In the Restaurant E-Book

Christoph Ribbat

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 319

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

What does eating out tell us about who we are? The restaurant is where we go to celebrate, to experience pleasure, to show off - or, sometimes, just because we're hungry. But these temples of gastronomy hide countless stories. This is the tale of the restaurant in all its guises, from the first formal establishments in eighteenth-century Paris serving 'restorative' bouillon, to today's new Nordic cuisine, via grand Viennese cafés and humble fast food joints. Here are tales of cooks who spend hours arranging rose petals for Michelin stars, of the university that teaches the consistence of the perfect shake, of the lunch counter that sparked a protest movement, of the writers - from Proust to George Orwell - who have been inspired or outraged by the restaurant's secrets. As this dazzlingly entertaining, eye-opening book shows, the restaurant is where performance, fashion, commerce, ritual, class, work and desire all come together. Through its windows, we can glimpse the world. Christoph Ribbat (b. 1968) has taught in Bochum, Boston and Basel, and is now Professor of American Studies at the University of Paderborn.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page  1   OPENING TIMES  2   POSTWAR HUNGER  3   THE PRESENT DAY  4   READING RESTAURANTSIndex About the PublisherCopyright

1

OPENING TIMES

Frances hurries through the crowds of Chicago. She is looking for a job as a waitress. The trams screech in her ears, a policeman’s whistle shrills, the ‘L’ train thunders. She is thirty-seven, a teacher by training. She started off in a village school with just one classroom, near St Clair in Michigan, right out by the Canadian border. She has lived in the suburbs of Detroit, in the suburbs of Chicago, and then in Great Falls, Montana. That was when she married William and stopped teaching. Then the economy in Great Falls collapsed. They moved back to Chicago. And William became incurably ill. In her threadbare black dress, Frances battles her way through the crowd of people in dark, narrow Van Buren Street. She has seen a job posting in the Chicago Daily News. Now she stands in front of the restaurant. She looks in through the window at the bright, decked tables, at ladies and gentlemen eating at leisure, white-aproned girls holding plates in their hands. Frances hesitates. Should she go in or not? Her heart is beating so fast, she writes later, that she almost can’t breathe. But she enters eventually, and asks the man behind the cigar counter whether they need a waitress. Yes, he says. They did. But they hired one just yesterday. I see, says Frances. She flees back on to the street, back into the hubbub of the year 1917.1

*

The Chinese capital is famous for its restaurants. Fish and seafood are excellent here, as are beef, poultry and noodles. The choices are many and varied, because the restaurants aren’t just catering to long-established residents, but also to the refugees who now call this their home. Their traditions and dietary restrictions – for example those of Muslim residents – enrich the diversity of the local cuisine. The sweet soy soup at the market comes highly recommended. Also worthy of mention are Mother Song’s fish soup and rice served with mutton, while in front of the Longevity and Compassion Palace, meat cooked in ashes is on offer. The boiled pork at Wei-the-Big-Knife at the Cat Bridge is outstanding, and the honey fritters from Zhou Number Five by the five-span pavilion are absolutely exquisite. This is all according to a gourmet. In the year 1275 he writes about the impressive gastronomic scene in Hangzhou, the capital during the Song dynasty.2

*

The history of the European restaurant begins with the fact that people aren’t hungry. Or at least, they act as though they aren’t. In Paris in 1760, with all its malnourished inhabitants, it wouldn’t be in keeping with the zeitgeist for the elite to stuff themselves to bursting point in some tavern or inn. Anyone with any sense of decorum has a delicate constitution. Unable to stomach much, they barely eat a thing, but still take their time about it. The upper-class clientele are enticed by the restaurant, this luxuriously furnished new style of inn. Large mirrors in which to admire oneself and others hang on the walls. The ‘restorative’ bouillons which lend the new restaurants their name, derived from the Latin restaurans, steam from decorative porcelain bowls. Made from poultry, game or beef stock, these brews are said to replenish the strength of those who are too sensitive for other forms of nourishment.

It is not the bouillons which make the restaurant successful, however, but rather its focus on individuals and their desires. Customers here don’t have to sit at a long, shared tavern table with all sorts of strangers. They get a table all to themselves. They can decide the hour at which they wish to be served. They make their choices from a menu.3 After the revolution, representatives of the National Assembly come to Paris from the provinces, and go out to eat together in restaurants. The Parisians emulate them. Before long, establishments begin to open which are also, fashionably, called restaurants, but more reasonably priced and less plush than the prototypes. In the revolutionary era, the guild system begins to ease its grip. Gastronomes now have more freedom to satisfy their customers’ varied desires. And from the very beginning, service is of great importance for the restaurant’s success. Enlightenment philosopher Diderot, for one, after dining out in 1767, praises the bouillon, the iced water and the beautiful restauratrice.4

*

Out in Van Buren Street, in front of the restaurant with the bright tables and smart waitresses, Frances, rejected would-be waitress, briefly feels relieved. But then she has to make her way onwards, to the next establishment that has placed an ad in the Daily News. She is just one of countless women in Chicago who are competing for jobs. She has often thought about these crowds of women, crashing into the heart of the city from the outskirts each morning like a tidal wave. Many are young, some already middle-aged, making themselves look younger with make-up and overly short skirts, while others are simply old, not even attempting to feign youth. An army of women: secretaries, hairdressers, textile workers, daughters of farmers and daughters of factory workers. They are cheap labour, because they are women and because they have no experience when it comes to life and work in the big city. The most visible female workers serve behind the expansive windows of the restaurants – of which Chicago now has over a thousand.5 And Frances wants to be one of them.

So she moves on. In the next restaurant, a woman is standing behind the cigar counter. She sends Frances on to a young man, who, in turn, refers her to a gentleman in the backroom, the manager, who is sorting aprons and jackets. She asks him whether he needs another waitress. He asks her whether she has worked as a waitress before. She lies and says yes. He asks her whether she is quick on her feet. She asks him whether it looks like she’s not. And then another young man leads her down a narrow staircase into a damp, foul-smelling cellar. Here, ten young women are getting changed, putting on lipstick, sweeping rouge across their cheeks, powdering their noses, tossing make-up brushes back and forth and cursing with a crudity that Frances has never heard before in her life. No one pays any attention to her at first, but eventually one of the quieter girls helps her get into her uniform. Frances is now a waitress. A waitress with a secret.

*

On the surface, the early Parisian restaurant resembles the cafés in which bourgeois public life develops. People come together in the cafés. They debate. They argue. Everything is very different from church or the royal court, different from the elite salons, the academies or scholarly societies. Anyone who can pay for his drinks and his food gets in. Anyone can join in the conversation. Newspapers are scattered around, supplying opinions. No authority intervenes, ends disputes or keeps order. If an argument arises, then eventually – or at least so one would imagine – common sense prevails, and the argument reaches a conclusion.6

But the restaurant is different. You don’t go there to debate with others, nor to read the newspaper. You go to unwind or to put your sensibility on show. Once seated at the table, you make a choice that has little bearing on the broader political situation: between poultry, game or beef bouillon. The blend of public and private life sought here leans more towards the private. The Parisian café offers large rooms in which you can see everything and everyone. The restaurant, on the other hand, has niches and alcoves for customers to retreat into – groups and couples alike. There are cabinets particuliers – special rooms in which one can conduct private conversations or meet for assignations ranging from the romantic to the erotic.7 This is not the place for intense public discourse. And it’s important to note: men and women appear together here.8 A very unusual occurrence – at least for the non-French around 1800, who speak of it with wide-eyed amazement.9

*

This is what Frances Donovan isn’t telling her colleagues: she wants to become a waitress for research purposes, not because she needs the money. With William being terminally ill, it has become clear to her that she will have to make her way through life alone in future. So she has decided to get another degree. She is studying English at the University of Chicago – with a minor in sociology.

The Chicago School of Sociology is becoming world-renowned. In these early days, Frances is a part of it.10 The professors challenge their students to use the entire city as a laboratory. They urge them to investigate all facets of urban life: from migration to family life to youth crime.11 To focus on how newcomers to Chicago are either fitting into the city or foundering in it. Methodical reflections are of little importance to the Chicago sociologists of this time. They seek to break free of the ceremonial character of academia. Their goal is to experience, observe and record, in the moment.12

Frances Donovan is so impressed by these concepts that she herself becomes a sociologist. A freelance one, so to speak. Without any contract, position or research funds, she sets out. And in the wilds of the new Chicago, there is no figure more interesting to her than that of the waitress. In 1917, Frances becomes one of them. One year later, in 1918, William will die of his incurable illness. And two years later still, in 1920, a Boston press will publish The Woman Who Waits. It is the first academic study of the modern waitress, written by Frances Donovan.

*

Before long, Parisian restaurants of the late eighteenth century are filled with the scent of more than just bouillon. There’s chicken and macaroni, compotes and crèmes, eggs and confitures.13 The Véry brothers’ establishments specialize in oysters. Café Hardy makes a name for itself with grilled meats. The Trois Frères Provençaux serve southern French cuisine, cooking with olive oil instead of cream, bringing the bouillabaisse to Paris. By the early nineteenth century, this new type of eating house has firmly established itself, in Paris – and only in Paris.14

The era of the restaurant critic is dawning. Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière publishes the Almanac of the Gourmand, releasing new volumes regularly throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century. Grimod is tremendously successful. Writers have turned their attention to food before, of course. But it is new for the emphasis to be exclusively on the culinary and on a world peopled only by consumers and chefs.

Grimod invents the gourmand. This new cultural figure wanders the streets of Paris, gazing at the sweets in window displays, pursuing the scent of roasted meat. He recommends little red-breasted robins as a delicacy. He compares the pâtissier Rouget to the playwright Racine. He praises Theurlot’s butter and the macaroni at Corazza and at Magasin d’Italie. A typical Parisian, he claims that although the best meat may come from the Poitou or Auvergne regions, it only really takes on flavour after it has been delivered to the capital. No topic is too trivial for him. His almanac even addresses how best to sweep away crumbs from the table. He visits and evaluates restaurants, and claims to be able to ruin the reputation of an establishment with a single sentence. Grimod also develops a new type of customer for the post-bouillon restaurant. The gourmand is no longer too sensitive or fragile: as delicate as his palate may be, this customer is healthy and strong.15

Writers such as Grimod, Carême and Brillat-Savarin transform the physical act of food consumption into an aesthetic and intellectual practice.16 Their readers are curious to discover an increasing variety of pleasures. And so two aspects of nineteenth-century society cross-fertilize one another: gastronomy and the expanding world of Parisian journalism. French cuisine only becomes French cuisine because so many people are talking about it.17

But great as the curiosity of these dedicated restaurant visitors may be, the kitchen remains closed to them. Only waitresses and waiters cross back and forth between the consumption and preparation areas. For everyone else, the glittering sphere of culinary refinement remains clearly divided from the steamy production space. This is what the success of the restaurant rests upon. It creates illusions. The Véry brothers, for example, famed for their oysters, call their inn Chez Véry, to make you feel you’re in their home. But that is most definitely not the case.

Not all customers are able to cope with this. In a restaurant called Véfour, in 1839, former infantry officer Alphonse Robert hurls a wine bottle against a mirror when the waiter refuses to put it on a tab. It is a very expensive and highly symbolic scene, and one which leads to a sensational trial. By throwing the bottle, the officer destroys the illusion of elegance and ease constructed at Véfour. But then again, the fact that the waiter brings the bill at the end of the meal destroys the fantasy too.18

*

Frances Donovan wears a uniform now. She belongs. A colleague shows her how things are done. Five barstools at a counter right at the front: this is her area. She has the lunch-time shift, from half past eleven to half past two. First, the customer is given a glass of water, cutlery, a napkin. Then he orders. Once he receives his order, a card is punched. If he orders more, the card is punched again. The first customer has already arrived. He wants ham on rye and coffee. She spots the coffee. But where can she get the rye bread and the ham? Frances whispers her question to a colleague in a white jacket. Back there, he says, you have to call it out. He calls it out for her. The sandwich appears. Now everything is clear to her. She calls for sandwiches. She knows where the coffee is, where the milk is, doughnuts, cake. Then someone wants the roast beef special. It’s not where the ham on rye is. In the Foundry, says another waiter. Where’s the Foundry? At the back. She hurries off. The Foundry is full of sweating cooks, and in front of it waitresses are shouting orders. The roast beef special comes with mashed potato and a little mound of spaghetti, and the fat, cross-eyed cook slices the roast beef and tells her she should take thirty cents for it. Back to the table. Someone wants hot milk toast. Frances yells out ‘hot milk toast’ into the Foundry, but hot milk toast, says the fat cook, isn’t from the Foundry, but the Laundry. Not back here, up the front. She hurries to the front. Frances yells ‘hot milk toast’ into the Laundry. Correct. And so it goes on, from the Laundry to the table, from the table to the Foundry and back, napkins, cutlery, glass of water, coffee, and in the midst of it all a customer with a red neck tie stares at her lustily and wants to talk. She doesn’t want to talk, most definitely not. Her colleagues help her. They advise her to keep leftover scraps of bread and butter for herself, to take a dirty glass when she can’t find a clean one, and not to let herself be caught doing it.

The second day comes and goes. The third comes. Before their shift, in the changing room, the waitresses share stories about men. One girl pulls up her skirts and shows the others her white silk stockings and yellow silk suspender belt, stolen from her landlady, who she claims will never find out. Then comes the hectic lunchtime shift. Men come, men go; most of them want meat, coffee and cake. Sometimes there will be a handsome and better-dressed one ordering a cream roll or a chocolate éclair. The revolving door never stands still, the customers push their way in and back out again, the waitresses serve, clear, run to the Laundry, to the Foundry, fetching napkins, a glass of water, cutlery, again and again. The manager whips a cloth after them, driving them on, the waitresses cry out ‘Coming through!’ to carve their way through the crowded space – until, on the fourth day, a gentleman appears at Frances’ counter and orders bread, butter, peach slices and black coffee. Frances serves him. The manager shouts out that she should bring the gentleman some cream for his coffee. Frances says that the gentleman doesn’t want any cream, the manager says that she should bring the gentleman some cream regardless, she says again that the gentleman doesn’t want any cream, then the gentleman himself says to the manager that he doesn’t want any cream. The gentleman eats and disappears. The manager says to Frances that she shouldn’t contradict him. Frances contradicts him again. And the manager fires her. He tells her to give him her apron, right away. She takes it off and presses it into his hand. Then she goes down into the cellar and gets changed.

Her colleagues rally round her. They tell her that she’ll find another job without any trouble. They stroke her arm and compliment her on her beautiful waist, saying that they noticed her beautiful waist every day, and her brown eyes too, so pretty – and Frances is almost moved to tears.19

*

In the early 1850s, a man named Spencer runs a restaurant on the Mississippi. The eating house is located on a boat, moored alongside Cairo, in the state of Illinois, right where the Ohio and the Mississippi flow together. Here is the border between the South and the North, between the slave states and freedom. Another decade will pass before this world is changed by the Civil War.

Spencer is a free black American. Not a slave. A businessman. And an excellent cook. A contemporary observer explains his talent as ‘one of the instincts of his race’. He calls Spencer’s establishment a ‘restaurat’, which could either be a typographical error or a sign that, in the year 1854, Cairo, Illinois, is a very long way indeed from Paris.

For travellers on the Mississippi, the main transport route through this part of the United States, Spencer’s restaurant boat is an insiders’ tip. White gastronomes in the area are less enthused. To them, Spencer is unwelcome competition. They plot against him and drag him into a lawsuit. He is ordered to appear before the Justice of the Peace. And he does, bringing with him a cask of explosives and a pistol. He makes it clear that he will fire the weapon into the cask if things don’t go his way. Afraid of a suicide attack, the Justice of the Peace lets him go. But the white people of Cairo gather on the riverbank in front of Spencer’s boat, wanting to destroy his restaurant and drive him away.

Spencer draws his weapon and fires. He shoots eleven people, killing three. The crowd fight their way on to the boat, set it on fire, cut it loose. As it floats away downstream, Spencer appears on the roof, holding in his hand a part of the stove, the heart of his establishment. He has tied the metal part to a rope and slung the other end round his neck. He screams out his contempt to the people on the riverbank. Then he jumps into the water, and the section of oven pulls him down into the depths.20

*

The name of a restaurant in itself tells a story. One of the first eating places in Paris is called Le Grande Taverne de Londres, in an attempt to capitalize on late eighteenth-century French Anglophilia.21 Meanwhile, the first dining establishments in Sydney are called Trois Frères Provençaux and Café Restaurant de Paris, transporting the customers, at least for the duration of their meal, to the gourmet metropolis on the other side of the globe.22

The name is not the only textual component involved; the menu is also of key importance. Late nineteenth-century gastronome Julius Behlendorff clearly sets out how it should be handled. He recommends keeping the menus on tables at all times, and declares it to be ‘highly inappropriate’ for a waiter to pull one out of his pocket. Behlendorff also advises an ambiguous equilibrium whereby the menu should ‘not be too extensive, but neither too short’. His advice to heed the close connection between text and reality, however, is unequivocal. It makes a ‘bad impression’ if the menu is not ‘clean and new every day’, and would lead any customer to presume ‘that the dishes, too, are from previous days’.23

The written word also ventures beyond the restaurant itself. In Delmonico’s, the most prestigious establishment in New York, head chefs become prominent authors. In 1890, Swissborn chef Alessandro Filippini publishes a compendium of his recipes with the pedagogical subtitle How to Buy Food, How to Cook it, and How to Serve it.24 His colleague, Frenchman Charles Ranhofer, goes on to surpass him; in 1894, he releases a monumental cookbook entitled The Epicurean. It is so detailed that, according to his unimpressed successor Leopold Rimmer, it reveals ‘all the secrets’ of Delmonico’s kitchen.25

In the homeland of the restaurant, the tyre company Michelin publishes its gastronomic guide for the first time in 1900. At this point, they haven’t yet started handing out stars. One has to actually read an entry before making culinary decisions. Literary figures, too, discover the Parisian gastronomy scene as a setting.26 Émile Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris, published in 1873, becomes essential reading for gourmets, portraying the market halls as the fragrant heart of the city. Now, around the turn of the century, novels and plays are set in dining establishments, and travel articles depict the dishes, the decoration, the spectacle. Only the very select few can afford to dine in sophisticated restaurants, but they are, according to Rebecca Spang, ‘in the view and in the imagination of all’.27

*

Frances Donovan doesn’t give up. She looks for her next job, going from restaurant to restaurant, collecting rejections. Finally, she finds another position. On the second day, she takes the wrong door into the kitchen and collides with another waitress. A tray crashes to the floor and she is fired. And so the search begins again. Her next job is in the spectacular Café of Reflections, where there are mirrors everywhere – on the ceiling, on the walls, on the columns in the middle of the room. The tables are made of glass, the chairs are white, the lights dazzling. Frances spills soup on to one of the customer’s hats. After five days, she is given her notice.

Over a period of nine months, Frances Donovan will work in fifteen different establishments. She gets fired again and again. Sometimes for answering back, sometimes, as she herself admits, because she simply isn’t a very good waitress.28 And so she gets to know all the different types of restaurant in Chicago. There’s the hash house, open night and day, where men can quickly fill their bellies. There’s the tea room, clean, attractive, with salads and sandwiches on offer, for ladies and a higher class of business people. Restaurants of the finer variety are called ‘cafés’ in Chicago. Donovan, however, considers these differences to be irrelevant. When it comes down to it, she states, no customer, not even the most upper-class one, has the faintest idea who is preparing the food. She declares that cooks are ‘the lowest type of men’ to be found in the big city, considering them to be the ‘scum’.29 And she also claims that, while the kitchen of the chic Hayden Square Tea Room may seem very sanitary at first glance, at night it is frequented by rats, some of which are the size of small cats. They wander across dirty plates; rat mothers with their children, on the hunt for delicacies.30

*

Cold cuts and bread, and beer in a pewter tankard to wash it down: that’s what’s on the menu if you go out to eat in late nineteenth-century London. It’s the kind of thing you would order in the chop house, an old British institution. Or you might hurry out during your lunch break to get a sandwich and a glass of milk. Around 1900, however, these customs are pushed out by a new kind of dining space, now imported from Paris. The steadily increasing number of tourists, the office and shop workers, the theatre folk and their audiences: they want more than cold cuts. The restaurant is more distinguished than the traditional inns. Or more exotic. Or both.

This makes things both interesting and complicated. The new London restaurants are run by the French, by Italians, by the Swiss. Many of the waiters are Italian, Polish or German. The menus in the more lavish establishments are, of course, written in French. So it’s not uncommon for a foreign waiter to get muddled up between French, English, his own native language and the complex culinary specialities on offer. This obstructs the dining experience for British customers. To make matters worse, some Londoners suspect the Italian food they’re getting is not as good as, and above all much more expensive than what Italian diners are being served. And to top it all off, English waiters are fleeing in the face of foreign competition. Many of them head for New York.

Nonetheless, the cosmopolitan restaurant grows in popularity. The capital of the Empire profits from the colonies; in an increasing number of establishments, the food being cooked is Indian. The South Asian chefs exude competence at the stove and onlookers take note of this, impressed. Around the turn of the twentieth century, an Indian restaurant begins to offer a delivery service – a very modern concept – to all households that can be reached on the Underground. The manufacturer of Nizam Madras Curry Powder has at its disposal a chef who offers on-site classes in Indian cooking to any ‘hotel, club or restaurant’. Even an Italian restaurant begins to offer veal cutlet in curry sauce (a critic praises its ‘distinctive excellence’). In London, one can now consume Chinese and Malaysian dishes, Greek pastries and Nigerian soup. As the new century begins, the erstwhile capital of cold cuts experiences globalization both on the plate and in the belly.31

*

At this time, gourmets find high-end cuisine in the restaurants of large palace hotels.32 Twice daily, hundreds of guests are catered to there: with luxurious dishes from the French tradition. In 1889, the Savoy opens in London, in 1895 the Palace Hotel in St Moritz, in 1897 the Vier Jahreszeiten in Hamburg. This is where the European and American superrich come together to feast and be seen. And the upper echelons always eat the same thing, regardless of whether they’re in London or St Moritz. Caviar and lobster are ever present. Intense sauces slosh across the plates. Distinguished head waiters flambé crêpes Suzette. Blue flames flicker, smoke rises heavy with the scent of liqueur. According to the wife of the hotelier César Ritz, this evokes ‘a feeling of proper respect’ in the guests.33

The badly paid cooks in these palaces remain invisible and are shown no respect at all. They work fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours a day. Most of them die before reaching forty, due to the excess of physical stress their bodies are subjected to. They toil in windowless, barely ventilated kitchens. Chefs have more vocational illnesses than miners. They suffer from a chronic lack of oxygen, tuberculosis, varicose veins and – ironically – malnourishment.34

This is the world Georges Auguste Escoffier comes from, and now he sets to work reforming it: in the restaurant dining rooms as well as the kitchens. His Guide Culinaire of 190335 declares that food must look like food again.36 In this era of ornamentation, his belief that everything on the plate should be edible is novel. And yet Escoffier is no culinary revolutionary. He is simply unable to turn his back on the heavy sauces. But he allows himself to become increasingly inspired by simple French country cuisine. The composition of the dishes must be comprehensible, the customer must be able to recognize the ingredients. Escoffier invents a multitude of new, creatively named dishes. He develops the dessert Peach Melba and dedicates it to the actress Nelly Melba. The ‘consommé Zola’, made with white truffles, he baptizes in honour of the great novelist. The ‘suprême de Volaille Jeanette’, a cold chicken-based delicacy, he names after a ship which sank during a polar expedition. He bemoans the fact that there is no copyright protection for new culinary developments.37

First and foremost, however, Escoffier is a theorist of the division of labour. In his kitchen, there are precise responsibilities: the rôtisseur, the saucier, the pâtissier, the gardemanger, the entremetier. Previously, it took one single cook a quarter of an hour to produce ‘Oeufs Meyerbeer’. In the Escoffier kitchen it takes just a few minutes for the entremetier to prepare the eggs, the rôtisseur the sliced lamb kidneys and the saucier the truffle sauce.38 The newly organized kitchen is cleaner, better ventilated, brighter and safer for the men who work in it. Above all, that work is quicker and more efficient.

Escoffier gets right to the heart of why this is so important. The restaurant clientele of the early twentieth century no longer have time at their disposal. The restaurant owner cannot count upon a ‘feeling of proper respect’ towards his establishment. His waiters can flambé to their hearts’ content, but the attention span required for long mealtimes and elaborate dishes is no longer a given. Modern diners, says Escoffier, only have ‘eyes for one another’, not for the plates.39 Once again, the point has been reached where the majority of restaurant-goers have barely any interest in the food.

*

Frances Donovan may speak about rats and dirt and reputed human ‘scum’ in the kitchens. But in truth all she cares about are the waitresses: the girls from the changing room, the warm-hearted warriors with their crude manners and stolen undergarments. She tells of young women who take off their wedding rings in order to get more tips. She knows that the slowest servers can be found in the department-store cafeterias and the prettiest in the so-called cafés. This is also where the wages are highest; the waitresses wear the latest fashions, silk stockings, the finest pink undergarments.40

Frances is fond of her colleagues, apart from those who steal her pencil or her tips. And yet she sees things through the eyes of an academic. Or rather, through the eyes of the woman she happens to be: a fair bit older than the average waitress, educated, from the upper-middle classes, a woman who feels superior to the waitresses. She considers herself to be more virtuous. The restaurant girls, she criticizes, read almost nothing but the murder cases in the daily paper. She calls her colleagues ‘ignorant’ and ‘coarse’. She observes that they are actually ashamed of their work, that they would like to come across as sophisticated, but that their bad English always gives them away. ‘There’s nothing very complex about the waitress,’ she concludes in the closing pages of her study. ‘Her behaviour can be reduced down to the two fundamental appetites of food hunger and sex hunger.’41

In the changing rooms, she takes a close look at her colleagues’ bodies. She gazes upon bared chests, fresh skin, and wonders how many of these sexually-so-active young women suffer from syphilis. She quotes statistics from the year 1915, in which the waitresses of Chicago led by a large margin the ranking of professions with the highest incidence of sexually transmitted diseases.42

After nine months in diverse restaurants, however, Frances Donovan is no longer able to hide her amazement. ‘She is often unwashed’, she writes of the typical waitress, ‘and her teeth are unfilled, but she knows life and she is not afraid of life, to her it is big, dramatic, brutal but vivid, full of colour.’43 To her, the waitress is a free spirit.44 She goes out into the world and fights her way through it: Donovan respects this. The waitress is completely different from the kind of woman who ‘comes running with a smile to greet the husband when he rings the bell’ in the evening. And so she praises the ‘striking personalities in this vulgar Bohemian group’, and sees the waitress as part of a feminist movement demanding freedom for all women.45

*

Guido Ara from Cologne, Germany, wants to help waiters. Whether in restaurants, cafés or hotels, they need to be able to speak foreign languages. Tourism is taking off and international business contacts are increasing. But waiters don’t have time to attend language courses. German waiters may be able to get by in English, concedes Ara, but not other world languages. And so he promises the readers of his books that ‘with a little effort’, they will be able to pick up the Italian and French they need in just eight days.

Ara’s method is simple and accessible. It covers not only the written language, but pronunciation too. ‘Zheu voo a-portay leh kart deh van too-de-sweet’, the waiter can promise the customer after reading Ara’s book. He can comment on the services he offers: ‘Vo-a-sea vo-tra shap-po’. And he can also announce the recommended dishes: perhaps the ‘pee-yeah de-voh sos rem-o-lad’, perhaps ‘ern bif-stek o pom-sso-tay’ or ‘ern kart de dan rot-y a-vek marm-e-lad de pom’? When Italian guests come in, he can also offer specialities such ‘do-eh sal-seetchy kon krow-ty’ and understand when they query the accuracy of the bill – ‘Cam-a-yer-ee chay un air-ror-ay nel con-to.’ The French sound different: ‘Gar-son,’ they say, ‘ill-ya une er-ror don leh noot.’ A German waiter who can respond to that is the ‘modern waiter’ to whom the author introduces himself: Guido Ara, gastronomy and language expert, five years before the start of the First World War.46

*

He would let himself be killed in this restaurant. He would allow himself to be massacred ‘without any resistance whatsoever’, because he feels a unique ‘sense of joy’ here. He becomes a completely different person, totally carefree. In these rooms, he lives entirely in the present, is ‘no longer [his] grandmother’s grandson’, as he puts it, but the ‘brother of the waiter’ who serves him and his companion. He is in a state of ecstasy. Granted, the beer he drinks here plays a part in it too, along with the champagne and the port, but so does the orchestra with its march music, waltzes, opera melodies and music-hall chansons, and the beautiful Princess of Luxembourg, who greets him and utters a few melodious words in his direction, and the tall and spindly head waiter who reminds him of a macaw at the zoo, and the ‘sporty gait’ of the other waiters, who, despite their haste, manage to deliver the chocolate soufflés safely to the tables and present the lamb chops and steamed potatoes to the customers in exactly the same arrangement in which they left the kitchen.

This is what impresses him most: how the seemingly hectic chaos reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be a world of order and harmony. To him, the tables full of customers seem like planets, and the waiters around the tables like satellites, bringing wine, hors d’oeuvres, glasses. The serving staff hurry around and cross each other’s paths without pause, and he sees the ‘regularity of these dizzying yet structured rotations’ in the intoxicating system of the restaurant.

He actually feels ‘sorry’ for the ‘other customers’, he says. They only think about the person they happen to be eating with, or about how high the bill will be or the fact that they will be coming again the next day. They don’t see the tables as planets and the waiters as satellites. Their imagination does not stretch to the kind of thinking with which one can transform the everyday world. But he, the narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, does possess this strength of imagination – and he feels it with particular intensity when he dines with his companion Saint-Loup at the restaurant Rivebelle.47

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What counts as a restaurant in the first decades of the twentieth century? The elitist, aristocratic establishments soon move aside, and the middle classes begin to take over. In Berlin, Aschinger’s Bierquellen are multiplying: dozens of fast-food restaurants distributed across the entire city. They offer beer sausages and potato salad. Fresh rolls are complimentary. The company’s central base produces the dishes on an industrial level: 2 million pairs of beer sausages in the year 1904 alone. The Aschingers invent a device which can cook 942 eggs simultaneously. The spice mortar has an electric mechanism. Colour enhancers like ‘spinach green’, ‘sauce brown’ and ‘crab red’ lend a hand with the visuals. But this mass production and culinary uniformity doesn’t necessarily guarantee automated behaviour from the clientele: in 1907, the writer Robert Walser observes that even in the standing-only Aschinger fast-food places, people seem to ‘let time drift away’ in a ‘downright facetious’ manner. He smears brown mustard across his sandwich, drinks a Helles beer, then another, and concludes: ‘We’re all human, after all.’48

In New York, where the restaurant was a bastion of all things French and aristocratic, haute cuisine becomes just one option amongst many. In 1918, an expert counts fifty different types of establishments in which New Yorkers can fill their bellies.49 These include the automat, a German invention.50 As early as the 1870s, a new, cost-efficient delicacy emerges in America: it is not as tough as some steaks and consists of meat which has been shredded then put back together again. Its name, initially at least, is Steak Hamburg.51

Before this, everything was straightforward. The best food was to be found in luxury hotels. Now, in the early twentieth century, the situation has become confusing. There are restaurants everywhere. As to how good they are, there’s no way of knowing. Written accounts become even more important than before. You read up and inform yourself first, then go out. Marcel Rouff and Maurice-Edmond Sailland travel all across France in their quest to produce the twenty-eight-volume culinary guide La France Gastronomique. The success of their work can be attributed to the country’s automobilization. And they also collaborate with the SNCF, the French railway company. Sailland, known by the pseudonym ‘Curnonsky’, speaks of the ‘holy alliance of tourism and gastronomy’. He creates an index of categories for the establishments he reviews. They range from the ‘high-end’ via the ‘bourgeois’ to the ‘regional’, right down to the ‘country kitchen’. It is from this index that the Michelin star system is developed.52