I have obtained in the past few days - and almost finished reading - William Sitwell’s book published in 2020 titled The Restaurant A History of Eating Out. I am not sure why I have not read it before but I suppose it’s rather like going to a restaurant and wondering why you have not dined there already.
I am presently grappling with trying to understand the history of dining out to more appreciate what and why I’m eating when I sit in one of our Birmingham or West Midlands restaurants. The history of British eateries is very interesting - over time our providers of hospitality have both given to the world and taken from it.
Sitwell’s book is more a provider of anecdotes, often very tangential to the subject - sometimes relevant and fascinating, sometimes irrelevant and interesting and sometimes, alas, irrelevant and dull. Of course his subject is the the history of the restaurant (anywhere in the world) and not the history of the restaurant in Britain and how we dine now here in Birmingham lends much to what has happened elsewhere - The United States, France inevitably, Spain, Italy, India and more recently Scandinavia so it is not unreasonable to spend a minute or so musing about the dining scene in Pompei as Vesuvius began to erupt or the free food provided by the Ottoman Emperor to the ordinary people around his palace grounds. But there is far too much of it. The story suddenly wanders down alleys of irrelevance describing the manner in which Robespierre was guillotined for instance (there seems to be an obsession with beheading as in another chapter Sitwell describes how a slave decapitated himself in front of the Arab traveller Ibn Batuta) and dropping in snide comments about British politicians he clearly doesn’t like especially those who offended his Remoaner sentiments.
It’s a shame because generally, and clearly it isn’t intended that the book be a piece of academic excellence, the story proceeds along merrily enough dabbling in the developments this Old Bloke has lived through which have lead us from Attlee’s Age of Austerity (which socialists seem to have forgotten about) when food, if you could get it, was something you put in your mouth and eventually digested but could hardly ever be thrilled about (though as a boy my tastes were undemanding), through the coming of the restaurant increasingly available to all, the silliness of nouvelle cuisine, the horrors of molecular gastronomy and the age of foraging to the year of home delivered high quality meals.
It’s an easy read except when Sitwell strays too far from what he needs to tell us. There’s much to glean from it and it’s a rather nice book to have, the cover is so nice in fact that the publisher has not splashed out on a dust jacket which seems justified given the book’s stylish white, grey and black look. A quote on the cover by Marco Pierre White who must have been happy with the references to him in the book includes the phrase, “(Sitwell) ... holds the pen of PG Woodhouse” which for all I know may have been meant literally, though I doubt it, but as a literary allusion makes me think that Mr White has probably not actually read any Woodhouse.
The book is good but disappears up side alleys far too often and for too many pages, so it is good in parts. The book editor should have reined in some of Sitwell’s more elaborate digressions and made the book shorter or even to have allowed for an additional chapter on the development of restaurants in the large part of Britain which is not located within the boundaries of London or the Home Counties. But perhaps Sitwell is on less certain ground when it comes to talking about what’s happening outside of those geographical limits.
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