This is an essay about one of the relationships that emerges between guests and restaurants.
Sometime before the age of Instagram, Diana and I went to the Fat Duck, which at the time was still the kind of restaurant to which you made a pilgrimage. The Fat Duck is located in the village of Bray, a bucolic fantasy about an hour outside London. It had about as many houses as you expect a place called a village to have, of approximately the right character, and we had to walk down an actual country lane, sunlit and leaf-lined, to get from the train station to the village center.
Once in the village, we realized that all the cars were Jaguars and Land Rovers, which presumably got driven to London every morning, and driven back in time for the owners to speak at the exclusionary zoning meetings that preserved Bray’s sanctity and home values. The center of Bray seemed to consist mostly of businesses owned by Heston Blumenthal: the village restaurant (the Fat Duck), the village pub (the Crown at Bray), and the other village pub (the Hind’s Head).
Lunch at the Fat Duck was an ordeal, resembling nothing so much as one of those guided frogmarches around a museum. A restaurant famed for its inventiveness had gotten to the point where the tasting menu consisted entirely of dishes that they couldn’t take off the menu, and you could taste the kitchen’s ennui. The servers had all the grace and charm of croupiers in the cheaper casinos of Las Vegas, and were almost as well-informed about the food. After ten or so courses of this, we decided we needed a pint and some chips to repair our psyches.
Which is how we found ourselves drinking pints of Fuller’s and talking to an extravagantly muddy farmer in the Hind’s Head at 4 in the afternoon.
The place was a movie set, a burnished caricature of an English pub that couldn’t have been more perfect if they’d polished the brass with 10-pound notes. There were maybe three or four people there when we arrived, scattered around the bar, and a polite but taciturn barman. Everyone was drinking alone, but the drinkers also all involved in a single conversation that occasionally engulfed the bartender, and, naturally, any strangers who happened to wander in. I remember nothing of the content of that conversation.
But that contrast, between the scripted, plastered-on service applied in the Fat Duck, and the plain acceptance in the Hind’s Head, has stayed with me for 13 years. I spent many of those years working in the hospitality industry, but it was only after I stopped that I realized why that magic was so hard to recreate – the welcome at the Hind’s Head had come from the guests, and that made all the difference.
There are two points to unpack here.
First, such a welcome could only have come from the guests, because hospitality is something that transpires between equals. We literally couldn’t have had the same interaction with the pleasant and taciturn barman, because it was his job to serve us. Others have written extensively about how many contemporary assumptions about service, especially in the US, are rooted in power structures that originated with slavery. It’s ironic that we increasingly refer to restaurants as the hospitality industry, because restaurants become an industry by removing equality and reciprocity from the interaction. Maybe it’s impossible to reconcile our instinct of what hospitality entails with today’s economy.
The truism is that the guests make the restaurant, and this is why. Anything the guests add to the scene is freely given, and in this sense, they’re doing the house a service that the house cannot possibly perform itself. This is doubly so because what guests often add is the sense that the restaurant is that most endangered of creatures – an actual, physical community, a group of people who have created a shared history, norms, and customs.
Which brings me to my second point – that restaurants are evolving to resemble private clubs because this is how society itself is evolving.
Sometimes this convergence is entirely explicit. Developers put private restaurants in towers built for billionaires. High streets sprout establishments that resemble restaurants in every respect, and require massive membership fees. Sometimes it’s subtler, with real estate prices standing in for membership fees. The large mixed-use developments that increasingly dominate urban landscapes are branded by carefully curated lists of restaurants appropriate to the tax bracket of the residential buyers they hope to attract. Restaurants are not characterized by their guests, but by their regulars, and to be a regular, you not only have to be able to afford to eat somewhere, but to live near it. Urban landscapes are increasingly maps of income distribution, and so restaurants and restaurant clienteles have become increasingly stratified.
In this, the Hind’s Head, like its famous chef, was ahead of its time – that picture book moment was a little too picture book, a fantasy of community enabled by wealth and homogeneity. The muddy farmer probably drove a Jaguar, like the dozens of her neighbors who trickled in, in their French cuffs and handmade shoes, over the hours we were there. Community was easy to find there, because there were no differences to overcome.
This piece is for Chris, who asked me to write about “that thing where you invite people to dinner and they feel like they must bring additional food.” After detours through the wikipedia pages on hospitality and thence, hospitium, here we are.
this reminds me of some work I did as a college student on utopias and dystopias in literature. One thing that came out of that work was the realization that for a utopia to remain a utopia in literature, rather than a dystopia masquerading as one, was for the utopia to be exclusive. You had to be initiated or pass some test, even it's a simple test such as "finding the place," for it to retain its utopian character. But when you factor in issues of access etc., translating these utopias to our real world reveals that such exclusive utopias, because they don't exist in a vacuum, are also dystopian. in other words: "Community was easy to find there, because there were no differences to overcome." oof.
well said.
Brilliantly persuasive, as always, my friend, but, perhaps, a bit of stacking of the denotative deck. The tell, rhetorically speaking, was in your bit of rhetorical sleight-of-typing-hand, with the assertion "hospitality is something that transpires between equals." Nowhere, in my brief etymological assay did I discover anything in either the roots of the word "hospitality" and even less so in "restaurant" (or should I say, "restauration," and specifically in the ancient sense of restoring an ailing body) that suggested a transpiration (or even a homely interaction) between equals. Rather, what occurs is almost to its beginnings (hospitality is, indeed, famously defined in the Quran) between host and guest. And I might add, always, until about the later centuries of the Middle Ages, a "guest" paid nothing. There is the antique strain of giving that informs the role of the host, and of the household. There is the requirement among even the lowliest and poorest of Bedouin households that one upholds the three-day rule, welcoming, gladly I might add, even strangers to partake of food and lodging, and Muhammed would add (does add), even enemies, *as if* equals. Or perhaps there is a buried ellision indicated as to what you meant. The irony you allude to at one point is, as the tired expression goes, in the DNA of the manipulative contrivances of an industry that describes itself, in defiance of a millennium of meaning, as one of "hospitality." ... "Just point your RFID gizmo in my direction sir, or use your paperless checkout privilege, whichever makes you feel less..." 'Twas not, of course, ever thus, as you point out. And I only hope, as I venture out after, essentially, almost three years of sequestration, that there is some shred of what I call of the relationship between my favorite hangs and me as a "regular"... It's not an accident that among my friends I count people I met originally because I became a habitué of the establishments they created in order to make a living, the sort of fellow that, when the chef de cuisine saw me through the wide-screen pass through window at which he peered constantly into the room, and would send a plate of a starter to my stool at the bar. And it was a privilege that traveled with me, when I quit my home of 30 years, and the neighborhood we (you and I) shared, to a new home 300 miles southward, where I knew no one. Though not too long after the migration, I learned it was same as it ever was, when, at a new neighborhood hostelry, which we had frequented sufficiently to be greeted with spontaneous smiles that employed the deeper facial muscles, and a drink was placed in front of me, compliments, it turned out, of another patron. When I sought out my benefactor, I saw a face that somehow I recognized, but couldn't immediately place, and then remembered it was the barkeep of yet a different gastropub (forgive the expression) in another neighborhood five miles in a different direction. That's hospitality.