THE RESTAURANT
A HISTORY OF EATING OUT
WILLIAM SITWELL
Simon & Schuster, 268pp, £20, ebook £9.99
Ysenda Maxton Graham, in the
Times, enjoyed this ‘warm-hearted romp through the history of eating out, from the food stalls of Pompeii, via the “sharing dishes” of the Ottoman Empire, to the first mention of a tablecloth in medieval London, to the out-of-work domestic cooks (whose employers had been guillotined) who opened the first restaurants in revolutionary Paris, to the clubbing Victorians and their 10-foot-high puddings, to dismal postwar British hotels, to Charles Forte’s Festival of Britain cafeteria, to the Roux brothers’ dainty French portions at Le Gavroche, to Heston Blumenthal’s snail porridge at the Fat Duck, to 35 tiny courses at El Bulli in Barcelona, to the restoration of sausage and mash as an acceptable menu item at Kensington Place.’
Annie Gray, in the Spectator, was less convinced by ‘this gastronomic whoosh through the centuries. This is unashamedly popular history, but it’s a book of unequal halves. The early chapters are uneven, the narrative alternating between purple prose (Vesuvius’s first rumbling likened to “the gods grumbling, perhaps like humans did when offered a bad hand at the gambling table”) and snarky asides.’
Richard Vines at Bloomberg admitted ‘the reader doesn’t get bored because Sitwell really doesn’t care to cover all the bases, preferring curious and interesting tales and tasty titbits to dull analysis’. He devotes the last few pages to a serious look at restaurant veganism and raw meat substitutes ‘which require 100 times less land and 5.5 times less water than conventional meat’ – quite a volte-face atonement for joking about ‘killing vegans one by one’ which cost him his job at Waitrose Food Illustrated 18 months ago.