The Waitress at Duval

Paris, 
1878-1923 

French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted this portrait of a waitress at one of the Établissements Duval, a small chain of low-cost Parisian restaurants. The first location opened in 1854 when a butcher named Pierre Louis Duval started using meat scraps to make broths.1 The Établissements Duval were often called “Bouillons Duval” or “Établissements de Bouillon” in reference to this signature dish. However, the restaurants were best known for their women servers who wore black dresses, half hidden by aprons and snow-white bibs, and caps.2 In 1881, the Baedeker guidebook advised travelers that the servers were “soberly garbed, and not unlike sisters of charity.” Similarly, a journalist at the New York Times noted the “neat, nun-like uniforms” reminded him of what the cooks wore in the kitchen of the House of Commons.3,4 Three menus recall these restaurants that were once an integral part of the Parisian scene.

Renoir painted the Duval waitress a few years before the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, which celebrated the recovery of France after the Franco-Prussian War. The world’s fair provided many places to eat, including a Duval restaurant situated next to the École militaire, on the Champ-de-Mars. Communicating with visitors from foreign lands was not always easy, as indicated by the puzzled look of the waitress in this contemporary illustration.

British journalist George Augustus Sala wrote that Paris was back to herself again in 1878 and that young gentlemen who were anxious to “see life” should go to a Duval restaurant. Although the restaurants could be crowded and served small portions, they were popular with visitors and Parisians of all classes. The handbook Abroad and at Home; Practical Hints for Tourists reported in 1881 that “in every quarter of Paris you see one or two sober and respectable-looking façades painted dark red and lettered simply ‘Établissement Duval.’ (The restaurants are) wonderfully organized, exceedingly cheap, and all the food that is sold in them is good and genuine.” This menu comes from the branch at the 1878 Exposition Universelle and is dated May 30 of that year.

 

In 1900, the waitresses went on strike for a 12-hour day and against having to kickback some of their tips to management. The job action did not affect their popularity. French bibliophile Octave Uzanne observed in The Modern Parisienne in 1912 that “the little waitress at Duval’s is generally charming, very clean, helpful, intelligent, and gifted with an extraordinary memory and attention to clients.” They were praised in poems and café songs. The menu below comes from the one at the Place de la République on Christmas Day in 1917. During the grinding attrition of the First World War, a melancholic mood must have pervaded these plain restaurants where diners sat at bare marble tables. Perhaps it was a hospitable waitress who inspired an American far from home on the holiday to keep this drab and poorly-printed menu as a memento. 

Twenty-six locations dotted Paris in the early 1920s when a French-American restaurateur saved the menu below from the location on Rue Lafayette near the Gare du Nord.5 The illustration portrays the Duval waitress as an iconic symbol from a bygone era. And as it happened, the old system had not changed much. The 1925 edition of Dining in Paris reported, “These waitresses are not paid. Each girl has five tables to wait on, for which she pays so much a day. She is given her food, and for the rest relies on tips, so they have good days and bad ones.”

While some women worked at Duval for many years, others moved on to the other jobs, including the stage. Whenever Alexandre Duval, the son of the founder and owner of the chain, saw one of his former waitresses, he would take off his hat in a grand gesture. According to one story, a prominent actress once said to him: “Monsieur Duval, I should be obliged if you would not salute me quite so elaborately every time you see me. People will be thinking I’m an old Restaurant Duval girl!” 

Notes: 
1. The portrait, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was painted in about 1875 when the artist was 34 years old. Renoir may have eaten at Duval restaurants many times during his early, difficult years. 
2. The Duval on the Rue Montesquieu, near the Palais Royal and beside the Hôtel Duval, was the only location that employed men as waiters. As the flagship of the chain, it served a more refined cuisine and charged higher prices. 
3. Jim Chevallier, ParisFoodHistory.blogspot.com/2018/12/rouwens-van-coppenaal-inventor-of-chain.html (accessed 5 January 2020). 
4. In April 1886, the “Pall Mall Gazette” announced the opening of a bouillon restaurant named “Duval” in London. The British venture, which was unaffiliated with the French company, was located at Charing Cross. The manager and servers were bilingual French women.
5. The menu was discovered in the Mailhebuau family papers. In 1922-23, Camille Mailhebuau, formerly part owner of Bergez-Frank’s Old Poodle Dog in San Francisco, went to France where he looked for ideas as to what type of restaurant might do well in the United States during Prohibition.