[lbo-talk] On a Social History of the Restaurant

[James Heartfield]

Good piece. Britain in wartime organised communal dining, which Churchill insisted should be called ‘British restaurants’, ‘not canteens’ which sounded too municipal (though that’s what it was). Communal eating was a good way of feeding people cheaply, and its rituals still survive in school dinners.

In the USSR, though communal eating was favoured, it was said that waiters in restaurants were famously rude, feeling that their servile status was a throwback to the days of privilege.