The Physiology of Taste (50 page)

137:
A RESTAURATEUR IS
anyone whose business consists in offering to the public a repast which is always ready, and whose dishes are served in set portions at set prices, on the order of those people who wish to eat them.

The establishment itself is called a
restaurant,
¹
and he who directs it is the
restaurateur
. The list of dishes with their prices is called, quite simply, the
carte
or bill of fare, and the
carte à payer
²
or check indicates the amount of food which has been ordered and its cost to the consumer.

There are few men among those who throng the restaurants who bother to suspect that he who first invented them must have been a genius and a profound observer of his fellows.

We shall pander to their laziness, and outline the maze of ideas which have finally resulted in this highly useful and popular institution.

138: Toward 1770, after the glorious days of Louis XIV, the skulduggeries of the Regency, and the long tranquility of Cardinal Fleury’s dominance, visitors in Paris still had very few resources properly classified as conducive to good living.

They were forced to depend on the cooking of their innkeepers, which was generally bad. There were some hotels serving a regular dinner which, with few exceptions, offered only the strict necessities,
³
and which moreover was available only at fixed times.

It is true that there were caterers. They, however, provided not portions but whole courses, and anyone who wished to entertain
a few friends must order from them well in advance. The result was that visitors who did not have the good luck to be invited to some well-ordered private home left the capital without knowing anything of the wealth and the delicacies of Parisian cookery.

A system which damaged so constantly the public interest could not last forever, and already some of the more thoughtful citizens dreamed of improvement.

At last an intelligent fellow came along who decided for himself that an active cause could not but produce its effect; that since the same needs arose every day at about the same times, hungry diners would flock to a place where they could be sure of satisfying such needs most agreeably; that, if he should cut off a chicken wing to please the first comer, there would not fail to be another arrival who would gladly accept the leg; that the carving of a slice of roast meat in the obscurity of the kitchen would not ruin the rest of the joint; that nobody minded a slight increase in cost when he had been served well, and promptly, and properly; that there would be no end to the necessarily complex arrangements if the diners were allowed to discuss the price and quality of the food they might order, but that a wide choice of dishes and a set price for each one would have the advantage of being adaptable to every purse.

This intelligent fellow considered, as well, a great many other things which are easy to guess. He became the first
restaurateur
, and created a profession which is always a successful one if he who practices it possesses sincerity, order, and skill.

139: The encouragement of this new profession, which spread from France all over Europe, is extremely advantageous to everyone, and of great scientific importance.

1. Thanks to it, any man can dine at the hour most convenient to him, according to the surroundings in which either his business or his pleasures have placed him.
   

2. He is sure of not spending more than the sum which he has decided upon, since he knows beforehand the price of each dish to be served to him.
   

3. Once he has fixed the limit of his expenses, he can, according to his tastes, choose a meal solid, light, or dainty; he can bathe it in the best French and foreign wines, spice it with coffee, and perfume it with the liqueurs of the Old World and the New, and without other limits than the vigor of his appetite and the capacity of his stomach. A restaurant is Paradise indeed to any gourmand.
   

4. It is, moreover, an extremely useful thing for travelers, for strangers, for those whose families are temporarily in the country, and for all those, in a word, who do not have their own kitchens or are for the time being deprived of them.
   

Before the period we have already mentioned (1770), rich and powerful people were almost the only ones who enjoyed two great advantages: they could travel quickly, and they were always well fed.

The advent of new public vehicles which can cover fifty leagues in twenty-four hours has eliminated the first privilege; the coming of restaurants has done away with the second, since through them good living is at the beck of any man.

If he has fifteen or twenty francs to spend, and if he can sit down at the table of a first class restaurateur, he is as well off as if he dined with a prince, or more so, for the feast at his command is quite as splendid, and since he can order any dish he wishes, he is not bothered by personal considerations or scruples.

140: The dining room of a restaurant, looked at with some care, presents to the keen eye of a philosopher a scene well worth his attention, because of the variety of human situations which it contains.

At the back is a crowd of solitary diners, who order at the top of their voices, wait impatiently, eat in a rush, pay, and get out.

There are visiting country families who, content with a frugal meal, still make it eventful by a few dishes which are unknown to them, and who seem to relish delightedly their novel surroundings.

Near them sits a married couple of Paris: it is easy to spot them by the hat and shawl hung up behind them, and plain that for a long time now they have not had much to say to each other. They have taken seats at some neighboring theater, and I wager that one or the other of them will fall asleep in it.

Farther on are two lovers. They give themselves away by the eagerness of one, the coquetries of the other, and the gourmandism of them both. Pleasure shines in their eyes, and by the way they order their little feast their whole past together can be guessed, and their future prophesied.

In the middle of the room is a table occupied by the regular patrons, most of whom dine there at reduced rates and from a set list of dishes. They know by name all the waiters, who tip them off secretly to what is best and freshest. They sit there like a kind of stock-in-trade to the restaurateur, a center of attraction around which the other diners collect, or, to put it better, like the tame ducks which hunters in Brittany use to lure in the wild ones.

And then there are those individuals whose faces are known to everyone and whose names are never even heard. They act as if they were in their own homes, and more often than not try to pick up a little conversation with the diners nearest them. They belong to one or another of those types unique in Paris, who, having neither property nor private funds nor ambition, still manage to spend a great deal of money.

Finally there are foreigners here and there, especially Englishmen; these last stuff themselves on double portions of meat, order whatever is most costly, drink the headiest wines, and do not always leave without support.

The exactitude of this picture can be verified any day of the week, and although it has been drawn only to stimulate our curiosity, perhaps it may also serve to point a moral lesson.

141: There is no doubt that opportunity, and the all-powerful attraction of a restaurant’s list of dishes, have led many diners into extravagances which were beyond their pockets. Perhaps some delicate stomachs too could trace their indigestion to this
institution, and blame it for various sacrifices made willy-nilly to the least worthy of the Venuses.
⁴

But what is even more ominous to the social order is that we are convinced that solitary dining strengthens egotism, and accustoms an individual to think only of himself, to cut himself off from the life around him, to rid himself of the amenities of polite intercourse; it is all too easy to distinguish those men who dine habitually in restaurants, thanks to their behavior before, and during, and after any other kind of meal at which they are guests.
*

142: We have already said that the establishment of restaurants has been of great importance to the science of gastronomy.

In short, as soon as experience has proved that a highly worthy recipe for ragoût can make the fortune of its inventor, cupidity, that power of powers, fires all the imaginations and puts every cook to work.

Chemical analysis has found edible parts in substances until now judged useless; new foods have been discovered, old ones bettered, and both new and old combined in a thousand ways. Foreign inventions have been imported; the world itself has been put to use, and contributes so much to our daily fare that in one meal we can trace a complete course of alimentary geography.

143: While the art of cookery thus followed an upward trend, as much in discoveries as in prices (for what is new is always dear), the same motive, that is the hope of reward, gave it a contrary movement, at least in the matter of expense.

Some of the restaurateurs decided to try to wed good living to economy, and by their appealing to men of modest fortune, who
are necessarily the most numerous, to assure themselves of the greatest number of patrons.

They sought out among foodstuffs of moderate cost the ones which best responded to intelligent preparation.

They discovered in butchers’ meat, which is always excellent in Paris, and in sea fish which is very plentiful there,
⁵
an inexhaustible resource; and to complement it, fruits and vegetables which modern horticulture makes it possible to market cheaply. They calculated shrewdly the basic necessities to fill a normal stomach, and to quench an uncaptious thirst.

They observed that there are many foods which owe their high prices either to their scarcity or to the season, and which can be offered somewhat later without this pecuniary obstacle. Gradually they arrived, little by little, at such precision in their reckoning that, while still earning a profit of from twenty-five to thirty per cent, they could offer their regular customers, for two francs and even less, a sufficient dinner and one which any well-bred man would willingly enjoy, since it would cost him at least a thousand francs a month to maintain, in his own home, a table as varied and as well supplied.

The restaurant keepers, considered from this last point of view, have rendered an especial service to that significant part of the population of any large city which is made up of visitors, soldiers, and clerks, and they have been led by their shrewdness to the solution of a seemingly insoluble problem: how to live well and at the same time moderately and even cheaply.

The restaurateurs who have followed this plan have been no less well repaid than their colleagues at the other end of the scale, and have suffered fewer serious reverses; their fortunes, even if slower in coming, have been more solid, for though they made less money at one time they made it every day, and it is a mathematical truth that when an equal number of units are collected at one point, they give an equal total, whether they were brought there in dozens or one by one.

Enthusiasts have kept bright the names of many culinary artists who have shone in Paris since the beginning of the restaurants. Among them one can cite Beauvilliers, Méot, Robert, Rose, Legacque, the Véry brothers, Henneveu, and Baleine.
⁶

Some of the restaurants run by these men have owed their celebrity to one special thing: the
Veau Qui Tette
, to sheep’s trotters; the…. to tripe served on the gridiron; the
Frères

Provençeaux
to cod with garlic;
Very
to truffled entrées;
Robert
to his dinners ordered in advance;
Baleine
to the great care he took to serve fine fish; and
Henneveu
to the mysterious little private rooms on his fourth floor.
⁷
But of all these gastronomical heroes, none has more right to a biographical note than Beauvilliers, whose death was announced by the newspapers in 1820.

144: Beauvilliers, who established himself toward 1782, was for more than fifteen years the most famous restaurateur of Paris.

He was the first to have an elegant dining room, handsome well-trained waiters, a fine cellar, and a superior kitchen; and when more than one of those we have just mentioned tried to equal him, he kept the upper hand with ease, since he was already so far in advance in following the progress of gastronomy.

During the two successive occupations of Paris, in 1814 and 1815, equipages of every country could be seen before his establishment: he knew personally all the foreign heads of state, and ended by speaking all their languages, at least as far as his profession demanded.

Beauvilliers published, toward the end of his life, a work in two octavo volumes called
L’ART DU CUISINIER
. This fruit of long experience bears the imprint of intelligent skill, and still enjoys all the esteem which was given it when it first appeared. Never before that time had cookery been discussed with so much method and precision. This book, which has appeared in several editions, made things much easier for the works which followed but never surpassed it.

Beauvilliers had a prodigious memory: he recognized and welcomed, after twenty years, people who had eaten perhaps once or twice at his restaurant. He also had, for certain cases, a method which was all his own: when he knew that a group of very wealthy people dined in one of his rooms he came up to them with an
important air, bowed low, and seemed to shower them with unusual and special attentions.

He would point out a dish which was best not to try, and another one to command with all haste, and would himself order a third which nobody knew existed, at the same time calling up bottles from a cellar to which he alone held the key; in all, he showed such a friendly and agreeable manner that all these
extra
additions to the total bill seemed so many courtesies on his part. But his role of perfect host did not last long; having played it to the hilt he took his bow, and soon afterwards the swollen bill and the bitterness of paying it
⁸
were proof enough that the dinner had been enjoyed in a restaurant and not a private home.