The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [4]
Finally, to promote his ideas, Roze de Chantoiseau included the address and a short description of his own restaurant in Almanac Royale: “Fine and delicate meals for 3—6 livres per head, in addition to the items expected of a restaurateur.” The first restaurateur was a natural self-promoter.
After the French Revolution, the code of laws requiring artisans to keep to one trade dissolved. From that point on restaurants flourished. Since then, the concept of the restaurant has branched out in myriad ways, from the advent of fast food in the last several decades to the development of niche food-service styles such as tapas, dim sum, omakase, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. In addition to informing our culinary culture, eating meals in restaurants has also led to various social customs. The “power lunch” is taken in restaurants, where the food is second to the meeting’s purpose. The same can more or less be said for the restaurant date. Banquet-style dining, or “harmonious” meals in Chinese culture, is something of a learned art in regard to ordering courses for the table. And few public places are more favored for the modern sport of “people watching” than restaurants, especially among solo diners.
In the United States, restaurants evolved from family-style meals at innkeepers’ tables to a smorgasbord of fascinating eats and dining-out traditions. No historian, though, can argue against the birthplace of restaurant culture being New York. The island of Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs make up a dense nugget of multifaceted food lore and the seedling for our appreciation of so many ethnic cuisines, owing to its numerous ethnic communities.
Restaurants existed before John Delmonico opened his first cafe and pastry shop on William Street in downtown Manhattan in 1827, but they had never truly solidified their place in the daily life of Americans the way they had begun to in Europe. The Swiss immigrant, born Giovanni Del-Monico, brought his brother Pietro to the States to bake at the cafe what were then the most impressive pastries in the city Moreover, they were served in a comparatively clean, pleasant setting. Empowered by the success of this little shop, the Delmonicos took a gamble on purchasing the storefront next door, hiring a French chef, and serving full, hot meals at lunchtime. Their mission was to attract businessmen and other working people who could afford to eat finer meals midday and actually appreciate the novelty of the French delicacies they served.
The Delmonicos would send for more relatives and open three more restaurants, each one more refined than the last, over the next decade. They would set the mold for fine dining in New York City and America as a whole. Before this time, restaurants were mostly taverns that offered limited food options and often served only shared meals to which customers would help themselves. There was also an oyster trend, and New York had four oyster bars by 1805. In fact, the oldest restaurant still in operation in America is the Union Oyster Bar in Boston. Oysters were a beloved snack food in nineteenth-century America, but they were also incredibly cheap, sold by street hawkers and in cellar bars, some of them for an all-you-can-eat price. (Again, why did they have to do away with these?)
Yet these taverns and inns that served food were often raucous places, bound to have uncouth fellows lurking about (America was in a particularly boozy place in time then), not suitable for women, and shocking to European travelers. And the food they served was, by all accounts, extremely crude. New York was very far indeed from the foodie destination it has become. For the most part, the middle class still had yet to see food as something more than plain sustenance. The Delmonicos’ restaurants paved the way for the sit-down restaurant culture that New York City would thrive on over the next century and beyond.
Taking this workday lunch concept further, William and Samuel Childs