What happened to dining?
January 29th 2008 01:04
That's the real luxury of dining, is the care and the time to enjoy it. When we cook at home, we want to get it out of the way as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, our stand-up-and-go culture is losing its patience for a good night at a restaurant, and restaurant owners themselves are realizing that bigger profits accompany more tables in a night.
Tim Hayward looks at the issue in the Guardian, and wonders what happened to big meals?
From the article:
" It's far more common to find ourselves back out on the pavement, 90 minutes after arrival, chillingly sober, wondering what to do next. Somehow a restaurant meal, an event that used to constitute an entire evening out, has passed through a kind of temporal compression. Eating out has become so fast and efficient that we need to plan another way to amuse ourselves for the rest of the evening."
Certainly, life has gotten faster, and most people, when going for a night out, also want to tie in a pub or a club, which means the meal has to take less importance. Add this with, what I see as, declining interest in good food and calorie-counting, and you can see how the meal gets pushed to the bottom of the priority stack.
The end of the article:
"This is a joint problem. Diners need to demand the right to take their time, and restaurateurs with ambitions beyond mass catering should be falling over themselves to encourage slow eating. If we don't, we'll see the idea of "going out for dinner" lose its relevance. Going out for a meal will be about taking on nourishment on our way to the pub or the cinema, or worse, something we can't afford to do. We need to slow down and work out how we can turn a meal back into an event."
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