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Christmas specials 11
The Economist December 18th 2021
A
an economic history of the restaurant
THE PLEASURES O F T H E TA B L E
NEW YO RK , PARIS AND YOUNT VILLE
How restaurants came to be and how the pandemic may change them
pril 9th 2020 was the restaurant industry’s dark est day. The imposition of lockdowns to slow the spread of covid19, combined with people voluntarily avoiding others, meant that on that Thursday book ings in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland and Mexico via OpenTable, a restaurantreser vation website, normally in their millions, fell to zero. Now, as economies unlock, many restaurants, even the fanciest, are facing labour shortages. Le Gavroche, one of London’s swankiest French off erings, has had to stop its lunch service and has lost its general manager. Covid brought to a halt an astonishing expansion. In 201019 the number of licensed restaurants in Brit ain grew by 26%. Americans were, for the fi rst time, spending more than half their total food budget on eat ing out. Wellpaid folk from Hong Kong to Los Angeles were happily renting kitchenless apartments: why bother cooking when good food was so lavishly avail able beyond your front door? Being deprived of restaurants has made people re alise how much they value them. Eating out fulfi ls needs which seem fundamental to human nature. People need to date, to seal deals and to peer at their fellow humans. At a good restaurant you can travel without travelling, or simply feel coddled. Yet restaurants in their current form are a few hun dred years old at most. They do not satisfy some pri meval urge, but rather those of particular sorts of soci eties. Economic and social forces, from political re form to urbanisation to changing labour markets, have created both the supply of and demand for restaurants. Their history also hints at what their future could look like in a postpandemic world. People have long feasted outside the home. Archae ologists have counted 158 snack bars in Pompeii, a city destroyed by a volcano in 79ad—one for every 60100 people, a higher ratio than many global cities today. Readycooked meat, game and fi sh were available for Londoners to eat from at least the 1170s. Samuel Cole, an early settler, opened what is considered to be the fi rst American tavern in 1634, in Boston. These were more like takeaways, though, or stands where food might be thrown in with a drink, than res taurants. The table d’hôte, which appeared in France around Cole’s time, most closely resembled a modern restaurant. Clients sat at a single table and ate what they were given (trends now making a comeback). Many of these protorestaurants resembled communi ty kitchens, or quasicharities, which existed for the benefi t of locals. Strangers were not always welcome. Nor were they destinations predominantly for the wellheeled. Before the use of coal became widespread in England in the 17th century, preparing food at home involved spending a lot on wood or peat. Professional kitchens, by contrast, benefi ted from economies of scale in energy consumption and so could provide meals at a lower cost than people could themselves. Today dining out is seen as an indulgence, but it was the cheapest way to eat for most of human history. It was, thus, a lowstatus activity. Cicero and Hor ace reckoned that a visitor to a bar might as well have visited a brothel. According to “Piers Plowman”, a late14thcentury poem, cooks would “poison the peo ple privily and oft”. Some rich types rented private din ing rooms; Samuel Pepys, a 17thcentury diarist, en joyed eating “in the French style” (that is, with com munal dishes) at one in London. But most wealthy
