Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (37 page)

Coffee houses soon became the favourite haunt of newsmen, for whom their open debate made them ideal places to pick up the latest gossip – although, as one contemporary ballad noted, its veracity might be doubtful:

You that delight in wit and mirth,

And love to hear such news

That come from all parts of the earth,

Turks, Dutch and Danes and Jews;

I’ll send you to the rendezvous,

Where it is smoking new;

Go hear it at the coffee house

It cannot but be true.
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By the end of the century, coffee houses were well established in the City; they also dominated political and intellectual life in London. As we saw earlier, Covent Garden drew coffee houses like a magnet, and there was intense rivalry between various establishments as to which was the most ‘happening’ place in town. Will’s in Russell Street boasted the patronage of Dryden for 40 years: he could be found in winter occupying a large chair by the fire, or in summer on the balcony, dispensing witty remarks to a captivated audience. Meanwhile, up the street was Button’s, established in 1712 by Joseph Addison, founder-editor of the
Spectator
, who played host there to a gallery of influential politicians and writers including Richard Steele, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Anyone was welcome to join in the debate: the front door even had a letter box shaped like a lion’s head, through which passers-by could post contributions to the paper.

With their shared intimacy, free speech and political leanings, coffee houses created a completely new sort of urban social space. They represented the arrival of what the sociologist Jürgen Habermas called the ‘bourgeois public sphere’: a domain in which people from all walks of life could meet and converse as equals; where, for the first time, ‘public opinion’ could form.
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During the eighteenth century, the sphere would expand into the salons and academies of Paris and ‘table societies’ of Germany; during the nineteenth, it would include London
clubs and Parisian cafés. But in the days of London’s first coffee rush, that was still a long way off. While Londoners sat around and dished the dirt, Parisians remained mired in the
Ancien Régime
: a milieu that was to give rise to a radically different kind of eatery – one that would eventually challenge the very sociability of public dining.

Paris before the Revolution had no equivalent to London’s taverns and coffee shops, nor to the intellectual life they fostered. The nearest to the former were
traiteurs
, eating-houses that enjoyed a state monopoly over the sale of cooked meats, and served table d’hôte meals to loyal groups of regulars. However, as fashionable society in the eighteenth century responded to the Romantic rediscovery of nature, a dissatisfaction grew with the
traiteurs
’ heavy fare, and various figures, Rousseau prominent among them, began to call for an altogether lighter, more natural diet. In 1767, a
traiteur
by the name of Minet responded, opening an establishment in Paris with the following advertisement: ‘Those who suffer from weak and delicate chests, and whose diets therefore do not usually include an evening meal, will be delighted to find a public place where they can go and have a consommé without offending their sense of delicacy …’
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The consommé in question was a restorative meat bouillon known as a
restaurant
, kept on the boil all day long so that clients could pop in for a cup of it any time they liked. More medicine than food, the
restaurant
– and the establishments to which it gave its name – was destined to change the face of public dining for ever. The new restaurateurs were soon dishing up other ‘healthy’ foods such as semolina, rice-creams, fruit in season, eggs and white cheeses; the very foods, as Rebecca Spang pointed out in her book
The Invention of the Restaurant
, that were eaten by Rousseau’s rustic heroines.

Restaurants presented an entirely new way of eating out. Anyone, including women, could go there at any time of day, sit at their own table, order what they liked off a menu, and pay for it separately. Individual, independent, anonymous; restaurants were about as far from the enforced camaraderie of
traiteurs
as one could get; which, as
the latter soon realised, made them hugely attractive. Soon
traiteurs
began opening their own
salles du restaurateur
, many of them staffed by ex-courtly chefs relieved of their posts by the Revolution. Richly decorated with boudoir-like interiors complete with mirrors, chandeliers and painted nature scenes, restaurants were unlike any previous public eating-house, and tourists flocked to Paris to be shocked by their louche decors and even loucher clients, whose behaviour they found utterly perplexing. This account by Antoine Rosny, who visited Paris in 1801, is typical:

On arriving in the dining room, I remarked with astonishment numerous tables placed one beside another, which made me think that we were waiting for a large group, or were perhaps going to dine at a table d’hôte. But my surprise was at its greatest when I saw people enter without greeting each other and without seeming to know each other, seat themselves without looking at each other, and eat separately without speaking to each other, or even offering to share their food.
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It would take another hundred years for restaurants to catch on outside Paris, but what Rosny was witnessing was nothing short of a social revolution. By giving clients a choice of what to eat, restaurants were dismantling the ancient laws of the table, replacing its companionship with theatrical individualism. From now on, dining out would focus not on the camaraderie of diners, but on the gastronomic genius of the chefs who cooked for them.

Restaurants required a whole new kind of diner to appreciate them fully, and Grimod de la Reynière, maverick nobleman and gastronomic guru, was the self-appointed man. In 1803, Grimod went on a series of ‘nutritive strolls’ through Paris, publishing the results in his
Almanach des Gourmands
, the world’s first restaurant guide. It was an instant hit. Where the bourgeois had once fallen over themselves to learn how to give the perfect dinner party, they now clamoured to be told where to go out and eat. The
Almanach
became an annual publication, acquiring the sort of holy status reserved today for the
Guide Michelin
, with the power to make or break the restaurants it reviewed. Professional
gourmandism was soon flourishing in Paris, along with the idea that fine food could only be enjoyed by refined aristocratic palates. The latter notion appealed to restaurateurs themselves, many of whom were used to pleasing noble employers. The bouillon-serving simplicity of early restaurants soon disappeared under a cuisine of towering complexity. Menu comprehension replaced effortless grace as the new social test, as arriviste diners struggled to decipher florid descriptions of dishes and the processes that went into producing them.

Given their obfuscation and snobbery, it is perhaps unsurprising that restaurants took a while to catch on outside Paris. However, their influence eventually spread, thanks to the diaspora of chefs who travelled first to the royal courts of Europe, then to the world at large. Men like Antonin Carême and Alexis Soyer became the first true celebrity chefs, cooking for royalty (Tsar Nicholas I and Queen Victoria respectively), and popularising the art of haute cuisine. Carême, generally held to be one of the greatest geniuses ever to wield a wooden spoon, used the Rumford range to refine the art of sauce-making, while in the 1830s Soyer created a kitchen at the Reform Club so radical that people paid to go on guided tours of it.
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Slowly but surely, French influence spread through the clubs and hotels of London, bringing with it, as the author of the
Epicure’s Year Book and Table Companion
William Jerrold announced in 1868, a new culinary sensibility: ‘If the princely kitchens have decayed, the number of people who know how to eat has vastly increased. Clubs have spread among men of modest fortune a knowledge of refined cookery.’
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This ‘refined cookery’ was, of course, French. By the turn of the century, haute cuisine was synonymous with culinary excellence in Britain, in both public and private dining rooms. ‘Mixed dining’ was soon all the rage, as fashionable men and women began eating out together for pleasure, in a way we would recognise today. By the early twentieth century, restaurants were the new focus of social life in the West, and through them, French cuisine gained a grip on the gastronomic high ground it is yet to relinquish.

Restaurants are now so much part of the urban landscape that it can seem strange to think of them as relatively new to the scene; yet their proliferation into the range of eateries we know today took place mainly during the twentieth century. The arrival of the railways was what first gave rise to a need for new sorts of public eating-houses, as large numbers of people began commuting to cities each day and needed somewhere to have lunch. While factories generally had their own works canteens, clerical and city workers resorted to dining rooms and chophouses, often clustered around railway stations or in business districts. Although the new establishments served similar food to the old taverns, they were on a much larger scale, and had smaller tables in individual booths. As restaurant-style service spread to chophouses, the anonymity of public dining that so shocked visitors to Paris the century before became commonplace. Restaurants were morphing into the diners, bistros and fast-food joints of the modern city.

While the new breed of restaurants served a useful purpose, they also posed a problem. Although city-dwellers in the past had treated public cookshops with suspicion, they had generally visited so few of them that they had come to know and trust the proprietors personally. But dining out in the industrial city was an entirely different matter. The new eateries were large and anonymous, and fears over hygiene made their unseen kitchens deeply threatening. Added to that was distrust about the way the food itself was being produced. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book
The Jungle
, in which the author exposed the grotesque and unsanitary conditions prevalent in the Chicago meat trade, led to public revulsion on both sides of the Atlantic at the idea of factory meat. Since cheap industrial meat formed the basis of every working man’s diet, something had to be done, and that something was the creation of a new kind of restaurant – one that would reassure customers about eating in public.

The answer was restaurant chains, and the idea behind them was simple. Just as food manufacturers had used brands to reassure people about their products, restaurants now used them to persuade diners there was nothing nasty lurking in the kitchen. By adopting a recognisable format repeated at every outlet – such as Howard
Johnson’s orange-tiled roofs – restaurant chains could build up a sense of brand recognition and trust among customers. Cleanliness and openness were the new watchwords, an approach that White Castle, a Kansas company founded in 1921, took to an extreme. America’s first hamburger chain, White Castle relied on selling customers the very food that
The Jungle
had put them off: cheap ground meat. As the chain’s co-founder Edgar Ingram recognised, this presented something of a challenge. Somehow, he needed to find a way to ‘break down a deep-seated prejudice against chopped beef’.
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His solution was to create an image of such purity (down to the use of the word ‘White’ in the chain’s title) that customers would feel reassured about the safety and wholesomeness of the food. The resulting restaurants had sparkling white-tiled exteriors, stainless-steel interiors, and, most radically of all, open kitchens fully visible to the dining room, so that diners could watch their meals being cooked. The company’s promotional brochure of 1932 reinforced the subliminal safety message:

When you sit at a White Castle, remember that you are one of several thousands; you are sitting on the same kind of stool; you are being served on the same kind of counter; the coffee you drink is made in accordance with a certain formula; the hamburger you eat is prepared in exactly the same way over a gas flame of the same intensity; the cups you drink from are identical with thousands of cups that thousands of other people are using at the same moment; the same standard of cleanliness protects your food.
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