#37
on restaurant "culture"
BIG NIGHT (1996)
“I think restaurants have become too important.”
Bruno Kirby delivers that line in Rob Reiner’s 1989 film When Harry Met Sally. And the thing is, while we’re supposed to find Kirby a bit pedantic and full of himself in that scene, he’s not wrong about restaurants. Unfortunately, what he noted was going on in the late 80s only worsened.
“Restaurants are to people in the 80s what theatre was to people in the 60s.”
I like this observation. Not only because it’s True but because he pinpoints a specific status signaling that has thrived.
I spent most of my life not going to restaurants. I have almost no memories of them in my childhood, except for a birthday meal at a mid-level Italian chain that probably doesn’t exist anymore. For my sister and I, my working mother bringing home Mcdonalds after work, or the rare order-in night, was as good as restaurants got.
I only started “going” to restaurants when I started working in them. Nothing about the experience of being a line cook, a garde manger, a hostess, or a server made me want to spend more time in them, though. But it’s a “thing to do”; that’s what your friends with money will tell you; come out for dinner, babe!
I’m going to focus on upscale/trendy restaurants in particular here because the shawarma corner shop doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with these guys. After all, the corner shop tends to cater to a lunch crowd that only gets thirty minutes off to eat, if that. So that’s hardly the problem.
No, I’m referring to The Hype Restaurant, the places to go and be seen, and the “culture” around them.
Perhaps some of you have read Abolish Restaurants: a worker’s critique of the food service industry (if you haven’t, you should). No matter how trendy, well-rated, or quirked up, restaurants are indeed “miserable places.” The schizophrenic, dissonant nature of capitalism is on full display in a busy restaurant, the kind with small plates, natural wine, and young professionals celebrating the smallest “wins” and drinking away corporate ennui.
Meanwhile, largely unseen, the workers responsible for maintaining this warm, celebratory atmosphere are overworked, underpaid, stressed out, and emotionally and physically exhausted. As the critique above mentions, “looking for something else.”
I am concerned by who we become in restaurants. We keep trying to justify what is ultimately just bourgeois consumer impulse. We try to make it about the food, not Everything Else that Going to Restaurants implies and includes. The status flashing, but also whatever the fuck this is supposed to be1
I’ve noticed that restaurants have, or are, becoming stand-ins for culture, thought, and free time. I don’t know what to call it; the attempt at injecting meaning into something shallow, into simple consumerism. The true and timeless pleasure of cooking for and eating with people you love never needed marked-up bottles of wine, tea lights, pulsating music, and tiny tables, yet here we are.
It makes sense: alienated, anxious, and treat-obsessed, we meet in places where we can barely hear each other to take pictures of vinegary asparagus stalks and guzzle “natural” wine in the least natural environment one could ever imagine.
And it is in these environments that, depending on our class backgrounds, we either learn to behave bourgeois or continue to embrace the self-satisfaction of being a hype restaurant patron, exclusivity being part of the appeal, part of the experience.
We learn to tune out the workers around us, and in doing so, we are setting a dangerous precedent. We take pleasure in being served, seen, and publicly. There’s a reason the most moneyed person you know probably eats out three times a day. One gets used to this routine, the life of the menu holder whose appetite is so refined it needs to be catered to. The constant search for something new, the tragic, unsatisfiable nature of consumerism disguised as Taste.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve had fun in trendy little restaurants. But, to be honest, I’ve rarely felt anything outside of pleasant drunkeness stepping out of one. I have felt fed but not Nourished. I’ve felt the relief of going outside for a cigarette, a break from the endless noise of two realities clashing together at once in the name of the free market.
So much of what makes up our attachment to these places is Nothing; so-called vibes and allure.
Someone invite me over for dinner.
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The early pandemic bourgeois meltdowns, to me anyway, show an entitlement to SERVICE
Restaurant/rent-a-servant