THEY ALSO SERVE...

TIPS ON TIPPING AND THE FRENCH.

The Minipalais restaurant terrace in the Grand Palais.

One of the most disturbing restaurant scenes in any film shows two waiters, during a busy lunch hour, pausing for an instant as their paths intersect.

With a grin, one murmurs to his colleague “He ate it!”

I think it’s in Walter Ruttman’s 1927 documentary, Berlin, Symphony of a Mighty City,  but in a sense it doesn’t matter, since such an exchange might occur in any place and at any time where people gather to eat and others are paid to serve them.

“We’ve all read the horror stories,” a culinary expert told the press this week.“If someone feels they’ve been wronged by others, they’re likely motivated to spitefully reciprocate in kind.” He was commenting on a report that New York’s Balthazar restaurant had barred actor James Corden, rated by the owner as “the most abusive customer to my servers since the restaurant opened 25 years ago.”

Whether the Balthazar’s staff exacted revenge in the customary manner isn’t clear. It may have depended on whether Cordon, despite his rudeness – or because of it? – was generous in his financial appreciation of their efforts.

In  Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, Greta Garbo as a Communist commissar questions why a porter should carry her bags.

“That’s my business, madame,” he says.

“That’s no business,” she replies. “That’s social injustice.”

“That depends,” he responds philosophically, “on the tip.”

Much does indeed depend on the tip. Wait staff will put up with a great deal if the tips are good. Some accept that being bullied and abused “comes with the territory.”A few clients approach a meal in the same spirit, as if terrorising the servers contributed to their enjoyment, and should be recompensed accordingly.

“What should we do about tipping?” is the most common question asked by visitors to France.  15% is automatically added to the bill for service - but should they tip over and above that? The answer, as to most questions in France, is “it depends.”

If badgering the staff is integral to your appreciation of a meal, a generous tip can be seen as insurance against “spiteful reciprocations”. AIDS campaigner Randy Shilts has described how, at a $1000-a-plate fund-raiser in Palm Springs, a diner asked during the Q&A session if HIV could be transmitted by other than sexual contact – through a restaurant meal, for example.

Remotely possible, Shilts replied. Maybe if there was such a sufferer… and if he or she had an open cut…

“But what,” persisted the questioner, “if they masturbated in the salad?”

Aghast, the eyes of every diner lifted from their plate of greens, gleaming with vinaigrette, to the impassive waiters lined along the walls. Ill-paid, exploited, resigned to the contempt of their customers, they stared back. Hovering between them was their shared apprehension of a Horrible Possibility. The tips after that meal were almost certainly princely.

It’s more common, however, at least in France, for people to leave large tips not from fear but out of ostentation. In Diane Johnson’s novel Le Divorce, Isabel, its young American protagonist, takes her family to an expensive Paris restaurant where she has eaten with her lover, the wealthy and worldly Edgar. When the bill arrives, she urges her brother to add a tip.

“The tip is included,” Roger said.

“You leave something anyhow,” I said.

“No, that’s the whole point of having the tip included. I think it’s a very rational system.” 

Isabel tries to explain that a certain carelessness with money is expected in such places, and, defying her family, leaves thirty francs on the plate.

“Roger’s jaw clenched, and Chester looked embarrassed. I knew Edgar would leave about a hundred francs in these circumstances, but who would listen to me?"

The third reason for largesse is to recognise the exceptional.

Before the Grand Palais disappeared under a forest of scaffolding in preparation for its re-emergence as an Olympic venue, I sometimes lunched at Eric Fréchon’s Minipalais restaurant, among the columns of its majestic colonnade. Triple Michelin-starred Fréchon is noted for the novelty of his creations.  He’s installed these days at the Hotel Bristol, where he offers as his signature dish a whole chicken cooked in a pig’s bladder- not something found on the menu of your average neighbourhood bistro.

One Minipalais lunch sticks in my mind. Twenty minutes after we ordered, a young waiter arrived and, with some ceremony, placed in front of me a large dish, in the middle of which was a small heap of vegetal mush - green peas, I discovered, mashed with mint - supporting two tissue-thin slices of asparagus.

            “I wanted the asparagus soup,” I said.

            “This will be the asparagus soup, m’sieur,” he said, departing.

He returned with an aluminium Co2 bottle, from which he squirted a ring of white froth around the outer edge of the plate.

“But the soup…?”

“Un instant, m’sieur,” he said, disappearing again. I sneaked a taste of the foam. Asparagus mousse.

On his next trip he carried a small jug from which he poured a milky white fluid, the first thing I’d seen that actually resembled soup. I reached for my spoon.

“Non non, m’sieur” he said reprovingly.

A moment later, he was back with a tiny dish and a pair of tongs, with which he placed something on top of the central heap.

“Voila, m’sieur, “ he said briskly. “Votre Soupe d’asperge Blanche, Mousseline de Petit Pois à la Menthe Fraiche. Bon appetit.”

Dipping my spoon into the soup, I belatedly noticed the finishing touch he placed on top of the mushy peas.

It was a tiny pansy.

Now that was worth a tip!