Book of the week
The Restaurant by William Sitwell (Simon & Schuster) $60
Leaving aside the obvious financial concerns (few restaurants operate above a 5 or 6 per cent margin – squeezing us in is essential to their survival), the prospect of a new era of ‘‘distanced dining’’ misses the point of why we eat out.
The only time we want to eat a metre away from each other is in an office. We may think it’s just the food we miss about restaurants, but, under the shade of prohibition, it’s hard not to be wistful for an over-packed room. There could
thus hardly be a better time to reflect on the restaurant’s place in our lives with an ambitious new history by William Sitwell, The Daily Telegraph’s food critic.
Sitwell rattles through the early history of humanity’s culinary awakening, from the humorous inn menus of Pompeii: ‘‘For one [coin], you can drink wine. For two, the best! For four, [the Romans’ most celebrated wine] Falernian!’’
But it is not until the Dissolution of the Monasteries that one can begin to see what we would recognise as ‘‘dining out’’.
The gap in the hospitality market left by the abandoned monastic houses meant that, by
1577, there were 24,000 alehouses in England, a number that would double by the 1620s. (Today, only 53,000 pubs serve a population 10 times higher.) By the late 17th century, the desire for social space found another outlet in the coffee house, and by 1700 London had a density of coffee houses 40 times that of modern New York.
While England led the way in creating these public spaces, it fell to post-Revolutionary France to refine what passed in them for food. Although Robespierre was an ascetic, confining himself at meals to ‘‘a single glass of wine, heavily cut with water’’, he was accidentally responsible for
bringing haute cuisine to the public, when the chefs to exiled or guillotined nobility found employment by opening restaurants instead. In 1789, there had been about 50 restaurants in Paris. By 1799, there were 500.
England held its own during the early 19th century as a proving ground for chefs. It was for the gormandising Prince Regent that the first celebrity chef Marie-Antoine Careme produced his masterpiece, a 120-dish feast in the Brighton Pavilion in honour of Tsar Alexander I. It was in the kitchens of the Reform Club that Alexis Soyer perfected the miraculously clean gas stove.
Nonetheless, by the following century England had regressed and the restaurant scene of mid-20thcentury London was a hellscape. Sitwell hits his stride, conjuring up El Cubano, where Trinidadian waiters with parrots on their shoulders served, among other monstrosities, ‘‘open sandwiches containing a mixture of fresh fruit, walnuts and cream cheese’’.
Into this barren landscape of bolognese and chips the Roux brothers appeared like ministering angels. Reduced at first to smuggling ingredients from France, their restaurant Le Gavroche, which opened in 1981, changed the British attitude to food, as the roll-call of names that have emerged from its kitchens attests: Marco Pierre White, Rowley Leigh, Gordon Ramsay, and Marcus Wareing.
Sitwell is particularly entertaining on the past few decades of British cooking, which leaves one wondering whether the book might have been better with a narrower remit.
Nonetheless, this is an immensely engaging guide and avoids the slips that critic Jonathan Meades identified in ‘‘fine dining’’, of ‘‘fussiness, pretension, absurdly high prices and moron chefs who think they are philosophers’’.