Covid brought to a halt an astonishing expansion in the restaurant business
Covid brought to a halt an astonishing expansion. In 2010-19 the number of licensed restaurants in Britain grew by 26%. Americans were, for the first time, spending more than half their total food budget on eating out. Well-paid folk from Hong Kong to Los Angeles were happily renting kitchenless apartments: why bother cooking when good food was so lavishly available beyond your front door?
People have long feasted outside the home. Archaeologists have counted 158 snack bars in Pompeii, a city destroyed by a volcano in 79—one for every 60-100 people, a higher ratio than many global cities today. Ready-cooked meat, game and fish were available for Londoners to eat from at least the 1170s. Samuel Cole, an early settler, opened what is considered to be the first American tavern in 1634, in Boston.
It was, thus, a low-status activity. Cicero and Horace reckoned that a visitor to a bar might as well have visited a brothel. According to “Piers Plowman”, a late-14th-century poem, cooks would “poison the people privily and oft”. Some rich types rented private dining rooms; Samuel Pepys, a 17th-century diarist, enjoyed eating “in the French style” at one in London. But most wealthy people preferred to eat at home, enjoying the luxury of having staff to cook and clean up.
A Monsieur Boulanger, a soup-maker in Paris, may have been the first to do so. He dared sell a dish of “sheep’s feet in white-wine sauce”. The city’s, a meat dish only they were allowed to prepare, and was therefore illegal. They took their case to court, but Boulanger triumphed. The tale, supposedly marking the beginning of a movement in mid-18th-century France towards more open markets, is probably apocryphal. But other regulatory changes did help.
And yet three economic changes ensured that demand for restaurants grew despite rising prices. The first is immigration. In the 50 years after the second world war the net flow of migrants into rich countries, relative to population, more than quadrupled. Starting a restaurant is a good career move for new arrivals; it neither requires formal qualifications nor, at least for chefs, fluency in the local language. Migrants tend to improve the quality of an area’s restaurants.
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