Abstract
We have all done it many times, and liked the experience as often as we have disliked it; but there are more literary and theoretical reasons why we should pay attention to Robert Appelbaum’s recent account of restaurant-going. For one thing, his book Dishing It Out: In Search of the Restaurant Experience is a valuable contribution to the flourishing field of literature and food studies. In that sense, the book continues the project of his study Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup and Other Gastronomic Interjections (2006), where Appelbaum provided an insightful overview of early modern food discourse by analysing serious topics such as the place of food in Shakespeare and Milton’s cosmologies while simultaneously offering a fresh perspective on the staple ingredients of our everyday life, such as beef, apples and herring. Indeed, his book convincingly demonstrated that these topics and ingredients inhabit a common social and discursive space.
Even though Appelbaum’s new book develops some of his earlier insights, both the timeframe and method of Dishing It Out are different: instead of a wide-ranging but recognizably scholarly analysis of early modern food discourse, readers of this new book encounter a personal as well as philosophical reflection on the way we eat now. This reflection, in contrast with the restrictive focuses of professional food writing as well as related forms of ‘ethnology’ or ‘sociology’ (p. 143), tries to paint a picture of restaurant culture as a whole from the perspective of the culinary amateur. As this particular amateur is also ‘a literary historian and a cultural critic’ (p. 142), Appelbaum’s account closely examines memoirs (Grimod de la Reynière, M.F.K. Fisher, Gael Greene, Ruth Reichl), novels (Jean-Paul Sartre, William Morris, Anne Tyler, Isak Dinesen, Monica Ali), philosophical essays (Sartre again) and restaurant reviews to consider ‘how the experience of the restaurant has been put into language, and circulated among us as a literary phenomenon’ (p. 19). As he puts it elsewhere, Dishing It Out is ‘a book about language … the language of the restaurant and … language about and for (or against) the restaurant’ (p. 44; emphasis in original). His reflections on this type of food discourse require our attention for what they tell us about restaurants and restaurant-goers. It teaches us an important lesson about literary criticism as well, but we will save that lesson, so to speak, for dessert.
Let us begin by entering the modern restaurant, a heterogeneous entity which nevertheless, according to Appelbaum, has a particular prehistory and identity. The practice of eating food outside the home in ‘[t]averns, inns, cafes … and itinerant food stalls’ (p. 54) may have been established much earlier, he admits, but the restaurant proper only truly flourished after the French Revolution installed a bourgeois way of life that seemed to democratize aristocratic taste and cuisine. Catering to this new way of living, the modern restaurant is a remarkably hybrid, private as well as public space where we voluntarily pay for certain services and behave in accordance with well-known but unspoken protocols. What is more, the word ‘restaurant’ (p. 9) always contains a promise to restore the customer via its ‘dainty comestibles…, private tables [and] personalized service’ (p. 54; emphasis in original). On a more abstract level, Appelbaum contends that ‘the restaurant involves the institutionalization of a formularity’ (p. 250), where formularity designates the ‘invention of form … for the sake of form, as a ceremony of everyday life’ (p. 172). As this notion spells out, Appelbaum feels that the restaurant is not simply a type of space but also a cultural practice with distinct social protocols.
Restaurants offer different types of food and ambience, but they also require divergent protocols on the part of servers and customers. To make sense of this variety, Appelbaum identifies several layers and distinctions in the world of restaurants. Most obviously, he differentiates venues according to a hierarchy of six levels which, he unconvincingly claims, does not work as a ‘hierarchy’ (p. 157): fast food joints, high-end fast food, (gastro)pubs, mid-range ethnic restaurants, traditional restaurants and Michelin star-consecrated temples of haute cuisine. Appelbaum also mentions various ‘axes of meaning’ (p. 36) that determine the ‘symbolic identity’ (p. 40) of a restaurant: ‘It is high or low, dear or cheap, in or out, now or then, here or there, multiple or singular, formal or casual, themed or unthemed, unique or common, familiar or strange’ (p. 250). This set of criteria, Appelbaum suggests, allows us to describe actual restaurant experiences (like his visits to the high-end Petrus, or the down-to-earth Le Zouave) as well as textual ones (the visits to the Maison Bottanet in Sartre’s La Nausée, or to the Restaurant Jacques in Ali’s In the Kitchen). These layers and axes also reveal that restaurants serve different and even incompatible needs, for innovation, class distinction and ceremonial formality but also for dependability, the bracketing of social status and friendly informality. Despite acknowledging the variety of the restaurant experience, Appelbaum is critical of both elitist and populist cuisines. In a spirited reaction against professional food writers and their emphasis on the ‘best’ restaurants for ‘them’ – the rich and famous – he champions the everyday variety ‘for the rest of us’, for this elitist thinking has exacerbated the commodification and standardization of the restaurant experience. In contrast to what ‘foodies’ would have us believe, he says, we do not find a broad ‘food revolution’ but a deepening divide between ‘elitism … for the few, and McDonaldization for the many’ (p. 256).
Appelbaum is even more concerned with restaurant-goers (and restaurant workers) than with restaurants, because ‘studying the origins, history and culture of the restaurant can help us understand the way the consumer came into existence’ (p. 11) and how, put differently, homo sapiens sapiens turned into ‘homo restauranticus’ (p. 26). The latter is a harmless species, but its energies can be misdirected, Appelbaum maintains, with disastrous results. The crucial date in this respect is not 1789 but 1960, when the anti-conformist revolution inadvertently created a consumer society and inaugurated the rise of ‘majestic consumption’ (p. 125): the narcissistic notion that you live in a world without scarcity. Even in our present downturn economy, Appelbaum observes, ‘you get the illusion that the purpose of life itself is the pursuit of infinite reward … the infantilized moment of consummate consumption’ (pp. 120–121). Another potential problem with the restaurant experience is that it leads to alienated labour on the part of restaurant workers (who do not produce or identify with the commodities that they offer to their patrons), and to inauthentic behaviour on the part of restaurant workers and guests (who both pretend to be friendly and refined and to be oblivious to the presence of other guests). Therefore restaurants are natural locations for the game of deception that Sartre called ‘bad faith’ (p. 79): here especially we pretend to ourselves and others that we are not who we are, and that we are who we are not.
However, things could be different. Even though ‘restaurants are places that encourage … and even demand that we approach them as consumers’ (p. 11), Appelbaum feels that they may present an alternative to the ‘de-personalized form of consumer society consumption’ (p. 189). If we want to cultivate this element of the experience, we should change our restaurants and modes of consumption. Appelbaum acknowledges that ‘de-commodify[ing]’ (p. 212) the restaurant is no easy task, but nevertheless outlines an alternative restaurant model: here, ‘the workers in the restaurant will have to be really cooking and really serving (in the spirit of comedy, hospitality and art, which is to say in the spirit of unalienated work), and the customers in the restaurant will have to be really eating’ (p. 101; emphasis in original). Although restaurants need to change, restaurant-goers should be transformed as well. We should aspire to be ‘consumers without consumerism’ (p. 253), he says, ‘customers in the spirit not of absolute sovereigns but of fellow citizens’ (p. 253). In short, the good customer does not want to be king. Even more concretely, Appelbaum proposes changing our eating habits. After observing our habit of looking away from one other while eating and of putting food into the side of our mouths and the dull middle of our tongues, he decides to make certain reforms: ‘I trained myself to sit forward when I ate, and to look straight into the eyes of the person sitting opposite me, and put the food … on the front of my tongue, where the first acute taste buds are’ (p. 232). As he noted in the conclusion to Aguecheek’s Beef, we should practice a certain ‘mindfulness’ when it comes to eating. He ventures that doing so may enhance the flavour of our food and our overall quality of life.
Appelbaum’s account of restaurant culture convincingly shows that restaurants are not simply ‘part of the scene’ (p. 8) but have a rich story to tell. Nevertheless, some aspects of his argument could be refined. Perhaps because of his focus on language, he pays remarkably little attention to the presence of restaurants and chefs on television. Surely one of the important factors contributing to the contemporary spread of restaurant culture is the fact that cooking programmes have become omnipresent. Appelbaum also ignores the fact that this presence of the restaurant experience in visual media has made cooking overwhelmingly popular in recent years, leading not only to increased restaurant visits but also to increased experimentation and refinement in home cooking (in that sense, the idea of a ‘food revolution’ seems less mistaken). It might even be argued that the experience of ‘dishing it out’ has been internalized to such an extent that even amateur cooking at home has acquired a certain restaurant quality now, with choice ingredients, complex recipes and semi-professional commentary afterwards. Paying attention to these phenomena may also advance our understanding of the way in which food figures in contemporary literary fiction. In his disappointingly brief analysis of 20th-century ‘restaurant novels’, Appelbaum asserts that they often voice an unease about the kitchen as a site of economic and culinary production. This is certainly an interesting observation, but it should be developed by looking at the representation of home cooking as well (the cooking scene in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, for example, voices no such anxieties). Moreover, why not consider the many consumption experiences on display in ‘chick lit’?
At this point, I imagine, you are feeling up for dessert. What does Dishing It Out teach us about contemporary literary criticism? To address that question, first we should consider an important aspect of contemporary literature: namely, its increasing interaction with popular culture. As Jim Collins has demonstrated in Bring on the Books for Everybody (2010), contemporary novels teach their readers how to pursue the good life of the quality consumer by taking their readers to elegant restaurants, refined tourist destinations and luxuriously decorated houses and gardens. One of the reasons why fiction provides such a taste education, he maintains, is because cultural programmes at universities no longer train students in distinguishing good taste from bad taste. This, he argues, is why contemporary fiction does and contemporary literary criticism does not interact with such unexpected forms of discourse as self-help manuals, tourist guides, home decoration and gourmet magazines. Yet current criticism quite clearly does interact with these lifestyle discourses, and similarly endeavours to replace random consumerism with ‘quality consumerism’. Ultimately, despite (or indeed because of) its critical remarks at the address of restaurant reviews and lifestyle blogs, Dishing It Out also functions as a taste primer of sorts. For Appelbaum himself desires ‘perfect moments’ (p. 105, p. 174) and explicitly notes that ‘good taste is not to be despised’ (p. 115). So the book effectively tells its readers how we can dine as truly cultured and literate people. If you want to be a proper restaurant-goer, then you should be a consumer without consumption and eat with the tip of your tongue – and if you need wine with that, Appelbaum’s book tellingly adds, ‘the wines of Collioure, especially the reds, are terrific’ (p. 46). Dishing It Out is not the only example of the hypothetical field of ‘literary lifestyle criticism’ (surely a topic for a larger study), but it is a particularly clear example. Like Robert Pogue Harrison’s Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (2008), Appelbaum’s book offers the same high-end lifestyle advice as our contemporary fiction. Yet this particular dessert may have been too rich already. We should discuss this topic further over lunch sometime. Do you know of a good restaurant?