The Restaurant: A History Of Eating Out
William Sitwell Simon & Schuster £20
As tales of saucepan-throwing, cocaine-snorting chefs attest, restaurants revel in drama and excitement. Running one requires culinary expertise, of course, but also creativity, business nous and people management skills – all geared to pleasing the customer and creating the ambience celebrated by Samuel Johnson: ‘There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced, as by a good tavern or inn.’
It takes a while for William Sitwell’s stimulating history of this global phenomenon to get going, since, apart from a colourful evocation of Pompeii, with its prototype pizzas, the early story is more about eating away than eating out. There’s a travelogue about the North African explorer Ibn Battuta’s contacts with exotic cuisines, and an admiring account of the range of produce in the Ottoman Empire. Such encounters were more about conventional hospitality than restaurant-style communality, a feature where Britain’s taverns pointed the way. Social habits didn’t change much before coffee’s arrival from the Middle East in the 17th Century. Coffee houses became so popular and politically volatile that Charles II tried to suppress them.
Star chefs began to surface in postrevolutionary France, where Marie-Antoine Carême, originally a pâtissier, invented the uniform of white jacket and tall white hat (toque). Laying down rules for everything from service to sauces, his cookbooks created a fine art of gastronomy. Several French chefs subsequently brought their skills to Britain – among them Alexis Soyer, who created sumptuous dishes on revolutionary gas stoves at London’s Reform Club.
Always well-informed, never dull, Sitwell summons a future of expensive concept menus marrying science with fanciful ingredients, as pioneered by Heston Blumenthal (pictured above). But he suggests there will always be a place for a good, simple meal which, as food writer Nicholas Lander observed, represents the least expensive form of travel.