The dish: cold.

The service: rude.

The place: the Cafe des Connards, on the famed rue des Merdes in Paris, which claims to be the restaurant with the rudest waiters on earth, and le garcon has just told me to shit myself a new head.

Tourists are flocking to the Cafe Connard after it made the startling claim to having the most impolite, impatient and downright insolent waiters in the whole world. “It is just part of our culture”, said Maitre d’ Phillipe Ouainqueu. “You come to a restaurant in Paris and you do not expect snivelling politeness. You expect to be insulted. However, we do it with panache. It is part of the Parisian culture to come to a restaurant and be made to feel humiliated and small. We just do it in spades.”

The cafe has made itself famous for turning away American tourists, telling them that they know “nothing about food”, informing British tourists that they can only have “custard and jelly”, as that’s all they understand, and greeting French visitors with a knee to the groin.

French restaurant critic Julien Mesfesses, however, has started to appreciate the place: “When I first went there, I received the customary knee to the groin, and the waiter kept flicking my ear. When I asked for another five minutes to think about my choice, he told me I was a chieur – a shitter, basically, and that I could have thirty minutes. He came back an hour later and everything I chose was ‘off’. All I could eat was the raw steak.”

“However, over time, I have come to appreciate the restaurant. Whenever I come, the knee to the groin seems more and more friendly, and I see it as a Parisian establishment.”

It is not unusual, when dining at the Cafe Connard, to be drawn into the spectacle. With fifty covers a night, there is ample opportunity for the waiters to display the full gamut of Parisian rudeness.

Head waiter Nicolas Tammere explains the attraction behind working for the Cafe Connard: “It’s not just a 9 to 5 job, or any job in any cafe, this is an opportunity to maintain the very French values that are under attack by your smiling Burger King employees. We don’t do politeness in Paris. We do rudeness, and people come from all around to experience it first hand. I love my job, and I hate my customers. It’s like that.”