More Restaurants

We were, I think, talking about restaurants. Leastways the Borscht ‘n’ Tears title of my last attendance in this spot was also the name of a Russian restaurant which I learn to my surprise is still going, despite various changes of regime in the Motherland, having been favoured with the custom of several Purple Cooers over the years. Maybe we can organise a grand reunion, should anyone fancy it.

Still the very survival of restaurants in these straightened times surprises me. Of course it is very agreeable to be taken out if someone else is footing the bill, especially when the atmosphere and the company is good. But if you are having to pay for yourself - worse, if you are having to pay for a string of random family - then I can’t help thinking to myself (at least in Britain) whether I really couldn’t have provided better food, better cooking, better wine and certainly a better atmosphere at home and still have enough dosh in hand at the end to buy something totally luxurious and unnecessary.

Of course there’s the washing up and clearing away, never to be underestimated, but even that can be rendered fun given a minimum of imagination. At a charity school I visited once in Norway, washing up for sixty people was accompanied by guitar playing and songs. As a visiting parent I was assigned to the drying up detail, as I recall. It made me feel that songs had a purpose beyond the iPod, not only to be listened to, but actually sung as well.

I suppose in truth I am a restaurateur manqué, which is why I feel mildly annoyed in most restaurants. It’s not only the cost: it’s all the missed opportunities to give people a memorable time. To go to a restaurant, certainly in the evening, should be to go (at least to have the chance of going) to a party. With the host providing a focus of mild entertainment that induces people to make contact with each other and for everybody to be warmed in the ambiance.

British practice is to ignore the folk around you even though the dining salon is so crowded that you are practically rubbing elbows. You keep your voice down and your thoughts to yourself, concentrating on your food if, that is, it is worth concentrating upon, which sadly it rarely is. We, as a nation, to not ‘do’ food. We lack appreciation of it. We value it only for the sustenance it brings and the opportunities it offers for snobbery - ‘sun-dried tomatoes! whee!’ or ‘My cookbook’s Marks and Spencer!’

I am not suggesting we go as far as that restaurant in Berlin known for the telephones on its tables; where you could dial up table 17 and make a secret proposition - though quite what proposition you might make I could never quite fathom. “Vould you like to eat a kipper vith me, Sweetie?” perhaps.

I believe that to be enjoyed a restaurant meal should be a party between like-minded friends and the restaurateur should hold the same relation to his guests as an attentive host at a party, smiling and encouraging all to relax.

Sadly attentiveness is these days interpreted as appearing in a rush out of nowhere every ten minutes to demand peremptorily and without any real interest whatsoever whether ‘everything is all right?’ That always seems to me to be an unforgivable sin simply for the lack of imagination that it betrays.

How can you possibly expand on variations in the subtle delights of dining to such an enquirer? In my restaurant the waiter would need only to lift a quizzical eyebrow to engage the diner in a conversation about the ageing of the beef, the digging of the potatoes or the
whether a coulis might or might not be appropriate. As indeed happens elsewhere.

I remember another little Russian restaurant in London - not a public restaurant at all. You were taken there as a guest. The salon was the front room of a house in a little terrace somewhere in the outer reaches of Kensington. It was run, if that you can apply that word in this case, by a little, white-haired emigrée from the Russian revolution.

You sat at tables. She came and talked to you in a strong Russian accent, sitting down at one of the chairs, moving candlesticks to see you better. There was no menu and no prices, but she told you what she had found in the market that morning and what was now cooking in her kitchen.

In singles and couples her diners drifted in until there were perhaps a dozen, she moved from table to table, a boy bustled round after her, placing breadsticks and cutlery on the table - glasses, napkins, bringing an occasional aperitif, usually vodka. Many talked in Russian.

Then the meal arrived. There was no choice. This was the meal she had cooked. You were her guest. She made you a present of this food. She was matriach, you were her children.

You ate and you drank and you talked and laughed. Most diners knew each other. It was like a family reunion. And after the meal, there were no bills. I never knew how it all worked. Money changed hands, certainly, but how much and when, seemed to be arbitrary. ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his need,’ sprang to mind.