12 Holiday specials The EconomistDecember 18th 2021
meal at home, but by 2014 the gap had risen to 280%.
From 200720 “French Laundry inflation”, describing
the cost of a meal at a threeMichelinstar restaurant in
California, was twice the core inflation rate.
And yet three economic changes ensured that de
mand 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. London’s
became far better in the era of free movement with the
European Union. The melting pot that is Singapore has
some of the best food in the world. Restaurants be
came more tempting, even as prices went up.gastronomics
The second factor was the changing microeconomics
of the family. As a new paper by Rachel Griffith of the
Institute for Fiscal Studies, a thinktank, and col
leagues, shows, households’ choices about whether to
make their own food or to buy it premade are shaped
not only by the upfront cost of those things. They also
depend on what economists call “shadow costs”.
The true cost of an athome meal involves not just
the outlay for the ingredients, but the time spent on
shopping and preparation. In an era of low female la
bourforce participation, shadow costs were low. A
stayathome mother who cooked instead of eating
out would have less leisure time. But as more women
entered the workforce during the 20th century this
equation changed, raising the shadow cost of cooking.
Now a working woman who cooked dinner would be
sacrificing time which might otherwise be used to
earn money. And so eating out made increasing eco
nomic sense, even as it became more expensive.
The third factor was changing working patterns.
Historically poor people have tended to work longer
hours than rich ones. But in the latter half of the 20th
century the opposite became true. The rise of knowl
edgeintensive jobs, and globalisation, made rich peo
ple’s work more financially rewarding—and enjoyable.
Toiling into the night became a sign of status. The up
shot was that the people with the most money to spend
on dining out increasingly needed it most, since they
had the least free time. In Britain the richest tenth of
households devote a much bigger chunk of their over
all spending to dining and drinking out than the poor
est tenth, and the gap has grown in recent years.
What does the history of the restaurant say about
its future? People have relished their reopening. In re
cent weeks global restaurant reservations have been
near their prepandemic levels. The best ones are
booked up for months: Silicon Valley nerds have creat
ed automated bots which instantly reserve tables.
The longterm future of the restaurant is less clear.
The pandemic has led to many people buying more
takeout than before (Uber’s revenue from delivery now
exceeds what it earns from helping people get around),
while others have a newfound love of cooking. Restau
rants have little choice but to continue to adapt. That
means moving still further from the utilitarian model
of the 18th century and before, and instead doubling
down on what they do best: offering those who need to
eat a taste of romance, glamour and love.npeople preferred to eat at home, enjoying the luxury of
having staff to cook and clean up.
Over time, however, the notion that a respectable
person might eat a meal in public gradually took hold.
Wilton’s, a fish restaurant in London, got going in 1742.
Dublin’s oldest, established in 1775, traded under the
name of the “Three Blackbirds” and was “noted for a
good bottle of Madeira, as well as for a Chop from the
Charcoal Grill”. Fraunces Tavern, New York City’s old
est restaurant, probably opened in 1762 (it is still open
today and serves determinedly American fare from
clam chowder to New York prime strip steaks).
Some historians look to the supply side to explain
this shift, arguing that the restaurant emerged as a re
sult of improvements in competition policy. Powerful
guilds often made it hard for a business to sell two dif
ferent products simultaneously. Butchers monopol
ised the sale of meat; vintners that of wine. The growth
of the restaurant, which serves many different things,
required breaking down these barriers to trade.
A Monsieur Boulanger, a soupmaker in Paris, may
have been the first to do so. He dared sell a dish of
“sheep’s feet in whitewine sauce”. The city’s traiteurs
(caterers) claimed the dish contained a ragout, a meat
dish only they were allowed to prepare, and was there
fore illegal. They took their case to court, but Boulan
ger triumphed. The tale, supposedly marking the be
ginning of a movement in mid18thcentury France to
wards more open markets, is probably apocryphal. But
other regulatory changes did help. In Britain reformers
worried about public drunkenness passed a law in
1860 allowing places serving food to serve wine as well
(thus encouraging people to eat something to sop up
the booze). Around the same time American states
started passing foodsafety laws, giving customers
more confidence in the quality of the food.
Yet for restaurants to flourish, richer people had to
demand what Pepys did not: eating in full view of oth
ers. Until the 18th century elites largely viewed public
spaces as dirty and dangerous, or as an arena of specta
cle. But as capitalism took off, public spaces became
sites of rational dialogue which were (putatively) open
to all. And, as Charles Baudelaire, a French poet, ob
served, 19thcentury cities also became places where
people indulged in conspicuous consumption.
The restaurant was the natural habitat of the flâ-
neur, Baudelaire’s wandering observer of city life.
Where better than a restaurant to see and be seen? Out
went the set menu of the table d'hôte; in came the à la
cartekind. Shared tables gave way to private ones. Eat
ing out became less of a communal activity focused on
calorie intake and more of a cultural experience—and
a place, as Baudelaire wrote, where people could show
off their wealth by ordering more food than they could
eat and drinking more than they needed.
Restaurants’ growth accelerated in the 20th centu
ry. American employment in food service quadrupled
as a share of the workforce over this period. The Mi
chelin Guide was first published in 1900; the stars
came 26 years later. And yet the continued rise of the
restaurant up until the pandemic nonetheless pre
sents an economic puzzle. Cooking at home was be
coming ever easier. Average house sizes grew. Appli
ances such as the food processor and the dishwasher
reduced preparation and cleanup times. Dining out
became relatively more expensive: in America in 1930
a restaurant meal was 25% costlier than an equivalentToday dining
out is seen as
an indulgence,
but it was the
cheapest way to
eat for most of
human historyThe growth in the
number of licensed
restaurants in
Britain between
2009 and 2019The number of
restaurant bookings
via OpenTable on
April 9th 2020