Consider the Restaurant

Is the experience of eating confined to putting something in your mouth and savouring it? Of course not. There is the occasion, its ambience, the accompanying conversation, the wine, the familiarity or the novelty of the place where you eat. All of these can make food a much larger experience.

But what about food itself? What influences the design and preparation of cuisine? Is it simply flavour and nutrition?

Think of the restaurant. You shouldn’t take this amazing institution for granted; it was invented in Paris as late as the late eighteenth century. The essential feature of the modern restaurant was, as Brillat-Savarin said, that it allows people to eat what they want, when they want, how much they want, knowing in advance how much this would cost. Think about this: this degree of choice was nowhere available. Before the modern restaurant you would go into a tavern and eat what was on offer that day; you would go typically because you were travelling. Today, you drop in because you have a desire to exercise a choice between things that people may eat everyday in Pnomh Penh, but are impossible to whip up at whim.

In Paris, an early restaurant provided a choice between 12 soups, 65 entrées, 15 roasts, and 50 desserts. It was designed so that two travellers (such as John Protevi and I in Paris a couple of years ago) could walk into a place dictated by our budgets, at a place and time dictated by other activities, such as taking in a museum exhibition, he desiring cassoulet and I poulet au pot, and both being served these dishes at exactly the same moment, and later diverse desserts at no notice. We all take this sort of thing for granted, but just think how much preparation it demands from the establishment. How can you serve diners a page-full of choice among slow-cooked dishes? Long before Protevi and I woke up, perhaps long before we even got off our flights, bits of what we would eat were being bought, prepared, and stored for later assembly. Obviously, the ability to serve such a variety to a diner at his or her whim requires a kind of cooking that is quite different from that which is practised either in the home or in a banqueting hall.

According to Barbara Santich, writing in the Oxford Companion to Food, the French guild system demanded that restaurants differentiate themselves from traditional kinds of cooks. In France, in the late eighteenth century, there were traiteurs, rôtisseurs, pâtissiers, aubergistes, and taverniers. In an early case, a French court upheld the restaurant’s right to serve sauced dishes, recognizing these as distinct from a ragout, which was solely the right of the guild of traiteurs. The court ruled that a ragout is meat cooked in a sauce, not meat served with a sauce in which it was not cooked. So ask yourself: where did the classic sauce come from? Not from the demands of flavours or nutrition, or even of the efficient use of left-overs—not from these origins, but from the competition of guilds in eighteenth century France.

Clearly, restaurants branched out from such origins, in part by employing rôtisseurs and pâtissiers of their own, in part during the breakdown of aristocratic hall-eating, which released thousands of cooks to other establishments. Gradually, it became the home of “fine dining.” But culinary aesthetics did not fracture. The food you got in a restaurant was the pinnacle and culmination of what you aspired to at home. Sauces made the journey from the restaurant to the home kitchen; ragouts and poulet au pot from the kitchen to the restaurant, but the aesthetic was more or less unified.

But then two important new developments occurred. The first was that of fast eating. Stanich notes one paradigm of such a development:

The introduction of Prohibition in 1920 caused many [traditional restaurants] to close their doors, at the same time opening the way for an expansion of quick-service, alcohol-free, female-friendly cafeterias, luncheonettes, and tearooms serving a different class of cuisine to a different clientele.

We all know where this has led—not just the universal franchise of fast eating, but that of fast food.

The opposite development, in the late twentieth century, was that of a restaurant cuisine, an aesthetic that is all its own, and not in any way a perfection of the home-cooking aesthetic. Restaurant cuisine is marked by food research unavailable to home cooks (Michel Guerard, for instance, using rice as a substitute for butter in a celeriac puree), as well as highly specialized production techniques, including the formalization of line cooking and plating, molecular techniques, and highly intellectual creations arising out of these, including the “deconstruction” of familiar dishes and extraordinary parodies of home and street cooking. What you get at one of the new restaurants is nothing at all like what you get at home—though ambitious and well-heeled home cooks can now attempt to reproduce restaurant dishes (in something like the way that great art works are now available in giclee reproductions).

Have you heard of the foie gras flan that won Markus Samuelsson the series 2 Top Chef Masters? I know that some philosophers claim to be professional level cooks, but even if you, dear reader, are one of these, you would find it just about impossible to do in the best appointed kitchen. You just don’t have the technique. Well, you might contest that. However that might be, only a professional at the very highest level could have designed the recipe.