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Restaurants as living rooms, by Ruby TandohLast year I had a regular appointment which made me so anxious that I had to arrive at least an hour early to factor in time to panic and then to soothe myself. During that hour, I would sit in a nearby drive-thru McDonald’s where the after-school crowd congregated: dads jabbing at unresponsive menu screens and children hurtling around the restaurant with school socks slumped around their ankles. There were groups of teens huddling around a single milkshake and pensioners with hands wrapped around a tea. Most of us weren’t brought there by anything so vague as appetite but to sit, congregate, use the bathroom, talk, decompress, spread shopping bags across a spare bench, warm up, reply to messages and breathe. The trouble with this city is that, in spite of its size and the multitudes it contains, there is very little room to sit and just… be. Walter Benjamin wrote that “streets are the dwelling place of the collective… an eternally wakeful, eternally agitated being”, which extends to all public(ish) spaces, from alleyways, marketplaces, squares and tunnels to porticos, atria, bridges, under-bridges, platforms and roads. Each of these spaces seethe with people in motion, the urban landscape resisting stillness – sometimes in a passive kind of way, though often with a more directed and hostile intent. (Think of sloped bars rather than seats in bus shelters, and the difficulty of finding a bench anywhere that isn’t a park). In order to relax, we need to cross over from public clamour into the private realm, where for a price we can buy some peace. More often than not, this means finding a place to eat.
Any restaurant, café, pub or canteen could, at least in theory, be a place for this rest. Before the restaurant was the restaurant, we had the public house, while ‘saloon’ has the same etymological roots as salon, which would eventually become the modern-day sitting room or living room. The home, with its division of spaces into zones for living, eating, cooking, washing and sleeping, forms a blueprint for how our cities function: I’d argue that restaurants, particularly inexpensive and chain restaurants, aren’t the kitchen, hearth or dining room of our collective dwelling space but the living room. This is a space where we live, which in this sense is nothing more or less remarkable than the passing of time – living as something that happens at rest, being rather than doing. Certain old-school London restaurants are designed to evoke the feeling of a late Victorian parlour, plushly carpeted and draped and lit so that a bustling expanse feels as intimate and home-like (although never homely) as the domestic space. There’s an overlap here with hotel restaurants and the gentlemen’s clubs of St James, both of which are designed to become a home from home. Coffee shops make use of sofas, clusters of armchairs and movable chairs at small round tables rather than the static or linear dining set-up. These arrangements are designed to facilitate eating without necessarily privileging it over sitting, talking, resting, recharging, meeting and working, even napping. Not all eating places allow us to linger. Brighter lights, smaller and backless chairs, louder music and fewer soft furnishings are designed to speed along the eating process and usher us out of fast and fast-casual restaurants as quickly as we are served. The unwritten contract of any establishment with chairs and tables is that once someone has bought something, they have to be allowed to sit – to settle – for at least a while, although this principle can be bent beyond recognition once the implicit goodwill is removed from the equation and profit margins are squeezed. The average McDonald’s does not appear to be designed to encourage anything other than anxiety and the frenzied scarfing of finger food. I have never been to a Pret that was not an actively unpleasant, even spiteful, place to sit.
Still, as humans we’ve made it our business to find ways of living in even the most inhospitable environments. The city’s living room is a composite of thousands upon thousands of small, not entirely welcoming spaces: franchise cafés in station ticket halls, chain pubs, chicken shops and shopping centre food courts that, in spite of their best efforts, add up to something like an infrastructure of rest. The food in these places is secondary to the fact of chairs, tables, plug sockets, space, toilets and warmth. On pubs, A.A. Gill writes that: “It’s the waiting I remember most vividly, waiting for something to happen. The pub was a metaphysical airport lounge and, standing at the bar, I was like those drivers with a passenger’s name scribbled on cardboard. I stood there for years with this invisible sign that just said: ‘Anyone. Anywhere.’” Citing John Anthony Galignani’s 1852 Illustrated Paris Guide, Benjamin describes the city’s covered arcades as “a place of refuge for the unprepared.” London, where I live now, doesn’t have this web of arcades but it does have a robust network of chain cafés, restaurants and fast food joints which fulfil the same function. Plenty of food is served there. In fact, I’d argue that more than serious restaurants or the supermarket or even the domestic kitchen, those chains are where the city is really fuelled. And yet, amid the eaters, there are many for whom the food is more or less incidental. I’ve been doing a lot of this kind of dining recently – anything that gives me access to a place where I can rest. Some of the prices that I have paid in return for a moment’s refuge include: a Starbucks mint blend tea; Pret filter coffees; a Costa fruited teacake, served burnt and without butter; McDonald’s fries, double cheeseburgers, tea, caramel waffle latte, white coffee, Diet Coke, chicken nuggets (normal), chicken nuggets (spicy), hot chocolate, McFlurry, Filet-o-Fish, chicken mayo; Caffè Nero tea; Wetherspoons’ lime and soda, lemonade, coke; a Wimpy milkshake; Five Guys fries and a little burger; a bottle of water in a Pumpkin Café. There is something unforgivable about choosing, as my venues of earthly refuge, only chain restaurants with the most determinedly bad vibes. I won’t be greeted by name in these places or have the satisfaction of feeding my money back into the local market. I will almost certainly not have outstanding food (with the exception of the McDonald’s double cheeseburger, which is poetry). I can count on bright lights, music, beeping kitchen timers, names and numbers shouted across a counter, crowding, shit decor and a toilet that I might need to ask for a code to use.
Yet even at their most lawless, chains have an almost mechanical predictability that is as consistent at the lowest price point as what high-end restaurants are striving for in their ascent of the Michelin ladder. I recently had a conversation with someone whose refuge of choice is a Wetherspoons, a space which, whether it is in a converted cinema, by a quay or in an old bank, unfolds in a dimly familiar way, like a dream of a home half-remembered. This friend sinks into a Wetherspoons when there is nowhere else either loud or quiet enough for them to feel at ease. They can feel at home without having to perform gratitude. They can commandeer a table near to a plug socket without any guilt. While there, they buy time with a pint and the 10-12 chips that seem to comprise a portion. In chains, we know exactly how things work and what to expect, even if what to expect is very little. “There is only one Olive Garden,” as Helen Rosner puts it, “but it has a thousand doors.” In the last couple of years, I’ve come to value the purgatorial quality of a chain restaurant, pub or café more than ever. I have not always been well, and when I’m not well I will hustle out of the front door in the service of only the most nebulous idea for some errand. I wander the city – eternally wakeful, agitated – making tasks up as I go. In this enervated state it’s entirely possible that I will shoulder-barge a stranger on the street, board a cross-country train on a whim or go to the King’s Cross station toilets just for a place to sit. When this unravelling begins, I need life’s relentless possibility to be curtailed for a moment. I need to regain my bearings in a place designed – from its decor to its upselling script and the way that the sandwiches are arranged in the fridge – to shrink the world into a perfectly formulaic microcosm. I need to be swaddled in a place I know by heart. In my favourite McDonald’s, on those dreaded appointment days, I found this reprieve. I would linger over whatever inexpensive thing I had bought – a cheeseburger, a tea – while collecting a few stray thoughts. The setting did not invite calmness. I’m reminded of Yvonne Maxwell’s essay about the fabled Brixton McDonald’s, a stage for everything from “Essex revellers having screaming matches” to “light-skinned bum cheeks spilled out of pum-pum shorts onto the cold plastic chairs.” But in spite of the ruckus, this McDonald’s became a refuge exactly like a family living room, which is to say it is wearying, comfortable, relentlessly mundane, steeped with memory, populated by some people who I begrudgingly loved and others who I loved begrudging. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, writer Georges Perec spent three days in the cafés and tabacs of the Place Saint-Sulpice, writing down, fastidiously and without elaboration or narrative, everything that struck him during that time. “Slight change in the light,” he observed in one entry. “The 63 goes to Porte de la Muette.” In spite of Perec’s surroundings, food barely figures in his accounts: there is a brief mention of a Camembert sandwich, a note about a glass of Salers Gentian, but these meals are incidental to the act of just being immersed in the semi-public space.
Outside McDonald’s, a queue of cars and vans would inch along the drive-thru lane as the sun slowly sank behind the low skyline of the retail park. Those sunsets always seemed unusually beautiful to me – on a stretch of A road on the outsides of a city in the shadow of industry in a drive-thru – although now I wonder whether it was just that I had a chance to notice them: to watch, sat still for a moment, in the company of strangers with my fries. You're currently a free subscriber to Vittles . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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