The Restaurant

A History of Eating Out

William Sitwell

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781471179617
• eBook ISBN: 9781471179631
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK.
The fascinating story of how we have gone out to eat, from the ancient Romans in Pompeii to the luxurious Michelin-starred restaurants of today. Tracing its earliest incarnations in the city of Pompeii, where Sitwell is stunned by the sophistication of the dining scene, this is a romp through history as we meet the characters and discover the events that shape the way we eat today. Sitwell, restaurant critic for the Daily Telegraph and famous for his acerbic criticisms on the hit BBC show MasterChef, tackles this enormous subject with his typical wit and precision. He spies influences from an ancient traveller of the Muslim world, revels in the unintended consequences for nascent fine dining of the French Revolution, reveals in full hideous glory the post-Second World War dining scene in the UK and fathoms the birth of sensitive gastronomy in the US counterculture of the 1960s. This is a story of the ingenuity of the human race as individuals endeavour to do that most fundamental of things: to feed people. It is a story of art, politics, revolution, desperate need and decadent pleasure. Sitwell, a familiar face in the UK and a figure known for the controversy he attracts, provides anyone who loves to dine out, or who loves history, or who simply loves a good read with an accessible and humorous history. The Restaurant is jam-packed with extraordinary facts; a book to read eagerly from start to finish or to spend glorious moments dipping in to. It may be William Sitwell's History of Eating Out, but it's also the definitive story of one of the cornerstones of our culture.

1 The Romans

An inn discovered in ancient Pompeii reveals a city with a very sophisticated array of hotels, bars and restaurants.

23 August AD79. A blazing hot day on which we can imagine a citizen of Pompeii stumbling out into the street from his favourite bar. It could have been the Inn of Primus, a very real watering hole situated on the north-east corner of Holconius’s crossroads. From the main entrance, he steps out onto the Via dell’Abbondanza. This, the main street of the town, once dissected a metropolis of some 12,000 souls and stretches out for almost a kilometre.

Perhaps our friend, weary from drink – wine, possibly, which was watered down to suit a customer’s taste – and wishing to avoid the crowds of this Pompeiian Oxford Street, a Fifth Avenue of the ancient world, turns right out of the bar and then takes a sharp right again down the narrower Via Stabiana. He passes the open window of Primus’s, where a counter abuts the street, offering food to go. There’s even a wide step up to it so that passers-by, our worse-for-wear Pompeiian included, don’t bump into it as they make their way down the busy little street.

This Primus regular, irritable from the heady mix of alcohol and losing at dice, wishes merely to get home for a siesta. He looks ahead of him down Stabiana, the view into the distance dominated by the hulk of a mountain. This is Vesuvius. Having grown up with this large feature of the landscape, it is as familiar to him as his own hands. But today there is something unusual about it. From the summit of the mountain, a thin plume of smoke can be seen – what the younger poet Pliny described as looking ‘like an umbrella pine’.

The thoroughfare of Via dell’Abbondanza – a Fifth Avenue of the ancient world – was filled with popular eating and drinking establishments visited by rich and poor. Emperor Nero, even, was known to frequent such taverns.

There had also been a rumble that morning, an earth tremor that residents of the town had remarked upon. But they were not uncommon; this part of Campania often experienced such minor shakes – the gods grumbling, perhaps, like humans did when offered a bad hand at the gambling table. Certainly Vesuvius’s smoke and a minor rattling of the ground would not have alarmed the residents of the town, nor would they have connected the two. Indeed, the idea that a volcano such as Vesuvius might erupt was ridiculous. While there had been a serious earthquake seven years previously, she hadn’t actually erupted for 1,500 years.

And so we follow our man as he stumbles home, ducking and weaving along the vast cobblestones, attempting to avoid both pedestrian and stray dog. Once home, maybe he takes another few drinks, pushing him beyond sunset and into the night. And then, fully sated, he retires to bed, falling into a deep sleep. Perhaps the effects of the best part of a day at Primus’s meant that one of the gods looked kindly upon him and never woke him up.

For 24 August arrives and visits upon the little city of Pompeii a tragedy. Within hours, Vesuvius does erupt, spewing lava, deadly fumes and dust across the region. A great number of Pompeii’s residents die quickly, unable to escape from their houses. Those who do escape with their lives return in the weeks or months that follow to look for their possessions, their houses and the bodies of loved ones, but in vain.

An airtight blanket of ash and lava has coated the city. Rainfall has set the lava to pumice stone. Recovery of anything – human or inanimate – is impossible. So they give up. Pompeii disappears from the map. And, for eighteen centuries, it remains that way.

Excavations continue today after some 250 years, but what the visitor can see is, in the words of one historian, ‘the Pompeiians, their joys, sorrows, their work and play, their virtues and vices’.

And nowhere is this more pertinent than in a scribbler’s searches for concrete evidence of the dining scene of the Roman Empire over 2,000 years ago. For, as we all know, eating out is at the heart of things: be it fuelling happiness, appeasing grief, aiding and abetting both business and pleasure, or encouraging our best and our worst natures.

And, because Pompeii did not seek nor anticipate the oblivion that struck it, what we see is truth. It is a town that was in full swing at the very moment the Roman Empire was at its peak. Pompeii in AD79 was a big deal. It was a shining example of the Roman dream, the magnificent vision that meant a citizen of Rome could travel across the empire knowing that he was protected by a unified legal system and a single administrative language, and that, if he wished to buy drinks, snacks and meals, he needed only one currency. The empire’s downfall was precipitated by Barbarian invasions at its furthest borders – some say the upshot of uncontrolled immigration. Arguably, the last Roman emperor was Romulus Augustulus, but, while he may have been the final emperor, thus technically the most disastrous, he wasn’t so egregious as to offer the people a referendum…

So there was not a whiff of impending doom when Pompeii was trending in the AD70s. All that was good in the empire was great in Pompeii – law, technology, culture, language, religion, architecture, food, drink… And the town was well situated, too. Geographically, it was by the sea, but also nestling between the warm waters of the Mediterranean and the slopes of Mount Vesuvius in the region of Campania, a fertile area whose land, soil and slopes were perfect for the growing of vines.

The wines of the region were famous and its makers enjoyed a healthy export business. Indeed, the most famous wine of ancient Greece, Falernian, from Aglianico grapes, was produced on nearby Mount Falernus. This prized white wine was often made from late-harvested grapes and left to mature in amphoras until it oxidised, taking on a rusty colour and packing a punch with a high alcohol content. A price list on the wall of a bar in Pompeii states: ‘For one [coin] you can drink wine / For two you can drink the best / For four you can drink Falernian.’

Shaded by Mount Vesuvius and cooled by the sea, Pompeii had it all. A tourist destination, a fashionable seaport, a magnet for the smart set, an outward-looking internationalist stopping point for traders and businesspeople. That the amphitheatre could seat 20,000 spectators indicates that people would visit Pompeii from neighbouring towns, if not further afield. It was, in the words of Cambridge Classics professor Dame Mary Beard, ‘a cross between Las Vegas and Brighton’.

It was to Pompeii that Romans came for partying – to gamble, to find girls, to eat and to drink. And both visitors and residents were well catered for. Hospitality was a cornerstone of the town, if not the wider empire.

The term originates from the word hospes, which describes a Roman who is connected to a fellow Roman by ties of hospitality. The word was both legal and sacred. It was stronger than blood. They even had a God who oversaw it. It fell under the remit of Jupiter (also known as Zeus in Greek mythology), when he wasn’t dealing with sky and thunder, to watch over ius hospitia, the law of hospitality.

And so it applied to all, rich or poor, as a unifying concept. Regardless of your wealth, one was expected to embrace and offer hospitality. Perhaps it developed from more mercurial intentions. If Romans were hospitable wherever they went, it helped expand the empire both by enabling traders to do business more comfortably and by softening up those who were about to be conquered. And, if the latter didn’t succumb, the Romans slaughtered them anyway.

So traders, merchants and sailors arrived in towns and cities across the empire seeking and expecting a warm welcome – comfort, food, company and a little entertainment. As the historian Livy wrote of Rome: ‘Throughout the city, the front gates of the houses were thrown open and all sorts of things placed for general use in the open courts, all comers, whether acquaintances or strangers, being brought in to share the hospitality.’

It became traditional for courtyards of private houses to be adorned with items for passing travellers: a wonderful respite for the weary stranger. It helped to forge friendships and fuelled hope – an essential element if you’re building an empire. When someone returned home with tales of adventure and warm receptions, it would encourage others to set forth.

So the tradition gradually became formalised and, eventually, the violation of it was perceived as a terrible crime. This Roman custom meant that, by the time we drop in on Pompeii in AD79, commercial hospitality had become highly organised.

There were hotels, coaching inns, bars, restaurants and brothels. Because of the vast number of saucy images found on the walls of many of these establishments, some argue that virtually all of them doubled as brothels. Juvenal, a Roman poet of the late first and early second centuries AD, described the typical Roman bar as ‘liberty hall’, where your typical customer could be found ‘lying next to a cut-throat, in the company of sailors, thieves and runaway slaves, beside hangmen and coffin makers, or beside a passed-out priest’.

But less excitable scholars, such as the rather more contemporary Mary Beard, believe that, while there were some brothels in the town (and one in particular, with its dingy little bedroom and stone bed, makes one pity the poor sex workers), the images are less indicative of brothels everywhere, more that the Romans just had a dirty sense of humour.

As with most Roman provincial towns, several inns and taverns can be found at the entrance to Pompeii, having provided handy shelter to visiting merchants. Then there are other establishments spread across the town. In total, archaeologists have identified some 160 properties that seem to have been bars and restaurants, in addition to a great many hotels. This relatively large number owed to the fact that many people would not have had access in their homes to the utilities required to prepare food – from ovens to sinks. It’s not dissimilar to the circumstances that the dwellers of modern-day Manhattan find themselves in. Limitations on space and power provision mean that a great many New Yorkers have no kitchens and can’t even boil a kettle. And such is the convenience, affordability and fashion for consuming everything out – from coffee to three-course meals – that, even if they can cook, they don’t throw dinner parties.

Many of Pompeii’s establishments are what we would today call a restaurant with rooms, which the Romans called a hospitium. In various shapes and sizes, there were modest establishments in poorer parts of town that probably had long-term residents who couldn’t afford to rent a home, some of which appear to have had enough bedrooms for up to fifty people.

Then there were: coaching inns (stabula), which were simple bars, sometimes located just outside the metropolis; restaurants known as popina; and the inevitable lupanar (brothels).

Of those eating and drinking establishments, the Inn of Primus was doubtless very popular. Situated on the main drag of Via dell’Abbondanza, it would have attracted a wide clientele from the local businesses and residences that existed at the heart of Pompeii.

Along that street were found shops and workshops offering anything and everything one could imagine. There were builders’ merchants, blacksmiths, iron and bronze dealers, arts and crafts stores, shops selling cloth, olive oil, hardware and tools. There was a wine store, a bakery, a barber shop, as well as a grocer, a fruit store, a bank, several brothels, a laundry and the local public baths. The latter advertised itself as ‘elegant baths for the best people’, and that perhaps included those who lived in the extremely smart and unbelievably lavish villas, houses and apartments along the road: noblemen, generals and prosperous professionals such as surgeons and physicians.

Indeed, adjacent to the Inn of Primus were two impressive residences belonging to Pompeiians Marco Epidio Rufo and L. Rapinasi Optati. Both are architecturally remarkable, with inner courtyards, columns and fountains that must have felt like cool, calm refuges from the steamy streets beyond the grand front doors.

Of course, we know the names, if not the lives, of those who inhabited these homes, because – as with so many shops, baths and blacksmiths’ – their monikers and titles are written either on signs at the front or inside on the walls. And we know which buildings were bakeries, because the vicious discharge of Vesuvius covered, concealed and preserved not just the mills, ovens and loaves, but also the unground wheat kernels. In the olive oil shops, there are traces of oil in the jugs; amphoras are still stacked in the wine shops. In fact, archaeologists claim to have even found evidence of rosemary, garlic, olive oil, cheese and anchovies in the fossilised flatbreads in some of the bakeries. Not far from the forum is the sign of a shop belonging to local baker Podiscus Pricus, in whose building historians say was a wood-fired oven. There were likely other ovens across Pompeii, too, similar to a small one found in the Greco-Roman market area of Naples. Some 4ft in diameter, these ovens would not have been a good shape for bread, but you could bake smaller rounds: in other words, pizza – that classic Italian street food staple.

The spirit of some of the Pompeiians who chomped on these pizzas can be seen in the graffiti across town.

On the wall of a bar owned by one Athictus are the words: ‘I screwed the barmaid.’ A little more poetic and found at the bar of Astylus and Pardalus is: ‘Lovers are like bees in that they live a honeyed life.’ And at the bar of Innulus and Papilio – most likely also a brothel – an individual recorded the occasion of his coming out: ‘Weep you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!’

And thus at the epicentre of this energy and industry was the Inn of Primus. It was excavated on two separate occasions, in 1853 and 1857.

Stepping into the inn – amid the throng of locals (Pompeiians rich and poor lived cheek by jowl, meaning they likely rubbed shoulders in bars) and visitors new to the town – was an L-shaped bar. It was noisy and maybe a little smoky. While drinks were served at the bar, the circular holes cut into the top of the adjacent side suggest it was used to house a small grill, and there was likely a metal tripod secured over coals to hold a pan for soups or to keep food warm. It’s also probable that wine and other drinks were stored under the counters in terracotta or earthenware vessels.

To the right of the bar was a hearth, which may have doubled as a fireplace and second grill or oven. To the back on the left are steps that would have led to accommodation on a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Romans
• Chapter 2: The Ottoman Empire
• Chapter 3: The Legacy of Ibn Battuta
• Chapter 4: Medieval England
• Chapter 5: The Coffee House Revolution
• Chapter 6: The French Revolution
• Chapter 7: The British Industrial Revolution
• Chapter 8: Carême and the New Paris Guide
• Chapter 9: The Victorian Era
• Chapter 10: Britannia & Co. Opens in Bombay
• Chapter 11: The Invention of the Taco Machine
• Chapter 12: Postwar Britain
• Chapter 13: The Invention of the Sushi Conveyor Belt
• Chapter 14: Le Gavroche Opens in London
• Chapter 15: Chez Panisse Opens in the US
• Chapter 16: Bibendum Opens in London
• Chapter 17: The Death of Bernard Loiseau
• Chapter 18: The Future of Eating Out
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Picture Credits
• Copyright