SC - Boorish Table Manners in London-OT

[KallipygosRed at aol.com]

>From the New York Times, today:

Lars

Dinner as Scrum: Could This Be London?

September 6, 2000

By SAM WILLETTS

 

ONDON, Sept. 3 — They do it harmlessly in Wodehouse, and horribly
in Waugh. But behaving badly while eating well is more than a
literary tradition in England, where dining clubs like Oxford's
rich and arrogant Assassins still play at being lordly decadents by
getting expensively sick over shattered crockery. 

 It would be just another pastime like train spotting or cricket if
London's restaurant boom hadn't provided an arena for a new
generation of oafs.

 Forget Paris, and forget New York: this city's culinary big
hitters agree that London is the home of the hooligourmet and the
Visagoth.

 It's become so bad that the president of Britain's Restaurant
Association recently declared London diners the worst behaved in
the world. 

 "I've simply never seen boorish behavior in restaurants on such a
scale anywhere else — people trying to make the staff cry, shouting
and swearing, even throwing food," Michael Gottlieb, an expatriate
American who presides over the 3,000- member group, said. "It's
ironic, considering how much less real crime there is in London
than back in New York." 

 Most of the worst behaved, he and other restaurateurs agree, are
well-educated men in their 20's and 30's who earn their living in
the City, London's financial district. (I recently watched a
financial alpha male, a ringer for Henry VIII with a shave and
Savile Row tailoring, savagely rattling the closed grille of an
expensive City bar and roaring for service. At Rules, which is both
the oldest restaurant in London and the most strenuously English,
I've cringed as a youngish, patrician-looking man bellowed
profanity at a waiter who refused him more refreshment.) 

 But London's well-heeled bohemians can mix it up, too. Ask the
long-suffering Adam Tudor: in his capacity as doorman for the
private Chelsea Arts Club, he has been hair-pulled, shin-kicked and
stuck with a brooch. The last of these attacks was launched by one
of the club's artistic ladies. 

 The phenomenon dismays Gordon Ramsay, whose two Michelin stars for
his restaurant are expected to become three before very long. Mr.
Ramsay, 33, who was once a professional soccer player, is vehement
on the subject of luncheon louts. 

 "We recently commissioned these lovely glass panels in the
restaurant, optic-fibered, showing these dancers pirouetting —
beautiful things," he said. "Almost immediately, I had to get them
steam-cleaned by a specialist after someone eating here threw up
all over them."

 No apologies were offered. Instead, in a spirit the declining
Romans would have recognized, the sick man proposed going in search
of a clean shirt in which to start the process afresh. "It's
soul-destroying at times," Mr. Ramsay said. "I trained for years in
France, and these days I spend a fortune in New York restaurants,
without ever encountering the kind of boorishness you can see here.
I just don't think people in London are as impregnated with the
culture and etiquette of eating good food as people are in other
great cities."

 At Gordon Ramsay the final sanction is to strip the miscreants'
table, layer by layer. "Once you get down to the wood, they realize
it's time to leave," Mr. Ramsay said.

 Anthony Worrall-Thompson, a television personality and the
proprietor of Woz in Notting Hill, goes one better: "I take away
the table. I've done it on several occasions when people have
become objectionable and refused to leave. It's particularly
effective with a round table, because they're left sitting there
like a drunken game of musical chairs."

 The behavior that necessitates such warfare "is definitely a
London thing," Mr. Worrall-Thompson said. "It's partly down to the
huge bonuses going to young City guys, who don't know how to handle
it. But I think it's also that Londoners are still getting used to
using restaurants, not just as places for special occasions, but as
a natural meeting place, like the pub."

 Ah, the pub. Soren Jessen, the Danish proprietor of two of
London's smart restaurants, One Lombard Street and Noble Rot,
believes that London's eaterati are "unquestionably worse behaved
than the New Yorkers or Parisians — and I can add Copenhageners to
that." He specifically points to London's new bar-restaurant
chains, which he says pander to a dark British longing for the
primeval pub and its forgiving gloom. 

 "Those places try to be restaurants and pubs at the same time," he
said, naming groups like All Bar One and the Slug and Lettuce.
"It's all dimly lit, it's thumping, people are encouraged to drink
too much, to shout, to flick ash on the floor. And people are
carrying that whole attitude into serious restaurants." 

 Mr. Jessen doesn't resort to furniture removal, preferring to take
the preventive course at One Lombard Street. "We discourage them by
trying to soften the environment, to civilize it, to feminize it
even. So if you flick ash on the floor here you should feel
horribly out of place. And I'm sure it helps that our beers, unlike
our Champagne, are very, very expensive."

 No one is too grand, it seems, to be touched by the scourge, not
even Nico Ladenis, the chef and owner of Chez Nico, still one of
the titans of London's haute cuisine. 

 "Michael Gottlieb is quite right," he said, "but I think it's just
an extension of the whole national attitude — the way authority and
privilege are like red rags to a bull. It's about excessive freedom
— the freedom to be a yob, the freedom to be rude and boorish.
Maybe it also comes from frustration over the loss of empire, loss
of the Raj. How far back do you want go? You could write a whole
book about it."

 Actually, Mr. Ladenis has written at least part of a book about
it; Chapter 8 of "My Gastronomy" (Macmillan, 1997) entitled, "The
Customer Is Not Always Right."

 "What's certain," Mr. Ladenis concluded, "is that the English have
always taken democracy to extremes."

 If this criticism is all a bit hurtful to Londoners' pride, there
is some comfort on offer, and it comes, improbably, from an
Irishman. Oliver Peyton, the owner of Mash and the
Michelin-approved Isola, does not deny the complaints against his
adopted city. How could he? His own delinquent diners specialize,
he says, in having sex in the lavatories; his minions at Isola have
instructions to intercept would-be members of this Meal-High Club
before they make it into the trysting place.

 But Mr. Peyton says he likes what he calls London's wildness. 


"I got into this business precisely because I wanted to challenge
and change the stuffy, reverential character of haute cuisine," he
said. "I never liked cathedrals to food. London's the best place,
the natural place, to do that, because it is much freer and much
more rock 'n' roll than other cities."

 "In the end it's a question of balance," he added, "and I can put
up with the bad behavior that does go on, if that's the price of
life in London being such fun, and of restaurants being fun." 

The New York Times on the Web
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