THE RESTAURANT

A chatty, episodic history of eating out from British food writer Sitwell.

Ranging from the Roman Empire to “The Future of Eating Out,” the author, food critic for the Telegraph, favors an anecdotal approach that should please readers of A History of Food in 100 Recipes. Sitwell’s preference for good stories over coherent narrative is evident in early chapters on the Ottoman Empire and legendary Moroccan globe-trotter Ibn Battuta, which don’t describe anything modern diners would think of as restaurants. An interesting chapter about medieval England, where food stalls in busy markets moved indoors to become cook shops and eventually sit-down restaurants, is followed by “The Coffee House Revolution,” more focused on socializing and talking politics than eating. Sitwell gets back to restaurants with “The French Revolution,” which reveals that Paris became a hotbed of fine dining because private chefs for the aristocracy opened restaurants there after their masters lost their heads during the Reign of Terror. From “the first modern-day celebrity chef” (Marie-Antoine Carême) on, the author trots through material familiar to historically minded foodies: the impact of the gas stove, the ghastliness of postwar British dining; the 1967 arrival in London of authentic French cuisine at Le Gavroche, which fueled a subsequent explosion in great British cooking by chefs trained there; the fresh, locally sourced revolution led by Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in San Francisco; the outsize influence of restaurant guides; and the controversial rise of molecular gastronomy. Sitwell seasons the narrative with some intriguingly offbeat fare: the transition of Britannia & Co. in Bombay from dishing out comfort food to British imperialists to serving Parsi delicacies to Indians; the question of “the cultural appropriation of food” as embodied in a taco-frying machine patented by a Mexican immigrant and carried to global domination by Taco Bell; the conveyer belt in a crowded Japanese restaurant that ultimately moved sushi around the world and spawned the ecological catastrophe of industrial fishing.

The strenuously chipper tone grates, but it makes a refreshing change from the overseriousness of some restaurant critics.