Michael Gibney 

The top 10 restaurants and bars in modern literature

From the Restaurant at the End of the Universe to the cabman's shelter in Ulysses, chef and author Michael Gibney reviews the best eating and drinking in books
  
  

American Psycho
The best taste … A scene from the Almedia theatre's adaptation of American Psycho. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The world of cooking is a vast, enchanted province, full of interesting characters engaged in fascinating activities. Tattooed ballerinas dealing in flames and blades, red-eyed mad scientists obsessing over plates they've made. There is passion and addiction in the kitchen, aspiration and imagination. There is energy and exhaustion, discovery and defeat. There is triumph and failure and ugliness and love. There is everything we need for a wonderful story.

Artists of all sorts have been capitalising on the rich subject matter for centuries. A flip through any decent library reveals how, time and time again, authors turn to these motifs to complete their books' worlds.; whether it's Proust's madeleine or Emma Bovary's pineapple.

In writing Sous Chef, my rendition of a day in the life of a professional cook, I naively believed that I was onto something new. That I alone could see the jewels buried in the rough of my profession, and that I alone was equipped to tell a story that takes place there. I realised quickly, though, that I was wrong—that restaurants and bars, with all their nuance and beauty, abound in modern writing, and that I've merely added my own voice to a conversation that's been underway for quite some time. Some other authors have spoken up thus:

1. Hotel X in Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

The Menu: Oeufs brouillés; Chateaubriand aux pommes sautées; maquereau.
The Appeal: "The chargings to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the yells, the struggling with crates and trays and blocks of ice, the heat, the darkness, the furious festering quarrels which there was no time to fight out", and two litres of wine a day each.

2. The Dingo in A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

The Menu: Several bottles of champagne

The Appeal: The Dingo is where whiskey-sodden weeks spent with completely worthless characters are sporadically punctuated by run-ins with the Princeton elite – the great moundsman Dunc Chaplin, as well as the occasionally poignant, pretty-faced, wavy-haired, high-foreheaded, friendly-eyed, Irish-mouthed, built-chinned, good-eared, capable-handed, unmarked-nosed, lightly-built F Scott Fitzgerald.

3. Milliways in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

The Menu: "Large fat meaty quadrupeds of the bovine type, with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost be ingratiating smiles."
The Appeal: "A very agreeable and sophisticated answer to that question 'Where shall we have lunch?', Milliways is a place where one can meet and dine with a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time."

4. The Farolito in Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

The Menu: Mescal
The Appeal: Literally in the shadows of the volcano Popocatepetl, the shadowy Farolito is a place where the delicious Mescal and its companion hallucinations just might be worth the mortal cost of admission.

5. The cabman's shelter under Loop Line bridge in Ulysses by James Joyce

The Menu: "A boiling swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table and a rather antediluvian specimen of a bun."
The Appeal: Where a bacchanalian son in search of a father might find a woebegone father in search of a son.

6. Lantenengo Country Club smoking room in Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

The Menu: "The liquor, that is, the rye, was all about the same: most people bought drug store rye on prescriptions (the physicians who were club members saved 'scrips' for their patients), and cut it with alcohol and colored water. It was not poisonous, and it got you tight, which was all that was required of it and all that could be said for it.
The Appeal: Watching the moth-eaten storytelling Harry Reilly get pelted in the eye with the round-cornered ice cubes from Julian English's scotch and soda.

7. O'Connell's in White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The Menu: "O'Connell's is an Irish pool house run by Arabs with no pool tables … there are reasons why the pustule-covered Mickey will cook you chips, egg and beans, or egg, chips and beans, or beans, chips, eggs and mushrooms but not, under any circumstances, chips, beans, eggs and bacon."
The Appeal: "A place to discuss everything from the meaning of Revelation to the prices of plumbers. And women. Hypothetical women."

8. Charlie Bathcellar's Poolroom in Studs Lonigan by James T Farrell

The Menu: Beer; cigarettes.
The Appeal: Just off the el train at 58th and State, this is where the mopes and bums'll give you the horse laugh for going to a swell dance with a hot dame, and where gassing with the wrong punks is liable to get you pasted in the mush.

9. Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

The Menu: Moloko peeted with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom
The Appeal: "Veshches which give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg."

10. Dorsia in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

The Menu: Lobster with caviar and peach ravioli; blackened lobster with strawberry sauce; quail sashimi with grilled brioche; baby softshell crab with grape jelly.
The Appeal: "My priorities before Christmas include the following: (1) to get an eight o'clock reservation at Dorsia with Courtney, (2) to get myself invited to the Trump Christmas party aboard their yacht, (3) to find out as much as humanly possible about Paul Owen's Fisher account, (4) to saw a hardbody's head off and Federal Express it to Robin Barker – the dumb bastard – over at Salomon Brothers and (5) to apologize to Evelyn without making it look like an apology."

 

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