Andrea’s Review #8

“Recognizably Sublime Moments and Weirdly Remote Rhetorical Flourishes”
by Andrea Broomfield
Adam Gopnik’s The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food (Vintage, 2012) covers a wide range of topics, from profiles of restaurateurs to philosophical arguments regarding taste.  I was drawn to the book because of the title and what the book might convey to me about French food culture and France in general.  While France does play a role in Gipnik’s study, its role is less overt than what the title leads one to believe.   Readers do not meet French families or gain much insight into modern-day French families’ eating habits and recipes, in other words.
I did benefit from reading this book, however.  It helped me recall aspects of European food history that I had learned at one time but had forgotten.  I appreciated Gopnik’s chapter, “Who Made the Restaurant?” for just this reason.  He offered a brief history of the French term, restaurant, and how it moves from meaning a healthy broth—a restorative—to a type of establishment where diners choose where and with whom they will eat, and where they also choose their meal from an a la carte menu.  For that matter, the entire Part One, “Coming to the Table” is worth consideration because it analyzes a dining style that Westerners today are so familiar with that they simply take it for granted (be it eating at a Howard Johnson’s or a fancy French restaurant).  Gopnik places restaurant dining in a distinct time and place in food history, making this ordinary ritual seem quite extraordinary.
No matter where I was in Gopnik’s study, I discovered fascinating, important information about food culture.  I knew little about the progression of alcoholic beverages during a formal meal, how it is common to begin with champagne and from there move to white wine to red, then liqueurs and brandies, and finally a sweet wine.  This progression is largely an English invention, not French, and it happened in relatively recent times.  Nor did I know much about the difference between the café and the restaurant, and Gopnik effectively explains that the restaurant is about the chef and what he or she chooses to cook, while the café is about the patrons, where “pleasure can be rented for the price of a coffee.”  In what I consider a flash of brilliance, Gopnik uses the history of the café and the restaurant to get at why British food has historically been bad compared to French food.
Nonetheless, Gopnik’s narrative can become overwrought or disjointed.  He flits from thing to thing, absorbed occasionally with his own rhetorical  flourishes.  Thus, it’s amusing when Gopnik, comparing gourmands to theater buffs, imagines that theater buffs would find that “an eighteenth-century Shakespeare performance would surely swing between recognizably sublime moments and weirdly remote rhetorical flourishes;”  in many ways, that’s what Gopnik’s own book does.  He has “recognizably sublime moments”, like  when he offers an analysis of how seduction and sex relate to the restaurant’s cultural development, and then “weirdly remote rhetorical flourishes”, particularly when he composes these long, sometimes embarrassing emails to the long-dead female aesthete, Elizabeth Robbins Pennell (whose _Feasts of Autolycus_ is a culinary gem ).
Ultimately, I would recommend Gopnik’s study to the committed food scholar and academic more so than to a casual food lover, even though Gopnik is himself a journalist, not an academic. The writing is at times overly dense and the argument convoluted; one has to work hard to extract from the book the important elements.  It’s worth the labor if one lives and breathes food studies, but probably not as enticing for those who might instead enjoy curling up with some marvelously well-written and penetrating essays on food culture by Elizabeth David, Calvin Trillin, or indeed, Elizabeth Robins Pennell herself.