A fascinating, enlightening, and breezy dive into the history and importance of restaurants. Great read!

Overall, I read the book, but it was not one that I found memorable. The style is very chaotic, moving from scene to scene without making connections along the way. It was a snippet here, a snippet there, and the reader hopes connections will be made eventually. I wanted to like it, but overall, it was barely OK. It was just too convoluted.

In the Restaurant, by Christoph Ribbat and translated by Jamie Searle Romanelli, is one of the strangest nonfiction books I’ve ever read. Most nonfiction books are set up chronologically. It’s the most logical way to tell a lot of stories. In the Restaurant, however, is served up to readers like tapas. It jumps from topic to topic, telling the story of restaurants with side dishes of sociology, literature, crime, and commentary about what the institutions show us about society.

While the short segments that comprise In the Restaurant seem disjoined, I noticed that they slowly develop a theme of high versus low. For every scene or short discussion of restaurants becoming the realm of ultra-high class eating and service, there is a look at the rough, dirty conditions in lower restaurants (or sometimes the same ones) that dish up barely acceptable fare for the punters. Back and forth, Ribbat uses this tension to explore the dichotomies that the food industry reveals under close scrutiny.

A history of restaurants, one would thinks, would be all about food. There is a lot of food in this book—discussions of molecular gastronomy at El Bullí, the development of nouvelle cuisine—but Ribbat is equally interested in the way that food service is also about more than plates of food. When a customer arrives at a restaurant, they have certain expectations. They expect that they will, for lack of a better word, be catered to. The waiter is expected to make any substitutions the customer wants, to deliver the food at the right temperature, and so on. By referencing sociologists who studied restaurant workers, Ribbat also covers the discovery of emotional labor.

I was completely hooked by In the Restaurant. I loved the way it was told, most likely because it is organized a bit like my brain is. One fact is connected to another in a seemingly tangential way, except, the more to read, the more one realizes that looking at disparate things can create a larger picture. Stepping back to think about why, for example, front of house staff in restaurants are almost all white or how long it took to solve a series of doner kebab vendor murders show us how segregation is still alive and well in food service.

In the Restaurant was an incredible read, entertaining and enlightening.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration

A sort-of history of "the restaurant" told in bits and pieces and anecdotes and odd or striking historical incidents. I think I'm maybe too much of a square for the format of this piece as it set my GD teeth on edge from the beginning. Maybe a looser reader will enjoy this, as I do think Mr. Ribbat's actual writing style is engaging, but I was just too distracted by the structure.

I wanted to like this book as the subject matter of the evolution of restaurants seemed interesting. I was however not able to really enjoy it because the topic areas seemed to jump around too much. I also felt it concentrated too much on European and American restaurants at the expense of the rest of the world. There is value here but it could have been presented better.
Thank you to Net Galley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I was looking forward to reading a microhistory of the evolution or our current day restaurants. While it started out to be a fascinating read, it soon became fragmented and difficult to follow. I found the discussion of the Nazis to be too much, but I persevered through the Civil Rights movement before giving up. It read like a text book, and would probably be fine for that purpose, but was not something for a “casual” read.

The author's decision compose the book into so many small sections (many of which were connected but divided by other sections) that covered everything from the "British Restaurants" of WWII to McDonalds frankly made this a confusing read for me. I knew that I was receiving a lot of bits and pieces of interesting information about the recent history of restaurants, but I didn't understand the overall point of the format, or what the underlying focus was supposed to be here. Was this about restaurants' changing roles in society? Was this about restaurants as a place of both egalitarianism and class conflict? Was this a history that wanted to concentrate on being told through the lens of a chosen array of struggling writers and undercover scholars who worked in the restaurant at various points in their lives?

When I reached the final part of the book, the message I (think) that I received was that yes, this was about all of those, and more. But as I finished "In the Restaurant", I did not do so with a sense of conclusion, or honestly even satisfaction. The reading experience was so jumpy and so broad (not to mention oddly over-concentrated on restaurants in a European and American context), that even with a final wrap-up section, it felt like by trying to cover so much, the book didn't really cover anything.

Based on its publisher's summary, I eagerly approached this book under nothing more than a general impression that I was going to get a micro-history about the restaurant world. But now that I've finished I feel like I wound up with more than a differently structured history read. Quite frankly, I am still trying to process what I just read.