In a small, cozy restaurant that’s nestled alongside a mountain in northern Italy, an elderly waiter gently corrects my erroneous ways. What I want from the menu simply isn’t possible. I must learn to accept the fluctuations of chance. The chef, apparently, is feeling a tad finicky, with several days of rain having left him with no fresh mushrooms, an unfortunate, even dismaying, problem that couldn’t have been foreseen. Because of this calamity, it will be best to forget my dinner preferences. The chef will, I am assured, find the right arrangement of ingredients if I indulge his creativity, which sounds close to perfect.
I can recall similar admonitions in other restaurants. Times when I’ve been nudged, cajoled, dissuaded, pestered, or encouraged to try a dish. Yet that has never been an inconvenience, because my inclination is to inquire about the kitchen, to have a discussion with a server rather than state my demands. Sometimes it requires a bit of prodding, from me, to discover what the chef prefers, what the server deems notable, what’s most unusual, but my palate doesn’t necessarily determine what I order. A good restaurant comes about as the consequence of innumerable factors, such as culture and personality and atmosphere and season and the company that surrounds the table, and it seems, to me, that the purpose of a meal away from home isn’t efficiency, nor should I want a restaurant to conform to my expectations—because a meal that’s actually memorable seems to emerge, spontaneously, effortlessly, socially.
Yet how peculiar it feels, sitting in a restaurant that doesn’t surprise you. This is the wooden feeling of a conversation that’s been scripted in advance, where the questions proceed by design and where the answers are already known. This is restaurant as manufacturer, constructing your meal on an assembly line and delivering it to your table by a system. This is food as a series of inputs and outputs, with those around the table resembling a line of cars at a gas station waiting for fuel.
You confirm your reservation at home, you examine the menu along the way, you study the reviews before you walk through the door, and then, when you arrive, you check that the tables and decor and plates match your expectations, the pictures that you’ve already studied. It is certainly efficient: there are no worries, no uncertainties, and nothing is left to chance.
Although I do wonder how much trouble results from these expectations. When the goal is to fulfill the plan, every surprise causes danger. To be startled—with the wrong dish, by an unexpected taste—is worthy of distress. It seems to me that people are more hesitant, more distrusting of uncertainty, than they were in the past, and I wouldn’t limit that to restaurants. So much of life comes prepackaged, preplanned, in the most efficient form, in our contemporary world: people meet for first dates having already digested comprehensive life histories, people arrive on vacations having already seen pictures of the beaches and museums and restaurants that they’ll visit, people buy tickets for bands that play only songs that they already know. Even though the world might in some ways feel uncertain, confused, and especially vertiginous if you glance at the news, the daily life of the typical person comes with a remarkable amount of structure. The goal is to reduce friction and increase efficiency. Very little is permitted that hasn’t been planned, as it seems that the most frightening moment in our world is the existential moment—the times in life when there’s a pause, when the room quiets, and it feels like anything can happen.
If the food on your plate requires preparation, you’re probably communing with a recipe that’s ancient, a recipe that’s been perfected over the generations, in that most human of activities—the sharing of a meal. But a recipe is still alive, it adjusts depending on the cook and the ingredients and the guests. If you travel, the timeless questions will arise, questions that connects you to campfires from thousands of years ago. What do they eat over there? What did they make for you? How did it taste? And these questions aren’t, really, about food. They are social questions, about the people who live over there, about culture, about what makes us most human.
Perhaps spending so much time on screens that conform to expectations and that permit the ability to immediately delete or block or close anything that flusters you is probably bad training if you want to embrace the unknown. Sharing food with strangers, tasting a new dish, encountering something that looks peculiar—these choices don’t come with clarity, efficiency, and they almost certainly require you to ignore your instincts. When so much of life is lived in spaces that can be immediately closed, navigated away from, how difficult it is to squirm and suffer and linger amid those real world moments that you can’t delete. Although I have no way of measuring this change, it seems that eating an unwanted dish today feels worse for the typical person than eating an unwanted dish would have felt for the typical person a few decades ago, now that uncertainty and discomfort are cultural sins.
Unfortunately, this probably makes disappointment more likely. If you’ve constructed an edifice of expectations, it isn’t hard for a restaurant dish to falter compared to those hopes, for the food to be just a bit askew or strange or abrupt when compared to what you envisioned. What startles, what’s unexpected, ends up looking intolerable. Such planning seem to leave two unfortunate options: either the restaurant meets your expectations or it misses, however slightly, sparking frustration. And that does seem like an unfortunate dynamic, as the upside is contentment and the downside is disappointment.
With restaurants, I will admit that making reservations on your phone, knowing a few details beforehand, and maybe even using your phone to order from the table—a ghastly practice—just might be more efficient. I’ll concede the facts: these options reduce friction, make the process convenient, and probably mark an improvement from the clunky, cumbersome way in which we normally ask for food by speaking with a human. But that isn’t synonymous with declaring them better. To algorithmically strip every morsel of your individuality from your interactions doesn’t necessarily result in progress. Life contains various goals, competing priorities, and I believe that it is fairly straightforward to realize that efficiency isn’t the goal when you visit a restaurant.
Just as I don’t diagram my conversations, demanding every volley to be pleasant and precise, a good meal emerges as a social interaction, rather than as a predetermined, efficient process. A little friction that’s human might even be what improves the meal. And that’s especially true if you’re an epicurean, concentrating on taste and pleasure and the experience—I am particularly enthralled by good conversation about food, about the process, about cultivation, about contrasts, about seasonality and specialities, but the smallest portion of the night is always the chewing. To think that maximizing those few minutes is the entire purpose of a meal, rather than what emerges, in conversation, from the moment you step through the door, is to miss the entire point of going out to eat.
You made me remember a wonderful sushi restaurant on Pico in L.A. The Sushi House. Back when Yoshi still was there.
A lovely little Italian place closed down recently where we live, which is a pity. Going there was an experience. We’d chat with the helpful Italian servers, who’d make suggestions, advise on Chef’s recommendations, etc. The menu often changed, seasonally, with fun new additions. We’d order a drink, linger over conversation, and see where the meal took us. But alas, these charming little restaurants often can’t compete with the big chain places, where you can order everything on your phone. It’s like dining in an Amazon warehouse. Ha!