, I’m not sure. I’ll call the police and ask them if you want.’
To my surprise, the guy didn’t stomp out in a huff, he simply grunted, turned to Benoît and ordered.
‘Un toastie avec fromage, s’il vous plaît.’
‘Comment?’ Benoît hadn’t quite emerged from his coma yet.
‘Un toastie avec fromage, s’il vous plaît.’
Oh come on, I thought, be French. Moan about my rudeness, yell at me until you win the argument, don’t just give in.
Who was it called the French ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’? We Brits are the mild-mannered, mild-flavoured, vegetarian-cheese-eating surrender Corgis.
‘Oui, Monsieur.’ Benoît flipped open the toaster and slotted in a sandwich.
‘Est-ce que vos jus de fruits sont organic?’ the tourist asked, and I felt a sudden craving to go and squeeze some oranges.
But I was the one who’d learned a lesson.
French waiters are professionals, I realized, and too many of their customers are so damn amateurish.
For a professional waiter, dealing with amateur customers is like a tennis pro who never gets the ball knocked back to him. Of course he could content himself with serving ace after ace, but where’s the fun in that? Good waiters enjoy the game, they like an opponent with style.
They send over a brisk request to order, the customer returns with a crisply hit choice from the menu, the waiter meets it at the net and crashes in a volley about wine, which the client can only lob back in the form of a plea for advice. The waiter smashes home the vin du mois and the point is won. There are similarly tight exchanges about dessert and coffee and everyone gets a good workout.
But what if the customer doesn’t even understand the whole concept of the serve? What is this round, bouncy thing that is being hit towards me, the tennis virgin wonders, and what should I do with it? It’s no wonder that waiters occasionally get frustrated and overcharge amateurs for wasting their time.
Hang on a minute, I thought, what’s going on here? Someone get me a mirror. I think I’m mutating into a French waiter.