Service Included. The Tribulations of a Cashier
Original title: L’addition, s’il vous plaît ! Les tribulations d’un garçon de café
Service Included. The Tribulations of a Cashier
Original title: L’addition, s’il vous plaît ! Les tribulations d’un garçon de café
Synopsis
The café: the last popular theater where the comedies of work are played out every day
“Is it possible to order?”
“Of course, what would you like?”
“Hmmmm, I’m not really sure…”
Table 40
Welcome behind the scenes of the noisiest theater in France: the restaurant industry!
Raphaël Tillet spent ten years there and experienced it all: Parisian brasseries, neighborhood cafés, tourist restaurants, and North-American kitchens. He encountered tyrannical and brilliant chefs, showy waiters, exhausted temporary staff, bosses at their wits’ end, and unbearable customers. From this experience, he crafts a story that is at once funny, insightful, and political, offering an insider’s view of a mythical and much-maligned profession. From his first day as a “runner”—carrying plates and bread baskets—to his time in makeshift establishments where undocumented immigrants keep the place running, Service Included tells the story of a working France, invisible, worn down, but resilient.
With a lively, humorous style, Raphaël Tillet shows how the lines between passion and exploitation, camaraderie and domination, the art of living and economic survival are constantly blurring.
Service Included is at once a coming-of-age story, a social chronicle, a human comedy, and a cry of love for a profession that is both magnificent and ruthless.
Marketing Information
- English sample available
- A rare and authentic voice: a writer with firsthand experience, who writes with the verve of a storyteller and the eye of a journalist
- A universal French figure: the waitor—a blend of street smarts, elegance, and resourcefulness—becomes the mirror of a vibrant, working-class France
- A lively, funny, and accessible text: rhythmic, engaging, full of delightful anecdotes and punchy phrases. The reader is “in the thick of it,” right in the heart of the noise, the heat, the fatigue, and the laughter
- Mirror title: The Tribulations of a Cashier