Whet your appetite for restaurant writing with these. . .

True or false?

1. The Romans NEVER ate 'fast food'
   False. Little cooking stands were all over the Subura. The businessman's lunch was very popular..
2. The word 'restaurant' was coined by a Parisian named Boulanger in 1765.
   False. At least, according to a researcher at University College, London. Although many, many French history books go into great detail about Boulanger's invention of the word 'restaurant', Rebecca Spang asserts that there's no evidence this Boulanger person existed. She places the invention of the resturant in 1773, and credits Roze de Chantoiseau. Now there's a name to conjure with. Bon appetit!
3. The spread of restaurants was inspired by the French Revolution.
   True. The French Revolution abolished cooks' guilds and forced all those aristocrats' chefs to find honest work. Enthusiasm for culinary egalitarianism (and good eating) quickly spread to North America, as well.
4. MacDonald's 'Maharajah Mac', served in India, contains chicken.
   True. The chain has also announced it will be opening a vegetarian Micky D's in that country soon. (Do you want fries with that?)
5. In the 1950s, it was not cool to ask for a doggie bag in a US restaurant.
   True. Restaurateurs were annoyed by this habit, and not fooled at all by the claim that this food was for the dog. A newspaper article in 1963 noted:
   
   

   "As you may or may not know, Fairchild's, the restaurant on La Ciegna, has very plush kennels where you can leave your dog while you are dining. What's more, they'll give the dog a fine dinner, too. When a couple left their dog in there the other night, he didn't finish his dinner. So, they asked the waiter to put the remainder in a doggie bag – to take home to the cat!"   – "Wry Thoughts About a Rim Go," Art Ryon, Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1963 (p. A6), quoted here from Twitter's Food Timeline

   
   
   By the 1960s, the doggie bag habit was catching on, though.
6. Speaking of the US, chefs from that country have been given diplomatic status.
   True. According to the latest news, 80 chefs have been inducted into the American Chef Corps by the State Department. They're going to go out and spread the word about good cooking, and make friends. (Don't ask these guys for ketchup.)
7. Gyros is made of cows' ears.
   False. That's just what your grandmother told you to keep you out of the taverna. In Greece, gyros is a delicious treat usually made of slices of roast lamb shaved from a rotisserie. In other countries, it is all too often an weird sort of meat loaf made of pressed, spiced meat oddments. Try it in Athens, with some tzatziki.
8. 's Baggers restaurant in Nuremberg, Germany, was famous for its punk waiters.
   False. 's Baggers was famous for having no waiters at all. Food was ordered by computer, and delivered from the kitchen on rails by gravity feed. Farmers were known to comment unfavourably on the resemblance to automated feeding troughs, and the idea failed to catch on.
9. At a restaurant in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2008, it was possible to order a 'Terrorist' sandwich.
   True. The restaurant, called Buns & Guns, also featured machine-gun sound effects and helmeted waiters. The 'Terrorist' sandwich was vegetarian, by the way. Buns & Guns has since gone out of business, we wonder why?
10. The world's oldest restaurant was patronised by Hemingway.
    True. If we go by the Guinness Book of Records, the world's oldest restaurant still in operation is the Botin Restaurant in Madrid, famous for its roast suckling pig, and mentioned by Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises.

We're sure you knew all these. If you think your friends didn't, try out these factoids the next time you're all out for a meal.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

24.09.12 Front Page

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