The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: The Coming of Age of American Restaurants
Review by Barbara Santich
Patric Kuh, The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: The Coming of Age of American Restaurants (New York: Penguin, 2001), 241 pp.
I must admit to disappointment with this book, whose title seemed to promise so much — the evolution of cuisine and of restaurants in America in the twentieth century. It's not uninteresting, just not quite what I anticipated. Kuh concentrates on a selected few restaurants (at any one time) to epitomise the changes in restaurants and restaurant cuisine, but is more interested in the individuals — from Henri Soulé to Alice Waters to Sirio Maccioni - behind them than in detailed descriptions of the restaurants and their style, menus and service.
The Last Days of Haute Cuisine is an anecdotal history which never follows a direct path when it can take a detour — and while some of these are illuminating and fascinating others are irritating disruptions. It was revelatory to me to read about the history of agriculture and food production in California; as Kuh writes, "food here is devoid of any context, and for all the power of Californian agriculture, it has no relationship to food" (p. 138). It was also valuable to learn about the origins of Diners Card, American Express and the credit card system in the 1950s, and the consequences for restaurants and dining. In contrast, in the chapter ostensibly on the development of the Four Seasons restaurant and James Beard's contributions to its style and menu, Kuh takes ten pages from the introduction of James Beard to get to a description of food at Four Seasons, after digressions by way of the role of women in restaurants and perceptions of garlic in 1950s America. All this is interesting, but the reader is easily lost. There is often a pertinent point to these insertions, but often it's not obvious until the end of the chapter — as in the three paragraphs on M.F.K. Fisher which interrupt the story of Chez Panisse, or in the chapter on Le Cirque and Pasta Primavera where Kuh digresses into a discussion of restaurant reviews and restaurant reviewers and, after 11 pages, eventually comes to Ruth Reichl whose review of Le Cirque returns the reader to the main theme.
Essentially, the story traces the gradual decline in the (imported) French model which set the standards for the top restaurants in the 1940s and the emergence and rise of a home-grown American model. Kuh selects 1975 as the key year when "California supplanted France as the source of culinary inspiration" (p. 3). But not only the cuisine changed; the French restaurant was for the few, the elite, while "the American market was about the many" (p. 3).
Reading The Last Days of Haute Cuisine, I was unconsciously reviewing a parallel story in Australia. The evolution of the Australian restaurant scene seems to me to be quite different — though from such a fragmentary account it is difficult to understand the larger picture. One of the reasons for this is, I think, a different attitude towards wine (partly because Australia did not suffer Prohibition); another is the structure of Australian society, more egalitarian and democratic and with less reverence for 'le standing' (which we might translate as snob appeal), an attribute which Kuh emphasises through his choice of archetypal restaurants — Le Pavillon, Four Seasons, Le Cirque — each stamped with the personality of a particular individual, whether the owner, chef or maitre d'. I look forward to an analogous story of the evolution of restaurants and restaurant cuisine in Australia.
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