Whatever happened to the little fellow

A meal at Le Petit Pamphlet in the 3rd recently, just after reading The Perfectionist by Rudolph Chelminski (London, Penguin, 2005) about the late great chef Bernard Loiseau, whose rise to stardom was wonderfully related in Burgundy Stars by William Echikson, (Boston, Little Brown, 1995) brought to mind one of the striking contrasts between restaurants a few years ago and today. At Le Petit Pamphlet, as with 99% of Paris places, except the most luxe of them, the wait-staff is nice, pleasant, efficient and good but they’re not in it for life.  At La Cote d’Or aka BL in Saulieu, they were and are.  Loiseau, apprenticed as a teenager at the Troigros’, could have as easily entered the career path for service personnel.  I remember on our first trips to France when we had enough money to go to other than one fork and knife places, that we were always amazed by presence of the “little fellow.”  He was 12, 13, 14, whatever, and already was poised without being pretentious, self-assured without usurping others’ roles and always watching – eager to learn.  He was the person who worked on unoccupied tables, later delivered bread and butter, and a bit older, water, and finally, could in a pinch be called upon to pull a serving table out to help a waiter or replace a dropped utensil.   You saw him everywhere, even in Mom and Pop bistrots in the country where he was expected to learn the trade and take over when he reached the right age.  No place was too snooty, not Pere Bise nor Giradet, to have their little fellow. You’d come back 3 years later and there would be a new “little fellow” and somehow the person you recalled was 6 feet tall, now elegant, and fully trained.  Sometimes, if you were lucky, you could almost see the generations grow up.  It was a career, as Tante Georgette in French in Action said – “Il n’y a pas de sot métier.”  But I sense that’s changing, and while we don’t yet have “Hi, my name is Bruce, I’m an out of work actor, and I’ll be your waiter tonight,” we’re close.  Why? All sorts of reasons.  Not so much Child Labor Laws as Child Labor practices; the end of the apprenticeship model; tighter profit margins; a changing labor market; and most sadly, the diminution of the importance of service as a profession, paradoxically at the very time when it is the service sector that is most in demand worldwide.  Can you imagine the sort of people who were proud to have careers “in service” in “Upstairs Downstairs” posts applying today; no, now we’re lucky if we get out of work actors, émigrés from Eastern Europe and in one case a dragooned femme de ménage from the apartment above the bistro.  You can tell they’re not “professional” because they always ask you how the food is, when your mouth is full. It’s sad, it’s the end of an era, a tradition, but the “little fellow” is a thing of the past.  Cherish his memory. ©2006 John A. Talbott