The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [2]
Robert Sietsema, food critic,
The Village Voice
Introduction
EATING OUT IN NEW YORK
A few years ago when my friend Ari was apartment hunting, she was shown a two-bedroom in Brooklyn with plenty of sunlight, a patio, a nicely sized bathroom, and a tall industrial sink in one corner of the living room.
“Where’s the kitchen?” she asked her Realtor, looking around at the unfurnished space. A two-year-old was seated on her hip, and her belly bulged with another little-one-to-be.
The Realtor splayed his arms out wide as if to measure the preposterousness of her question.
“This is New York—everyone eats out!” he retorted.
She didn’t take the place. But you could hardly blame it on his argument. It’s not just in New York City; everyone does eat out—at roadside diners, upscale restaurants, drive-through fast-food pickup windows, and street-food carts. An estimated one-half of America’s meals are prepared away from home. We spend far more money in restaurants than we do in grocery stores each year. And eating food that’s prepared away from home is almost as prevalent among the impoverished as it is among the rich. We are halfway down the road to forgetting how to cook.
Across America we’ve experienced an eating-out revolution that’s changed the way we perceive food. From Big Macs to “small plates,” restaurant-prepared food is an everyday commodity and plays a part in popular culture more than ever. We talk (and often argue) with our peers at the office about the best places to eat. In restaurants, we conduct business, court one another, fill up on dinner alone. We go home to television shows such as Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen that feature the business of gastronomy, and we have our favorite celebrity chefs. Eating out has also become a fiercely competitive sport, in which dining in the hottest restaurants in town is akin to owning the latest fashion accessory, and food blogs feature up-to-the-minute reports of the lines outside these restaurants.
But perhaps nowhere in the United States do restaurants play such an important role in daily life as they do in New York City. Eating out is so intrinsically New York, so vital to the city’s cosmopolitan and workaholic lifestyles, that it’s also an immense source of pride. Fine dining is to New York what the opera is to Vienna. The brown-bag lunch is a social taboo, frowned upon in the same way that not knowing how to use chopsticks is. Many New Yorkers would view choosing not to eat out as foolish at the least, disrespectful at the worst, and overall, perfectly nonsensical.
So how did our restaurant infatuation begin, and when did this service industry come to feed us night and day? What is a restaurant, really? When did they first appear, and what are they doing in our world?
The notion of eating food being prepared by another probably dates back to the earliest hominids, or to Eve handing Adam that fateful apple. But the idea of a restaurant where a paying customer could choose his or her meal from any number of predetermined courses prepared by a chef became common only in modern times. Throughout the many centuries and civilizations in between, class-divided societies appointed servants for day-to-day chores, while the upper classes for the most part relinquished any hand in food preparation. Skilled trades such as meat curing and bread baking developed, as did shops where one could purchase these goods. There were cafes, teahouses, and taverns where patrons could sip a drink, and there were inns, guesthouses, and monasteries where communal meals were served with little or no options of food choice for each diner. None of these instances exactly qualified as a restaurant, though.
According to some sources, the earliest