A world without restaurants?
The coronavirus pandemic might be the end of restaurants as we know them. That should be a cause for sadness and concern not just among foodies and Michelin-star chasers, but for anyone who thinks capitalism and participatory democracy might actually go together.
Since the 18th century, the Western world has been built around multiple, imperfect and only partly compatible forms of public life.
One kind of public is the market: goods available to anyone willing to pay. Restaurants in this understanding are clearly public in a way that private clubs and dinner parties are not.
Another sense of public – “public broadcasting,” for instance – hinges on a common goal and state support. These are characteristics of food relief programs, but not of restaurants.
Many in Enlightenment-era France, where modern restaurants first appeared, believed the two kinds of public-ness were consistent with each other. Markets would expand to satisfy private appetites, and from that would come public benefits: jobs, commerce, coexistence.
Restaurant-going has historically been an experience through which people learned to coexist as strangers. As one American remarked in the 1840s, “It really requires some practice… but these [Paris] restaurant dinners are very pleasant things when you are once used to them.” Praising the cuisine and décor, she was struck most forcefully by the simple act of eating dinner in a room where others did the same.
To be one of the people in that space is to make a claim about belonging in society. Remember that a century later, the civil rights movement sit-ins began at a lunch counter.
The self-styled “inventor” of restaurants, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, often signed himself, “The Friend of All the World.” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s “Physiology of Taste” describes sitting down to dinner as “gradually spread[ing] that spirit of fellowship which daily brings all sorts together.”
These claims have never been fully realized, but for the past 250 years they have provided consumer culture with a plausible alibi: that it gets people what they want or need.
If the pandemic leaves Americans with nothing but ghost kitchens and GrubHub, we will have abandoned those goals and lost one of the few remaining spaces for coexistence in our fractured country. I, for one, hope that restaurant service has been interrupted rather than terminated.