TABLE MANNERS
THE SPARK : TABLE MANNERS
DAVE McGINN Dave McGinn is a reporter with Globe Life.
Two weeks ago, I had the experience of being the
oldest, most hearing-impaired diner at a restaurant. I am 35.
I shouldn’t have been surprised; my meal was at a
superhip Mexican restaurant in Toronto. But that’s the problem: Even if my
party, a group of exhausted, tacohungry parents, had the fuddyduddy fight to
ask for the blaring hip hop to be turned down, we knew there would be
consequences – the way hot restaurateurs have been behaving of late, the owners
themselves might have come over to chide us, or mock us on Twitter.
Globe and Mail food writer Chris Nuttall-Smith
recently called out this trend in a piece on the growing food fight between
diners (who are often impatient, demanding or flat-out rude) and chefs (who
have been smacking down unruly customers on social media). It clearly hit a
nerve, with a slew of reader comments, a continuation of the debate between the
injured parties on national radio – and, this week, feedback from another Globe
writer.
Feature writer John Allemang wrote from the point
of view of the “casualties of a downtownhipster scene that defines itself by
eardrum-perforating ambience, unchewable house-cured offal, self-taught
twentysomething chefs with laughable tats and a two-hour wait for unpadded
seats at the communal picnic table.”
His story is partly a lament for baby boomers, who,
if Mr. Allemang is any guide, feel frustration at the noise and rudeness of the
food scene even more than I do. “Once you hit the age of a Barack Obama, the
kind of restlessly fashionable dining experience that serious restaurant
critics overvalue becomes disorienting, confusing and hard to take.”
But clearly the piece tapped into universal
feeling. Online, younger “hipsters” themselves agreed with Mr. Allemang’s
complaints. Facebook comments, meanwhile, ranged from the bitter and nuanced
(“I suggest [restaurants] take a look at the way things are done in other parts
of the world, where all customers are accommodated and made to feel welcome”)
to the, well, bitter and direct (“Kiss this!!”).
The issue here isn’t just about dining, of course.
Eating is about taste as much as anything. One commenter referred to Thorstein
Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”: “It’s not as if ‘fine
dining’ was never a ‘pecuniary canon of taste’ and expressed form of ‘cultural
capital,’” the reader noted. “See it for what it is, social exclusion for the
expressed purpose of demonstrating cultural superiority in status.”
Kind of makes one’s stomach churn. As for any hope
of resolution to this fraught battle? That dream may be harder to realize than
a reservation at a new hot spot.
@DaveMcGinn
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