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How restaurants ate themselves William Sitwell's history of dining out will make you hunger for your favourite local eatery

When it comes to food, the tried and tested is often the best. Credit: Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images

When it comes to food, the tried and tested is often the best. Credit: Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images


April 27, 2020   4 mins

Per Se, one of New York City’s most admired restaurants, serves a tasting menu which is an act of emotional control from a chef (Thomas Keller) in which the diner, masochistically, submits. High above Columbus Circle, in a hushed and ugly dining room, you eat, for an absurd amount of money, tiny, painted meals delivered by rude waiters, who seek obeisance to the cult.

When I reviewed it in 2015, I thought it was a hoax on the credulous. It was not, for me, food, for it has no hint of generosity. It was, rather, anti-food, for people who think food, by itself, is too prosaic. They must have something new; something that is denied to others. The result was both gruesome and a fair revenge.

I thought of Per Se when reading William Sitwell’s The Restaurant: A History of Eating Out. It is, by its nature, incomplete. Most meals are lost to history, for nothing is more transient than food. Even so, it is a curious history of our relationship with eating houses from Pompeii, whose restaurants were preserved, to today, when they are all closed, so it reads like an acting obituary: who knows what will survive? On the wall of a bar in Pompeii it read: “For one [coin] you can drink wine / For two you can drink the best / For four you can drink Falernian [the wine of Mount Falernus]”. Who cannot identify with that?

This book is full of humanising stories. Charles II, for instance, was emotionally dependent on figs. When the Ottoman Empire forbade their export, he begged the sultan to make an exception, which was granted, and two ship loads arrived per year. Read that, and you do not see a king. You see a child.

Per Se, for most of the narrative, was a nightmare long in the future. Rather, there is pleasure. I could smell the street food of the Middle East – long my favourite food — through the pen of the 14th century north African Ibn Battuta who, during what Sitwell calls a 32 year-long “gap year”— often his style fails him — eats fried rice and chicken in what is now Iran. It summoned my favourite restaurant, which is a nameless hole in the wall near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, where Al-Wad Street meets Beit Habad Street, slightly to the right. (I tell you this because I want you to find it.)

Here a man who has probably never heard of Thomas Keller, who could not even be bothered to name his eating house, served falafel, which he fried in front of my eyes, with pitta bread and French fries. Then I wandered through the souk with my falafel sandwich. I have been a restaurant critic for 10 years, and this is the one I remember. He pretends to remember me too, even if I go only once a decade, because he is a gifted restaurateur; as gifted, in his way, as the Roux Brothers. Or likely more gifted.

Political revolution created restaurants, which caused rulers to fear them. Charles II resented coffee houses, and their ability to create dissent almost as much as he loved figs. I could have done without Sitwell writing that the Jacob the Jew, a coffee house owner in Oxford, followed the money to London. I am sure it was unconscious, but I was no longer hungry when I read it.

The three great engines of the modern restaurant were the Reformation, during which the religious houses, which fed people out of cynicism or charity, closed; the French Revolution, which put the chefs to the aristocrats out of work; and migration. One French chef went to Robespierre to complain — he had bullied kitchen staff too long, he thought he could bully Robespierre — and lost his head. The others created the great early restaurants of France and, with it, the ill-starred — for me, but I like food from holes in walls — decree that French food, and later all food — if prepared for the very rich — is art. I admire it for its ambition, and I know what it costs in every sense. But I don’t want to eat art. It cannot love you.

The most interesting parts of Sitwell’s history are the modern, for these are the restaurants I eat and write in, and they express less a love of what tastes good — nothing in good food is new, as Ibn Battuta says, nothing — than the neuroticism of the people who eat in them. These restaurants are fascinating, but I doubt their clients would recognise Ibn Battuta’s greed for fried chicken or Charles II’s hunger for figs. At El Bulli or Osteria Francescana or Per Se, the food is trivial and boastful; it bespeaks vanity, not greed. But restaurants are as personal as lovers. You want what you want, and they will pick out your sins for you.

But first – what to admire? The obsession of the great chef: Marie-Antoine Carême, who codified “gastronomy” and was killed by his poorly ventilated kitchen. He was, a poet wrote, “burnt out by the flame of genius, and the charcoal of the roasting spit”. Or the Roux Brothers who trained in private kitchens and created the first great French restaurant in London — Le Gavroche — and silenced those, like Bernard Levin, who called post-war English food a disgrace. (It was, Sitwell noted, no better in the Middle Ages.) A Roux wife drove each week to France for chickens because English chickens were inferior.

It’s both truism and metaphor: chefs burn out. Marco Pierre White, the first British chef to win three Michelin stars, re-established Wheeler’s a few years ago. I went to eat the cauliflower risotto. I shouldn’t have. On the evidence of Wheeler’s, White no longer cares about food. He gave up; and he knew he did. He returned his stars.

He was lucky.

A whole chapter is given to the tragedy of Bernard Loiseau, a talented French chef who heard rumours in 2003 that he would lose his third Michelin star.

It is impossible to study modern restaurants and not hate this silly guidebook — a sort of Vogue for butter — which exists to sell tyres; and who can eat a tyre? Loiseau put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That is where it leads you, this snobbery that kills. It tells how far food has come from its purpose, but what else would happen in a milieu sliding, in its pomposity, to decay?

What now, with Covid-19? I want to believe that, in our fear, we will, when it is over, turn to what is close and kind: the excellent neighbourhood restaurant. I want to believe we will reject the vanity of Per Se and the mulch of KFC, and eat from our favourite holes in the walls, from people who remember us, or pretend to. But it is unlikely: it is usually the behemoths that survive.  When you next eat out, go to the neighbourhood restaurant. You need it, and you will mourn it when it has gone.


Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.

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Joan Wucher King
Joan Wucher King
4 years ago

The most beloved of restaurants I enjoy is in a veritable tiny slice of a building serving mind blowing Japanese food. Its chance of surviving in a socially distanced future are zero, and – given the slim margins most restaurants “enjoy” – I fear a similar fate for other of London’s idiosyncratic restaurants squeezed into tiny spaces.

Andrew McGee
Andrew McGee
4 years ago

Can someone please reconcile for me the following four facts?
1. Restaurant staff are generally poorly paid:
2. Most restaurant food is of no more thn mediocre quality, both in content and preparation;
3. Most restaurant food is absurdly overpriced (and they expect tips on top);
These three facts together would suggest that someone is coining it in this sector. That someone would presumably be restaurant owners. Yet
4. There is a very high failure rate in this sector.

Michael Dawson
Michael Dawson
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew McGee

Rent and rates are very high.
There is a lot of competition.
Everyone has been in a restaurant and many people over-estimate how easy it is to run a restaurant and the time commitment involved.

P N
P N
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew McGee

One and four may be facts, two and three are more likely opinions. Perhaps you just live somewhere without a good local eatery?

nigel roberts
nigel roberts
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew McGee

You have omitted rent and regulatory compliance. Someone has to pay the landlords and the bloated index-linked pensions of the elf-n-safety bureaucrats.

Fred Dibnah
Fred Dibnah
4 years ago

I could only identify 2 of the 3 great engines. Reformation and French Revolution. Could someone please tell me the third.

Alex Delszsen
Alex Delszsen
3 years ago

I am sketchy on food history, but in Roman times (?) fuel was costly and cooking was left to street vendors. I also think about pasties made to keep hands warm, and then eaten for lunch by miners. (Tanya Gold I am not, so my historical references are cr*p.). That said, I often think I would like to see neighbours cooking pasties for neighbours, or stews and soups. One stop, for elderly folks, people in want, or for shift workers.
Yes, these are called take out restaurants, but wouldn’t it be lovely if they were more like co-ops, or truly hole-in-the-wall neighborhood charity level? Somewhere in the Middle East, or was it South America?, there is a bread store where you buy bread, and pay for a loaf for a needy person, who could come by for a free loaf.
Anyway, with health and safety regs., and the fear of lawsuits, one can’t just cook for your neighbours out of charity. Still, we holiday, or watch t.v.about developing nations, and feel the charm and hospitality.
We come back, and we want profit. What about this being a side gig, with some tax incentives, or lawsuit protection, so that we do these sorts of things? Yes, the middle classes don’t want their bakery filled with the homeless or addicts, but what about a pasty stand or bakery that makes room for its neighbours? There is all that empty downtown real estate in so many towns…
I wish the millionaires didn’t feel poor next to the billionaires. I wish the entertainers weren’t fixated on hair extensions and Bentleys. I wish there were more people who modeled themselves on Christians, maybe even becoming one in the process. Soup kitchens. Who was the punk princess? Yes, Gloria Von Thurn und Taxis…She runs a soup kitchen at her castle. Anyway, more of this, please.
And the weekend foodies, off to their wine tastings, or preparing their roasts—what about making a supper club for your ordinary, non-extreme anti-aging folks to age along with us, as a community? Long live neighborhood inclusive bakeries and such. But don’t fall into your same pseudo-,safe and middle class traps. Get Ancient. Get Third World. Get Christian. Let us stop living all Instagram-Ready and create lovely, humane villages. Please.

Last edited 3 years ago by Alex Delszsen