When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the molten lava covered the Roman city of Pompeii, preserving urban life in a deadly aspic. Archeologists have uncovered taverns with kitchens, very much like the bars and grills of our time. Ingredients were mostly (but not entirely) locally sourced and included chicken, fish, nuts and eggs. The little wood-fired ovens suggest that pizza might have been on the menu.
Pompeii is where William Sitwell begins his latest book, The Restaurant: A 2,000 Year History of Dining Out. He could just as well have called it a history of hospitality because his unfailingly engaging journey across centuries and continents finds many cultures where restaurants—as we define them—were unknown. In the premodern world, religious organizations provided food and shelter for travelers and the impoverished; individuals were duty bound in many societies to be hospitable to strangers. But in some places where commerce was active, a recognizable restaurant industry took shape. In Britain, the number of public houses serving food rose dramatically after Henry VIII outlawed the monasteries that had helped to feed his subjects.
The dissolution of the English monasteries wasn’t the only social upheaval to spur the spread of restaurants. According to Sitwell, the French Revolution caused a culinary revolution when the suddenly unemployed chefs of the old deposed aristocracy set up shop in Paris and began to serve a new paying clientele.
Sitwell doesn’t restrict himself to haute cuisine but also explores the unprecedented success of McDonald’s and Taco Bell. He takes a certain waggish delight in noting that the “trail of fast-food flops is as doleful as a litter of discarded wrappers, burger boxes and drinks containers.” And yet food on the go has a long lineage that includes the “cook shops” of late medieval England, stalls in the crowded marketplaces whose chefs whipped out fried fish, boiled poultry and hot pies.
The anecdotes are illuminating. Coffee, an invention of the East, was introduced to the British Isles by a refugee Eastern Orthodox priest who set up at Oxford. Before long, coffee houses spread to London and became the places to be. The once-groggy but ambitious English middle class was energized, caffeinated, with new ideas of civil liberty, imperial conquest and capitalist drive.
If The Restaurant is a bit Anglo-centric, that’s not a problem, given the dry British wit spread across every page like marmalade on English muffins. “It is most vexing for the racist anti-immigrant who bridles at the sight of brown faces obscuring his horizon to then find himself gleefully slobbering over their curries, chows or tacos.”
Sitwell is one of Britain’s top food writers but has little patience for the bloated hype of contemporary foodie culture. He skewers sycophants who describe trendy restauranteurs as “culinary freedom fighters” and endow chefs with unwarranted star power. He reminds us of the Italian provocateur, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose Futurist Cookbook (1932) included recipes such as “roll of colonial fish” and “Tyrrhenian seaweed with coral garnish.” Marinetti was joking. The authors of trendy menus offering similar delights are terribly in earnest.
