Bon Appétit: The History and Significance of Restaurants
Restaurants are ingrained in modern urban culture as the backdrop for informal business meetings, casual catch-ups, and romantic evening dinners. Dining is as much about nourishment as it is about the experience: sitting down with one another, sharing a meal, experiencing cuisines, and even décor, familiar and unfamiliar. The institution, however, is a more recent invention than one may think. As the modern restaurant continues to evolve, its public-private function remains relatively unchanged, though the COVID-19 pandemic leaves the restaurant’s rare function in society on the verge of extinction.
As we reevaluate routine life during this global pause, we should take time to contemplate the role that restaurants play in society and how they came to be.
Though popular folklore credits the world’s first restaurant to 18th-century Paris, there are records that detail their presence in China and Japan as early as 1100 C.E. In Elliot Shore and Katie Rawson’s “Dining Out: A Global History of Restaurants,” restaurants arose in the crowded cities of Kaifeng and Hangzhou, each with over a million residents. These two cities were the respective northern and southern capitals of the Song Dynasty, and traveling tradesmen journeyed between the two doing business. Though part of the same Chinese dynasty, each capital varied widely in their local cuisine, and restaurants provided a sense of home and familiarity for the travelers unaccustomed to the city’s foreign foods.
In Japan, teahouse traditions of the 16th century primed the region for a robust restaurant culture. A Japanese chef from the era, Sen no Rikyu, “created the multi-course kaiseki dining tradition, in which entire tasting menus were crafted to tell the story of a particular place and season.”
Restaurants appeared in Europe a few hundred years later and seemingly independent of their Eastern occurrence. “Restaurant” is actually a French word that refers to a restorative meat broth, or bouillon. Historian Rebecca Sprang explains that restaurants developed in Paris in the mid-to-late 1700s as a place for revolutionaries to conspire and the aristocracy to laze around in decadence. Cuisine continued to evolve from simple bouillons. During the Napoleonic state, oysters and champagne became representative of excellence and luxury, which British and American tourists experienced and exported the concept of the restaurant to their respective countries.
However, Sprang notes that the physical space of the restaurant is a “public space where people go to be private” and that they offer “a crucial public space for the practice of peaceful coexistence.” Within a restaurant, an aristocrat could sit next to a proletariat, a Democrat next to a Republican, the top 1% and the other 99%. While the space was public, the meals, conversations, and relationships were private.
Moreover, as described by Sprang, the ability to belong in a public space such as a restaurant is symbolic of a person’s larger ability to belong in society at large. During the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, Black college students demonstrated this exact point: a refusal of service at a lunch counter was indicative of the refusal of rights in larger society.
The restaurant continued to follow urban centers with migrant workers and expanded globally. But the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic demonstrated the restaurant’s necessity in modern urban life. During this pandemic, restaurants were kept open even though schools, churches, and spaces for public amusement closed, no matter if the state employed tight or loose regulations. Many restaurants in Washington, DC even provided cheap meals for workers. Clearly, restaurants served a significant purpose in society beyond its topical function of providing food.
Modern dining has continued to evolve in a rapidly globalized and digitized society. The term “experiential dining” has been heralded as the next evolution of dining, though it’s a bit of a misnomer — every restaurant has an experiential component. Essential Magazine vaguely defines experiential dining as surpassing food and décor to encompass multisensory acts. For example, the Triangle’s Snap Pea Catering, which FORM previously covered, delivers exclusive pop-up dinners at a hidden location, necessitating interested parties to secure tickets well in advance. At Restaurant Jezebel, individuals share their dietary preferences and the chefs prepare unique and customized plates for each person.
The business model of restaurants has additionally adapted to an instant gratification and tech-driven society. Uber Eats and GrubHub deliver food directly to one’s door, without the need to interact with other patrons or even those that deliver the food, whether it’s to a table or a doorstep. Such a phenomenon has sprouted the ghost restaurant. These innovations, focused on limiting human interaction and shifting business online, will only be expedited by COVID-19.
The coronavirus pandemic has shed a renewed, worrying spotlight on the restaurant industry as many wonder if it will survive the pandemic. At the outset of government shutdowns and rising cases, the New York Times shared that restaurateur and Momofuku founder David Chang “isn’t sure the restaurant industry will survive COVID-19,” while a CNN op-ed gravely concedes that “Restaurants will need a miracle to survive this.” Other outlets consider how the pandemic will forever alter the restaurant industry. For example, Food & Wine posits “21 Ways Restaurants Could Change Forever, According to Chefs.” Their story considers changes from increased worker protections to virtual experiences and ghost restaurants — restaurants without a physical space and rely solely on online ordering and delivery.
These grim stories extend beyond the anecdotal. It is estimated that 75% of independent restaurants will not reopen after the coronavirus passes. The National Restaurant Association in the United States stated that the industry laid off more than 3 million restaurant employees and lost $25 billion in the first three weeks of the virus, and lost a total of $120 billion after three months.
Though a vaccine and the end of the pandemic on the horizon, we must still social distance and make health — that of our neighbors, colleagues, and strangers — a priority. Until then, we will miss the public-private space that restaurants inhabit, and mourn their drastically diminished existence in the future. The next time we dine in a restaurant, consider the beauty of the peaceful coexistence restaurants facilitate, the ability for the public to convene in private, and the democratic void that would be lost in society if restaurants disappeared.
