PRESSION (‘PRESSYO’)
Draught beer. If you manage to get the demi business right, the waiter might still try to trick you by rattling off the names of different beers at Thierry Henry speed. Get it wrong and you’ll end up with an expensive bottle. If you say ‘un demi pression’ you can look over at the beer taps and read or point. At worst you’ll end up with the slightly more expensive of the two or three brands on sale. A couple of tips – a seize is a relatively cheap ‘1664’, and Heineken is pronounced ‘eh-neck-EN’.
QUART (‘KAR’)
You can almost always get a pichet (‘pee-shay’) of wine instead of a (more expensive) bottle or half-bottle. On the menus the pichets will often be marked as ‘25cl’ and ‘50cl’, or a quarter-litre/half-litre. You can sound really experienced in restaurant-survival techniques if you ask for ‘un quart de rouge’ or ‘un pichet de cinquante de rouge’. Remember that a bottle (75 centilitres) is six glasses, so a quart is two, and 50cl is four.
CARAFE (‘KARAF’)
Only the snootiest of restaurants will refuse to serve you tap water. But you’ve got to ask for ‘une carafe d’eau’, a small jug of water. Failure to specify this will result in you receiving a bottle of Evian, San Pellegrino or Badoit, which is not unpleasant, just more expensive. If you want to be really clever, when a waiter or waitress offers you branded water, just say no thanks and ask for ‘Château Chirac’, meaning a carafe of normal French tap water. The risk here is that the waiter will think you’re too clever for your own good and might plan some form of comeuppance like ‘forgetting’ to bring you bread.
MARCEL MARCEAU (‘ ’)
The French have long forgotten who Marcel Marceau is, but his legacy lives on. So when you want to pay, there’s no need to call the waiter or waitress over to your table and explain this. You simply catch his or her eye and mime writing something on a notebook, while mouthing ‘l’addition’ (the bill, pronounced ‘addi-sio’). This means, I want to pay. Or you can just hold up your credit card with a willing look on your face. This will bring the waiter over with a little credit-card machine. Surely this is the biggest advantage of the chip and pin system – no more chasing waiters when they disappear into a back room to email your credit-card details to a crime syndicate. In France, they’ll usually come over and let you type in your pin number. And they’ll even look away while you do it.
32 At the end of this chapter, you’ll find a few essential French words and phrases for the linguistically challenged who would like to get served. Use those and you’re in with a fighting chance.
‘Hands above the waist, s’il vous plaît, Marcel.’ Jean-Philippe (right)
gives etiquette lessons to new residents of Paris’s arty Latin Quarter.
THE
10TH
COMMANDMENT
Tu Seras Poli
THOU SHALT BE POLITE
(and simultaneously rude)
THOU SHALT BE POLITE
(and simultaneously rude)
THE FRENCH ARE GENIUSES AT BEING POLITE WHILE SIMUL-taneously insulting you. You’ve never been put down until you’ve been put down by a Frenchman. And they do it with such aplomb. They can wish you a good day, call you an idiot and send you sprawling into the verbal gutter before you can even open your mouth to reply.
I was once queuing at a famous French restaurant that doesn’t take reservations because it doesn’t need to. A chic-looking American expat, with a smug ‘yes I live here’ look on his face, sidled to the front of the line and quietly informed the maître d’ that he’d reserved a table for two.
‘Reserved a table, Monsieur?’ the maître d’ replied for the whole queue to hear. ‘We don’t take reservations. Is Monsieur sure he didn’t call the McDonald’s on the corner by mistake?’
He got a big laugh, and presumably lost a customer for life, but couldn’t resist the temptation to get in an insult that put the pretentious interloper firmly in his place. The French may claim to live in a classless republic, but they are very keen on keeping everyone in their place. And politeness, combined with extreme rudeness, is often the best way to do it.
Before they insult you, though, you will see nothing but impeccable manners. At a time when English-speakers all introduce each other by their first names, the French still call one another Monsieur or Madame. One way to attract the attention of a waiter or an evasive sales assistant is to call out ‘Monsieur!’ Yes, the customer is having to say ‘sir’ to get served. The world can be turned on its head once the French start using their politeness on you.
A Bad Début
One Saturday morning, at a slightly snooty cheese shop near my home in Paris, I saw a woman get sadistically put in her place by a man in a white overall.
I was being attended to by the female half of the husband-and-wife crémerie team, and was ogling some small decorative goat’s cheeses – a selection of round pats of fresh white cheese sprinkled with black pepper,
