Revenge is a dish best served by angry waiter
ThIS is baffling. Christoph ribbat’s book In The restaurant comes with endorsements from big names in that industry, not least Ferran Adria, formerly head chef of the world’s most feted restaurant, El Bulli.
But ribbat’s take on the entire business is joyless.
Amazingly, he has managed to write a book on restaurants without a single sentence that evokes the pleasure to be had there, either in the flavours to be savoured or in the social scope they give for making new friends.
his perspective is that these are either fast-food chains which are no more than factories or — at the top end — pretentious establishments where the rich pay ridiculous prices while underrewarded staff suffer nothing but abuse in the kitchens.
There is more than a grain of truth in both assessments. But his theme that the restaurant business is just a mirror of social exploitation, class war over the industrial stove, is dismally reductive. Cooks and waiters also eat out.
And the chains for which ribbat, a German, has such obvious cultural contempt, such as McDonald’s, give even the poorest mothers affordable respite from the domestic tyranny of the kitchen. Whether that is good for their children’s eating habits is another matter — but not one addressed by the author, as he doesn’t actually seem that interested in food.
Still, he does provide useful historical perspective, observing how little new there is in leading chefs becoming media stars. he points out how in the late 19thcentury, Alessandro Filippini, the chef at what was then new York’s most prestigious restaurant, Delmonico’s, wrote bestselling recipe books. We can be sure that if television had been around, Filippini would have been as familiar a face as, say, heston Blumenthal is today.
ribbat also reveals how there is nothing remotely new in the complaint that the public are in far too much of a hurry, or too interested in themselves, to regard the food offered to them with the necessary reverence.
he quotes Georges Escoffier, at the dawn of the 20th century, lamenting how restaurant owners cannot count upon ‘a feeling of proper respect’ towards their offerings and that diners only have ‘eyes for one another’
— not for the food on their plates. Though it was probably best for the restaurateurs that the public didn’t inquire too closely into the recent history of what they were forking into their mouths.
Ribbat admiringly cites George Orwell, whose first published work, on his experiences as a washer -up in Parisian cafes (Down And Out In Paris And London) portrayed just what went on behind the scenes: ‘The waiter tells him about his predilection for wringing out a dirty tea towel over a bowl of soup before serving it to a customer.
‘ That’s his way of exacting revenge on the bourgeoisie.’
And the first restaurant where Orwell worked had discovered one of the trade’s secrets: ‘ If the customers’ places are set with sharp knives, any restaurant can become a success.’ The point is that, if the customer can cut his meat easily, he won ’t realise how inferior it really is. As a child, I saw this approach in action, when my mother tried to send back the steak she had ordered.
The head waiter, showing not the slightest embarrassment, told her he would find her a sharper knife.
To which she responded: ‘Y ou don’t understand. I wouldn ’t give this meat to a dog.’
But then, my mother was from the family that created the L yons catering empire: she knew enough about food not to be hoodwinked by a head waiter , no matter how authoritative his demeanour.
I was a little sad that Ribbat didn’t even mention the L yons Corner Houses ( and their waitresses, known as Nippies) in his historical ramble through the development of the restaurant trade. Before then, there was in this country nothing much between ‘ greasy spoon’ cafes for the workers and a handful of very expensive restaurants for the rich. The expansion of the restaurant business, inter - nationally, has been about catering for a growing middle-class. For this reason, the likes of Jamie Oliver should now be concentrating on China and India. It would make a nice return of serve, given the extraordinary way in which, over the past century , Indian and Chinese restaurants have become the most popular on our streets.
Ribbat takes a bitter view even of the spread of multi- ethnic cafes, asserting that a Westerner choosing to eat there ‘may be nothing more than a closet xenophobe who likes various dining options’.
This is an author who sees every mouthful we eat as a political statement, concluding bleakly: ‘Today, we are all waiters’ — that is, exploited as much as the merest skivvy by the monster of capitalism. What a cheerless dining companion he’d be.