While dining out is forbidden, feast on a tasty history
‘It felt like I had been punched in the stomach,” was how UK Hospitality’s chief executive reacted to Prof Chris Whitty’s news that “social distancing” was likely to remain in place until the end of the year. It is hard to see how restaurants can survive. Leaving aside the obvious financial concerns (few restaurants operate above a five or six per cent margin – squeezing us in is essential to their survival), the prospect of a new era of “distanced dining” fundamentally misses the point of why we eat out.
The only time we want to eat two metres 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, the stamp and screech of waiters pulling out chairs on wooden floors. Certainly, there are greater tragedies at the moment, but as the mighty French gastronome Brillat-Savarin pointed out, “the fate of nations depends upon how they eat”. 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 man’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!” Later, we put a quick nose into the kitchens of the 15th-century Ottoman court where Sultan Murad II employed some 1,500 people – not that the cuisine much impressed his Western visitors, who reported it was “all eaten raw like cattle do… a dyet very proper to break a French horse’s belly”. 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, prompting a satirical pamphlet, “The Women’s Petition Against Coffee Houses”, which railed on behalf of abandoned wives who never saw their husbands “’til 12 at night… when at last they come to bed, smoakt like a Westphalia hogs-head”.
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 himself, like so many truly unpleasant men, 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. (Not, alas, Marie Antoinette’s own chef, who followed her to the guillotine after submitting to the revolutionaries a remarkably bold demand for new employment and back pay.) In 1789, there had been about 50 restaurants in Paris. By 1799, there were 500.
As Sitwell is pleased to report, 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 Carême produced his masterpiece, a 120-dish feast in the Brighton Pavilion in honour of Tsar Alexander I. (Sitwell reproduces the menu, featuring “The Royal Pavilion, rendered in pastry” and “A Welsh hermitage” among its eight centrepieces.) It was in the kitchens of the Reform Club that Alexis Soyer perfected the miraculously clean gas stove. (It had been carbon monoxide poisoning from more primitive stoves that did for Carême after he, via “fat on the heart”, had done for his patron George IV.)
Nonetheless, by the following century England had regressed and the restaurant scene of mid-20thcentury London was quite clearly a hellscape. Here Sitwell gets into his stride, conjuring up El Cubano, heralded as the last word in modernity and exoticism, 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 their ingredients from France, their restaurant Le Gavroche, which opened in 1981, changed the British attitude to food profoundly, as the roll-call of names that have emerged from its kitchens attests: Marco Pierre White, Rowley Leigh, Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing, and so on.
Sitwell is particularly entertaining on the past few decades of British cooking (with an amusing digression on the restaurant PR supremo Alan Crompton-Batt: “It was not a good time to ring someone and say, ‘We’re doing terribly interesting things with a duck down in Harrow…’”), which leaves one wondering whether the book might have been better with a narrower remit and more time spent on home turf. Some will be horrified to discover that, say, the River Café does not feature, or that St John gets only a passing mention, but Sitwell is frank about this being a personal, not a comprehensive, history. Even so, it is surprising to find nothing of Escoffier or César Ritz and, while the cantankerous poetess Elizabeth David gets her look-in (Francis Bacon kept battered copies of her Book of Mediterranean Food and French Provincial Cooking by his bed), there is very little here on the influence of food writers other than critics.
Nonetheless, this is an immensely engaging guide and avoids the slips that the critic Jonathan Meades identified in “fine dining” (“which should be pronounced in a refined accent – think Lynda Snell”), of “fussiness, pretension, absurdly high prices and moron chefs who think they are philosophers”. Sitwell never takes himself too seriously. As Dr Johnson declared, “There is nothing… by which so much happiness is produced, as by a good tavern or inn,” and it is bittersweet to enjoy it here vicariously.
In 1700, London had a density of coffee houses 40 times that of modern New York