The lost belle époque of the restaurant
Ahead of us is a dining desert that could last a generation
The late Angeleno food critic Jonathan Gold once resolved to try every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, from downtown pupuseria to beach huts on the Pacific. So numerous were the stops that this intrepid glutton had to abandon the trail, defeated, near the mid-market vendors of Century City.
Whenever it is that life resumes, eating a course through Pico, or any urban tract, promises to be much shorter work than it was in his day. And far less interesting.
There is a null hypothesis in which the best things in life are ultimately unchanged by the pandemic. Sport returns in more or less familiar form. The Ice Age of dating thaws, probably with a vengeance. Light falls again on theatre stages and on our museums’ dormant paintings. As a housebound people stagger blinkingly into freedom, the travel industry rebounds at a ferocious rate.
The one pleasure for which it is hard to make a sanguine case just happens to be my most cherished. I fear we will look back on the pre-virus years as the unrecoverable belle époque of the restaurant. Ahead of us is a dining desert that could last a generation.
Barring a surge of masochism, fewer entrepreneurs are going to brave the economic risk of the restaurant trade. Those who do will meet fewer willing investors. A sector that is already defined by overcapacity and hair’s-breadth margins will have to get smaller. Logic implies that takings for those who survive could stabilise and grow. But it also implies a narrowing in consumer choice.
And, with that, a loss of globalism. Being able to eat like a Basque, a Laotian, an Israeli, all in one day, and often within one postcode, might come to seem as improbable as the passport-free travel of the era before the first world war does now.
Irregular or conservative restaurant-goers will not care, or even register the difference. But we every-nighters (I once passed a whole year in a flat without cutlery) must brace for a more parochial scene as chefs and proprietors play it safe. And, as in the fashion world, what goes on at the avant-garde ends up washing back into mass tastes. The deglobalisation of food would come to a kitchen near everyone.
I have feared for restaurants twice before — first after the financial crash of 2008, and then after Brexit — only to be confounded. In the end, dining choices were even better in, say, 2012 than in 2007, and in 2019 than in 2015. This time, though, it is not “just” a macroeconomic shock at work. It is an attack on the specific lifeblood of the restaurant trade: supply chains, entrepreneurial risk-appetite, the public’s openness to experimentation. The crisis seems almost scripted to do for this one sector.
Now look, I feel like Imelda Marcos here, cursing the loss of one sensual pleasure amid so much general suffering. A realist would stress the point that restaurants, like stand-up comedians, are oversupplied. Just as the market can only absorb so much confessional humour in pub basements, the demand was finite at the best of times for new iterations of Scandi-Nepalese concept tapas or whatever. What is happening is not fair, but some kind of shake-out might have been due anyway.
But if the lamps are going out in the trade for some time, its important social function will have to be done by some other institution. Restaurants provide the first wage that many people ever earn. They are the first and sometimes last asset that some poor immigrants acquire. And for those of us on the demand side, they can be landmarks in our own progress, from never visiting them before adulthood, to shy forays into chain eateries on our own nickel, to debt-incurring nights at cypress-wood sushi counters. A sentimental attachment to the industry might be unwarranted, but no less intense for that.
And if the crisis is a matter of life and death, then the lockdown has accentuated the things that make life worth living. I will see Arsenal again. I will board a plane. I will lose an hour in the Rothko Room of the museum down the road. I am just not sure I will taste the hamachi collar at Bestia or the blood orange at Relae or the Madeira broth at Clove Club.