A Love Letter to the Restaurant
Here's why restaurants are the pinnacle of human achievement -- and why they might be going away forever soon.
From the outside a restaurant is a place where you come to eat, maybe alone or with a friend or loved one. You look at the menu laid out in beautiful descriptive terms, maybe select a wine from the wine list based on whether you like gooseberries or raspberries, place your order with the faceless server and everything arrives in a timely fashion. You then pay the bill and leave. Often, the experience is never spoken of again and those people that cooked for you, served you and cleaned up after you never enter your thoughts again.
For me, restaurants are the pinnacle of human creation. They are the end point where agriculture, supply chains, finance, marketing, creativity, human suffering and delight all merge in a single plate of food. There are many things that have to work perfectly so you can enjoy your steak just as you like it with every effort being made to satisfy whatever diet fad you are following.
Imagine going to a car dealership and getting the same service! Yes, I like the Audi but can I get it in green not blue, a bit more Porsche with the steering wheel on the left not the right, twin exhausts not single – and my wife likes automatic but I want manual. And by the way I want it in under 10 minutes and at no extra cost for all the hassle I’ve caused with my off-menu specifications: but this is what we restaurant folks do everyday, during every service, no matter the number of covers or pressure we are under. We treat everyone as an individual and cater – as much as humanly possible – to their demands.
Food and service is art. But unlike the artist who creates a single piece of art which goes on display forever, we create pieces that within minutes of creation get destroyed. Then we repeat the process 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times. This is the very definition of madness doing the same over and over again and getting the same result but the madness is the point. We do the same thing over and over in search of perfection, so that a critic who has never worked in a kitchen a day in their lives will say they liked it. We work and work in the hopes that the critic won’t slate the place and kill the business completely.
Hospitality for me is the home of the ‘unemployable,’ or to put it a better way, it’s a place where people who don’t easily fit the traditional mould of a civilised office worker come to earn their crust. And everyone has a backstory: gay, straight, fresh out of jail, maybe some metal issues, or the single parent who needs some extra cash but can’t commit to a 9-5 Monday to Friday, the restaurant is a place where every worker is welcome with only one caveat. You do your job to the best of your ability, supporting those around you and always, always making sure the customer has the best experience. If you do that in the restaurant, then your personal failings, poor lifestyle choices and general reprobate behaviour outside the restaurant is forgiven.
Alas those days seem to be at an end. In 2022, increasing inflation, fuel, energy food and labour costs all on the rise make it nearly impossible for the small band of independent hospitality artists to keep their doors open and make a living. Of course there will be financial hardship with many businesses defaulting on their bounce back loans but the banks will just pass on those losses to us, the heavily taxed working chumps. The men and women who power that supply chain – from farmers to truck drivers to artisan producers. With this cost of living crisis, a lot of creative and passionate people are going to end up in an Amazon fulfilment centre in order to make ends meet. But it’s really the customer who will lose out in the long run, all those amazing neighbourhood places that felt so special to you, like you were the only one who knew about it, or like it was your family’s special spot, will be gone. Replaced by a Starbuck’s or some other national chain working to a rigid standard operating procedure designed to enhance shareholder value not customers’ joy. You will have less choice, the food chain will lose diversity, Big Agri will crush small farmers and instead of warm friendly greetings at your local joint your only only greeting will be “welcome to McDonalds can I take your order?”
I love the business I’m in and almost all the people that work in it. I don’t want to see an ever-decreasing choice of food venue on the High Street or in the suburbs, where only the zombified chains selling food that carries to discernible taste can survive – because they have economies of scale and expensive lawyers. So get out there, tell a friend – or better yet bring a friend or make a friend by going to your local joint, order some food, order a drink, meet people, be part of the greater universe outside your own cosmos, sit there and enjoy the magic. While it’s still possible to do so.