Dr. Vernon Coleman recounts his memories of a man who had the strangest job in the world. Anton was a professional eater who was hired by a restaurant owner in Paris to sit at a small table in the window and eat food all day long.
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When we were living and working in Paris, we met a man called Anton who had what I thought then, and still think, was the strangest job I’ve ever come across.
Anton was a jolly, comfortably rotund, red-faced man who always seemed to be smiling. He was one of those rare creatures who looked as though he didn’t have a care in the world because he really didn’t have a care in the world.
He was a professional eater.
I know that sounds difficult to believe but that’s what he did for a living: he ate food, good, well-cooked, well-varied French food in a smart restaurant on one of the main boulevards in the heart of Paris. It was one of those restaurants designed to look like a traditional French restaurant and, therefore, catering almost exclusively to tourists. It had red sunshades outside and lots of copper pots and pans decorating the walls. The French, of course, prefer to eat hamburgers in McDonald’s.
You’ve probably heard of people whose job it is to taste teas or beers or chocolate. Those aren’t eaters. They taste and then spit out whatever they are tasting. I read once, in the New Yorker magazine, about a 25-year-old man who worked in Glasgow, Scotland, and whose job it was to sample all the available malt whiskies and combine them with grain whisky to make consistent and accessible blended whiskies. That wasn’t drinking; it was teasing. His body must have been constantly kept in a state of expectation and disappointment.
Anton wasn’t paid to taste food and spit it out. He was paid to sit at a nice table in a smart restaurant and eat. And he wasn’t a permanent contestant in one of those eating competitions where grimly determined contestants, usually overweight, middle-aged men, compete to see who can eat the most burgers or hot dogs in 30 minutes or an hour.
Anton was hired by the restaurant owner to sit at a small table in the window, select items from the menu and eat them. He would order a three-course meal (usually from the a la carte menu but once or twice a day from the fixed menu) and chew his way through everything put in front of him. He would then have a coffee and a small brandy before starting again with another meal. The brandy was the only alcohol he drank. For obvious reasons, he confined himself to bottled water with his meals – the restaurant didn’t want him getting tiddly halfway through his working day.
I once asked Anton how he’d come to be hired.
He told me that he used to have a job as a cashier in a men’s clothing store a block away from the restaurant and that he’d eaten his lunch there two or three times a week, always sitting at a small table for one in the window. A single man, he spent most of his money on rent and food. He had no expensive hobbies or family. He rented a small, one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a handsome-looking 19th century building in Montparnasse.
The restaurant owner, an astute fellow, noticed that when Anton was sitting eating, the people passing by would see him, look, often stop for a moment and then enter the restaurant. One customer, when asked why he had chosen that restaurant, explained that the fat guy in the window really seemed to be enjoying his food.
Anton even looked the part. He had a habit of tucking the white linen napkin, which the restaurant provided, into the top of his shirt. The restaurant owner apparently once said that he thought that this gave him the look of a gourmet. In reality, I thought he would probably be more accurately described as a gourmand. But he was definitely not a glutton. A glutton would have revolted the customers rather than attracted them. Most people take in food with the same general lack of discrimination as they fill their cars with fuel or, indeed, with which they guzzled on breast milk when they were babies. Gluttons simply don’t know when to stop. Anton enjoyed his food, in quantity and quality, and his enjoyment showed.
The owner offered him a job.
“All you have to do is sit at your usual seat and eat all day long. All your meals will be free and I’ll pay you a salary.”
The salary wasn’t much, was in fact slightly less than he’d received as a cashier, but Anton hated his job and loved food, and he would save on meals, so it took him no time at all to say “yes, thank you, when do I start?”
At 2.30 pm, as the lunchtime rush came to an end, Anton would get up from his table and go off for a walk and to do a little window shopping. It was, I suppose, the equivalent of a normal person’s lunch break – except, of course, that he didn’t eat anything.
I once asked him what he ate on Sundays, his one day off. He told me he always made himself a croquet madame, cheese on toast or opened a can of soup, minestrone being his favourite. If the restaurant had been open on Sundays, he would have happily worked seven days a week.
While Anton was away from “work,” enjoying his walk, one of the waiters would put a reserved sign on his table and when he had finished his daily constitutional, Anton would return, sit down, roll up his sleeves (metaphorically only, of course), pick up the menu and order his next meal, eating his way through until 8 pm by which time the restaurant would be full with the evening patrons and he could put on his overcoat and head off home. At least he didn’t have to shop for food or worry about cooking himself a meal.
Anton never read while he was eating. The restaurant paid him to eat and to do nothing but eat. Occasionally, he would look out of the window, see potential customers looking in, smile, nod in approval and pop another forkful of food into his mouth. His attitude was that he never read a book or a newspaper while performing his old job, so why should he do so in his new job?
The restaurant owner’s theory was that the sight of someone eating, and clearly enjoying his food, reminded people that it was time to eat, made them feel hungry and reassured them that the restaurant would look after them well enough. The fact that the space in the window alcove where Anton ate was only big enough for a table for one meant that the restaurant didn’t lose a table for two or four.
And then, one day, Anton wasn’t at his usual table. Instead, the place was occupied by a morose-looking stranger, clearly not hired to eat, who was nibbling at the edges of a plain omelette and reading his newspaper.
Three weeks after his disappearance, we met Anton in a café on the Boulevard St Michel. We were on our way to the Luxembourg Gardens and had stopped for an espresso and a cup of tea. Anton was nursing a glass of beer and looked younger, fitter and much slimmer.
“Where have you been?” I asked. “We’ve missed seeing you at your table.” The restaurant’s proximity to our apartment building meant that we passed the window once or twice a day.
“I lost weight,” said Anton. “The owner didn’t think that having a thin man eating his food would bring in the customers.”
“But how could you lose weight?” asked Antoinette. “You were eating all day long!”
“Nine or ten full meals a day,” he agreed.
“Have you seen your doctor?” I asked.
He said he hadn’t.
I told him he should. He really had lost a good deal of weight. I was worried about him. I didn’t say anything specific but it seemed possible that he might have developed stomach cancer or something equally unpleasant. He promised that he would.
Two days later, we had to go to England to see a close relative who had fallen ill. When the relative had made a good recovery, we took the opportunity to travel around a little and see family and friends we hadn’t seen for some time. And so, as a result, we were away from Paris for a month and then, having a good deal to do in order to catch up with the work we’d both missed doing while we had been away, we didn’t go anywhere very much for another week or ten days.
With one thing and another, it was nearly two months before we next walked past the restaurant where Anton had been employed. To our delight, he was back at his usual table, finishing off his post-prandial coffee and brandy. He looked almost as plump as he ever had done. He saw us looking, smiled and waved us to go into the restaurant.
“Thank you for suggesting that I saw my doctor,” he said. “He managed to sort things out for me.”
“You seem to be back to your eating weight!” said Antoinette.
“Just a couple of pounds to go,” smiled Anton. “If I put on another half a stone, the boss has promised me a raise!”
“What was wrong with you?” I asked him.
“I had a tapeworm,” he said. “Thirty-foot long,” he added proudly.
Antoinette shuddered.
“Has it gone now?” I asked him.
“Completely,” nodded Anton. “Passed it whole. The doctor thought it might have been from some beef or pork that was undercooked. We don’t do sushi here, so it wouldn’t have been from raw fish. He gave me some medicine in case the tapeworm had laid any eggs.”
“And you feel OK now?”
“Fit as a fiddle.”
Just then, the waiter came to take Anton’s order for his next meal. We said goodbye and told him how pleased we were to see him back at work.
“I’d hate to have a tapeworm inside me,” said Antoinette as we continued on our way.
“Did you know there’s a tapeworm diet?”
She looked at me in the way that she does when she thinks I’m joking.
“No, really, there is! You can buy tapeworm eggs, or even a small tapeworm in a jar. You swallow the eggs or the tapeworm, and then when you’ve lost all the weight you want to lose, you take some medicine to get rid of it.”
“I don’t believe you!” laughed Antoinette.
I don’t blame her for being sceptical, but it’s true.
Note: Taken from the book `Memories 1’ by Vernon Coleman. (`Memories 1’ is available from the bookshop on my website.)
About the Author
Vernon Coleman, MB ChB DSc, practised medicine for ten years. He has been a full-time professional author for over 30 years. He is a novelist and campaigning writer and has written many non-fiction books. He has written over 100 books, which have been translated into 22 languages. On his website, HERE, there are hundreds of articles which are free to read. Since mid-December 2024, Dr Coleman has also been publishing articles on Substack; you can subscribe to and follow him on Substack HERE.
There are no ads, no fees and no requests for donations on Dr Coleman’s website or videos. He pays for everything through book sales. If you would like to help finance his work, please consider purchasing a book – there are over 100 books by Vernon Coleman available in print on Amazon.
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