A bright smiling face arrived at my table wishing me, “good morning,” and then, as if to add sugar to honey, she wished me “bonjour” too. I paused and smiled. “Bonjour,” I replied in my best French accent – which made me feel, and sound, slightly creepy. I placed my order, a little high on the special attention that had been paid to me. A few seconds later I heard the same waitress: “good morning – bonjour”, she said, smiling at the next customer, and the next, and the next. My feelings of specialness evaporated like the head on a bad latte.
The waitress’s “bonjour” was no-doubt her modest contribution towards pushing the brand’s friendly French-ness. La Brioche after all is the French term for an enriched form of pastry (Queen Marie Antoinette is apocryphally reported to have said “: Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” – let them eat cake, with reference to France’s famished peasants). But the idea of people greeting each other with formulaic and often very insincere pleasantries is becoming all too common. I, for one, long for more sincere, spontaneous, creative and heartfelt human communication in all spheres of life – even restaurants.
Consider, for example, I recently received a text message wishing me: “choicest blessings on the auspicious occasion of Eid al Adha”. The sender, a long forgotten colleague, had obviously sent this “one size fits all” message to a large group of the contacts from his phone’s address book. Rather than respond directly to the sender’s greeting, many of the recipients, probably just group-texted their own generic Eid messages. I have to question the value of such greetings. Are we really wishing each other well? How much heart and soul can there be in these effortless bulk-communications? It is easy to imagine a future where we pre-program our phones with the following instruction: If Date = Dec 25th; send text “wishing you the sincerest season’s greetings” to contact group = “friends and family”. For the recipients and the senders of such thoughtless pre-programmed messages, what exactly would be the benefit? Both, generic template-texts and my waitress’s scripted greetings are classic example of what we used to call ‘cant’.
Historian Ben Wilson describes can’t as a four-letter word that has all but faded from the English language. Cant, like brioche, originates from the Norman French. Cant meant chanting, in a derogatory sense; it meant a type of formulaic speech used to mask the absence of genuine devotion. Cant is decorum and sobriety, without sincerity; cant is jargon and cliché masquerading as substance; cant is well choreographed verbiage bereft of any authenticity. Lord Byron, English poet and self-imposed exile, declared the 19th Century as the age of cant. The word may not have survived but the practice is thriving.
Table-staff cant aside, La Brioche is a pleasant enough place to breakfast. The outdoor seating is comfortable and well placed; the high hedge obscures the unappetising site of car parks and construction sites. Furthermore, the floral decorations add a pretty touch of pink and white. The menu is in English and French, and there’s also a French/Arabic version. The menu runs to 12 pages, and none of the dishes are overly described. Looking to my fellow diners the full breakfast option (scrambled eggs with turkey bacon and chicken sausages) seems to be a very popular choice. However, in keeping with the French idea of ‘le petit dejeuner,’ I opted for the croissants package (two croissants a coffee and, what I can only describe as, a shot of orange juice: glass, small, very). The croissants were amongst the best I have tasted anywhere, while my coffee was relatively unremarkable. The shot of juice the smallest ever, but good fresh fare.
La Brioche, as the name suggests, is a specialist baker. And while dining, I noticed a steady stream of customers arriving to buy boxes of cakes, French loaves and croissants to go. Before leaving, I asked the waitress for a brioche to go, she gave me a sympathetic look and said, in an infectiously upbeat Philippines accent, “we don’t have sir, sorry finished”. C’est la vie, I retorted, performing my most nonchalant Gallic shrug.
