Shipping is still stuck

an economic history of the restaurant

T HE PLEASURES O F THE TABLE

N EW YORK, PARIS AND YOUNTVILLE How restaurants came to be and how the pandemic may change them April 9th 2020 was the restaurant industry’s darkest day. The imposition of lockdowns to slow the spread of covid19, combined with people voluntarily avoiding others, meant that on that Thursday bookings in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland and Mexico via OpenTable, a restaurantreservation 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 Britain grew by 26%. Americans were, for the first time, spending more than half their total food budget on eating out. Wellpaid folk from Hong Kong to Los Angeles were happily renting kitchenless apartments: why bother cooking when good food was so lavishly available beyond your front door?

Being deprived of restaurants has made people realise 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 hundred years old at most. They do not satisfy some primeval urge, but rather those of particular sorts of societies. Economic and social forces, from political reform 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. Archaeologists 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 restaurants. 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 community 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 Horace 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 people privily and oft”. Some rich types rented private dining rooms; Samuel Pepys, a 17thcentury diarist, enjoyed eating “in the French style” (that is, with communal dishes) at one in London. But most wealthy