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Offered and accepted. Chef de Cuisine in a small restaurant in the Place aux Herbes, right in the middle of the medieval town of Uzes.

Getting there has been quite a journey, I have to say. I’ve been to something in the order of a couple of dozen interviews and have applied for getting on for 200 jobs since finishing at l’Auberge de la Treille last November. I turned down two jobs and still have two outstanding offers held in reserve Just In Case.

Frankly, many of the chefs and restaurant owners I met could do with taking a course or two in people management and interview techniques. One called me for interview at 8 in the morning – when I arrived two other candidates were already there and five more arrived before 8.30. He saw us in alphabetical order, not the order of arrival, so saw me at 1130, three and a half hours after I’d arrived. What a shit. Another did the same, albeit only summoning four of us for 1530. At least this one saw us in order of arrival, but WTF? Do these people really care so little about their future employees that they’re prepared to treat them like this?

Part of the problem, of course, is that in the current economic climate there are a LOT of unemployed cooks chasing fewer jobs than before, so Chefs and owners are getting cocky. I’m sure many don’t even give a second thought to the poor schmucks who are turning up like this on their doorsteps and simply treat us like dirt because, well, that works. I would refuse point blank to work for anyone who did this to me.

Equally I’d also refuse to work for any of those who called me for interview but who hadn’t actually read my CV before I turned up. So when they say things like, “Oh, you’re 48?” I understand that that means “I want a young commis I can boss around not a grown up who’ll answer back, ask ‘Why’ and have ideas that are better than mine and show me up”. Or who say, after speaking with me for 10 minutes, “Are you Belgian/German/Dutch?” Duh. Up there, top-right hand corner of my CV, the one in your hand, the one I e-mailed/posted to you last week, it says ‘Nationalité anglaise’.

And when they say, “Ah but I’m looking for someone who’s got experience of expediting 400 steak, chips and deep-fried frozen muck a day, not someone whose experience is doing 100 gastronomic meals a day,” what am I supposed to say? Your ad said ‘Seeking Second de cuisine for traditional restaurant’, how am I supposed to guess what you might want from that? Didn’t your preliminary scan through my CV clue you in a little? No? Ah, not had the time to read it? Fine, thanks for getting me to drive 150 kms for a five minute Conversation With An Idiot.

And don’t get me started about salaries. OK too late. There’s a new law in France which says that if you employ someone off the dole, you don’t have to pay their social charges for the first three months of employement saving employers about €100 a month. Fine. But only if you pay them minimum wage, €8.71 an hour. And in restaurants you get paid for 39 hours a week and the other hours you work are either ignored, or you get to take days off in lieu, or they’re paid (officially or unofficially). Just about everyone I met wants to pay minimum wage and then ‘We’ll make sure you’re OK with some cash out of the till, a few hundred euros a month/week in a good season’. Right. You wanna put that in writing? Thought not. But even if I could believe them, and frankly no one lies like a restaurant owner promising jam tomorrow, and they did give me a few hundred euros in cash every month, the problem comes at the end of the season when I have to sign back on the dole – then you only get something in the order of 70% of your previously declared salary. So 70% of minimum wage, i.e. about €800 a month. Good luck living on that with a wife and children.Because, Oh yes, no one is offering permanent contracts just six-month temporary ones “But we may be able to offer a permanent contract later on if we have a good season”. Well, I can certainly pay my rent with an offer like that, then!

Do Chefs and owners care about this? “Next please!” they cry as their eyes glaze over, you already forgotten.

I do have a lot of sympathy with owners at the moment, the French restaurant industry is deep in a hole and still digging for China. Many had pinned their hopes on a long-promised reduction in TVA (VAT in the UK, essentially sales tax) which currently adds itself at the rate of 19.6% to every restaurant bill. Former President Chirac promised to reduce it to 5.5% seven years ago, a promise taken up by President Nicholas ‘I get to shag Carla Bruni, nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahhhh-nyah’ Sarkozy during his election campaign. The reduction has finally been agreed by the EU (thank you Germany you bastards, You Must Be Stopped!) and the industry breathed a huge sigh of relief – Just in time for the summer season, hurrah! We are saved!

Er, not quite. Naturally, this being France, we can’t just say ‘TVA is reduced to 5.5% on restaurant meals’. Oh no. First we must set up a commission. And a panel. And conferences. All to decide how to implement it: should it be compulsory to reduce prices or increase wages or take on new staff? Who knows? Who gives a flying fuck? Well, the bureaucrats whose jobs depend on having enough to do that they look busy and important until it’s time for their two-month summer holidays – eating in cheap restaurants in the South of France moaning about how they’re not cheap enough. Wankers – that’s who.

So that’s the long way round to saying I’m really, really glad to have landed a decent job in an interesting restaurant with decent employers who pay overtime and seem to want to treat their staff like human beings, not scum. Result.

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