All the World’s a Restaurant: On the Global Gastronomics of Tourism and Travel
Author(s)
Spang, Rebecca L.
Abstract
An intimate connection seems to link restaurants and travel, voyaging and eating, whether one thinks of “Diners Club” or recalls that Michelin makes tires in addition to awarding stars. On one level, there is of course the simple fact that people away from their places of residence still need to eat and that if “eating out” is something done only from necessity, it will primarily be travelers who do so (though it will also be the case that the homeless always “eat out”). In addition, however, there is a sense in which eating – especially, though not necessarily – in a restaurant has come to be a stand-in for travel, or an enticement to it. Avowedly “ethnic” restaurants are often decorated with posters that might just as well grace a travel agency’s walls. The rebranding of British identity may be effected, in part, by offering tasty samples of “new British cuisine” to arriving international passengers at airports and ferry landings. During the mass tourism boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, several airlines participated actively in the publication of cookbooks and restaurant reviews. This, however, is not the way in which this chapter conceives of the relationship between restaurants, food, and global history; for while restaurants, and urban agglomerations of them, may both be worldly, restaurants are hardly a world-wide institution. In responding to a 1987 survey by the International Labour Organisation, the government of Chad counted but 6 restaurants within its borders (for a population of 3.3 million); while that of Tanzania (17.5 million) noted 18. In the same year, Finland had considerably more restaurants than Australia, which had three times as many people; Yugoslavia (22.5 million) had twice as many as the United Kingdom (55 million); and in 1987, the Philippines had the same number as the state of Nevada in 1933. Eating and eating out are certainly phenomena of global proportions, but restaurants, just as clearly, are not. The point here is neither to use restaurants in order to compare cuisines nor to consider restaurants as vehicles for the globalization of once local diets. Rather, this essay is concerned to identify how restaurant service differs from other, arguably worldwide, forms of eating out and to consider the ways in which other forms and vectors of globalization – such as the transport revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the concomitant growth of tourism – have served to make restaurants into an increasingly widespread, but by no means universal, phenomenon.
