I am obscenely busy with some things, so I won’t be able to blog much till the first weekend of February. So I am sorry that all those amazingly great posts that I’ve saved as drafts won’t get published till then. I am sorry to deny my readers the benefit of my superior condescending intelligence. I regret that your education will remain incomplete as a result
Amit, who is enjoying life in Pakistan, wants us all to vote for him as the Best Asian Weblog at the 2006 Bloggies. Go forth and do his bidding. Desh ki Izzat ka sawaal hai…
Finally, Michael Higgins, who was an Indian in his previous birth, has given an interesting reply to a question I asked via email about when the culture of restaurants came about in the West. His post is here. I’ve posted my email to him and his reply in the extended entry, so you can read that up before you read Michael’s post to understand my thinking.
Anyway, help me out on this. Michael tells in his post that restaurants didn’t exist in the West till the 18th century or so. I guess India not having restaurants till the 19th is not as incongruous as I thought. But there were definitely inns in the West for long before that, but somehow I think that inns and hotels, i.e. places where you could pay and sleep for the night would be alien to India before the Westerners introduced it. I don’t mean the dharamsalas – I mean a place where you can pay and stay. Any guesses? Any cultural referents?
Extended Entry
Hi Michael,
I read your comment on Marginal revolution about French chefs after the revolution, and it made me curious about something I’ve been thinking of for long. When and how did restaurants develop in Western culture?
I am asking because the idea of a restaurant, i.e. a place where you can pay money and get cooked food in return seems completely out of place in pre-19th century India. I don’t know if it existed, but I can’t imagine it existing. I’ve tried to find references to when the first restaurant in India was established, but have been completely unsuccessful.
I can’t imagine it existing because there would have been no need for it. You don’t need it when you are at home. You don’t need it if anywhere you visit, you will find someone of your caste, whom you can claim as extended family who will feed you. (For Brahmins, temples would have been a good place to find food) Any eating out for entertainment would probably be done at temple fairs.. Any extended trips to places far away would involve entire groups of people travelling with their families and carrying their cooking implements with them.
So my guess is that restaurants were needed only when urbanization forced men to stay in cities away from their wives and extended families, or when urbanization forced lone men to travel for long distances to places they had never been before. The idea of eating out for fun came much later. In fact, even now in traditional families, having to eat at a restaurant is considered some kind of a blot on the wife’s copybook.
Ironically, I’d expect that the segregation among castes accounts for a lot of the variety in Indian cuisine. A single small district will have almost as many styles of cooking as there are castes.
So is it what happened in the West too? When did restaurants develop? Which ones developed first – gourmet restaurants by chefs of beheaded nobles or eating joints for working-class migrants? Did one develop into the other or did both develop independently?
You can of course, blog the answer if you wish 🙂
Hi Ravikiran
I should blog about this.
I think you’re right that the restaurant culture in India is a very recent phenomenon. I recall that my wife said that her grandmother never ever ate at a restaurant in her entire life: she would eat only brahmim food and who knows who was cooking in a restaurant.
However, I think that there was something evolving in India and in the West among the well-to-do. All of them had their own chefs and their own dining halls and the food would be very recognisable as restaurant food. My family recently visisted the Lalitha Mahal Hotel in Mysore. That was a palace for the Maharaja. But it was apparent to me that it probably always served as a sort of hotel with its own restaurant even at the time of the Maharaja. The facilities were there. I doubt back then you could just go to the entry desk and check in, but they probably kept it filled somehow. There simply was no reason to create a place like that for just one guy: what was he going to to with 100 rooms?
In the west, I think there had always been inns of various sorts to cater to travelers. But the truly rich would stay with other rich and eat in their dining halls. In read somewhere that the revolution killed that kind of culture in France and the chefs, in desperation I suppose, decided to offer their services to any with money as restaurants.
I live in Virginia and have visited some of the mansions of the early presidents. It was obvious that these homes also served as sort of inns for their friends and acquaintences – in fact there is a quote at Mount Vernon (Washington’s home) that says exactly that. He had his own chefs to entertain the guests (slaves, of course). My guess is that as America industrialized, some of the chefs of the elites (of course not slaves) could try to start restaurants associated with the great hotels.
Other kinds of cuisines evolved separately. For example, the first pizza restaurant opened up in the U.S. early in the 20th century. These early restaurants were there just to serve immigrant Italian who were largely lower and low-middle class. Pizza required a special oven so there was always a market for that type of food – but initially only for Italian immigrants. They didn’t achieve wide popularity until after WWII. The first hamburger restaurants started in the 1920’s (White Castle) and were not all that good. They took off after WWII with McDonalds (obviously).
Probably in India, you could track the evolution of the restaurant from various threads. For example, there probably was always a market for wedding caterers. Well, it is kind of an easy step from being a caterer to being a caterer/restaurant. There were the temple cooks as well – some of them may have been hired by restaurants. There were the palace dining halls – some of those chefs probably started their own restaurants after the Raj era ended. And I’m sure that there were always restaurants associated with the major hotels as well.
I’m sure some people have written books on the evolution of the restaurant. I’m sure would be a fascinating subject.
Btw, the food was too good in India. I came back with a big problem: I need to lose weight.
I don’t know about other religions/castes/families.
My Uncle was almost treated like a pariah by my grandfather. Reason – he had started a restaurant. It was my grandfather’s belief that both food and hospitality should always be extended to anyone who needed it, never sold. He used to quote something from Katha Upanishad(not sure if it was in fact the Katha, but he almost always used this Upanishad…so, its a reasonable assumption), which I cannot recall now.
My Class 7 NCERT textbook did mention Sher Shah Suri setting up sarais along the GT Road. Of course it said nothing about the rack rates they charged.
But even if sleeping at the sarai was free, and entirely subsidised, some sort of economic activity must have sprung up around them. Horses and people both need to eat, so there would have been opportunities for stables and eateries. Brothels, too.
I am not going to add anything new here, i think, but my obsessive compulsive need to comment on your blog forces me to go through these points.
Athithi devo bhava. I doubt if people ever had to go without food in pre-urbanized, pre-western India when they travel. You could almost always find somebody willing to provide boarding and lodging.
Plus, kings had this fascination for setting up tourist bungalows and rest rooms on major roads. Besides, temples had the Annadhanam thing.
Also, the concept of a Tavern and a local Inn was very popular. The first known advertisement (an outdoor hoarding, to be very specific) was in Pompeii and talked of a tavern in the next town.
When I posted about Anantashram in Mumbai going out of business, a reader mailed me saying that the place, like most old eating joints in the city, was started with the purpose of providing food to the immigrant workers. Anantashram was for the fish-eating Malwanis. I am sure there must have been others as well.
In V S Naipaul’s ‘India – A Million Mutinies Now’ there is a reference to the fact about restaurants in the south in the old days being classified as “brahmin” and “military”.
While yes, restaurants in terms of just eating out on a whim might be an urban phenomenon, it is possible that the Dhaba might be the earliest example of the restaurant in India.
It would be interesting to trace the origin of the term ‘Dhaba’. If you’ve noticed, Dhabas on the highway up north are classified as ‘VaishNo'(vegetarian) and ‘fauji'(a hindi term for an army man).
The occurence of the term fauji up north and ‘military’ down south points to a connection with the army.
Down south, restaurants were (and are still) called Military & Civil.
Civil of course being vegetarian fare. Even today, one of the more popular restaurants in Madras is called Velu Military.
Sometimes, people in the countryside refer to veg-places as “ஸாபà¯à®ªà®¾à®Ÿà¯” (Saapaadu) hotel, meaning meals places.
C
And there is mention of street-food hawkers, and food being sold at sporting venues of the Ancient Romans. Perhaps the chinese eating places (in China) are also quite ancient.
Well, I dont know how far I am right, but in all the mythological stories that I have read, atleast in telugu, the hero (usually the prince alone or along with his chum) before getting the kingdom, goes out for learning the ways of the world and always the best place to get information about a new city would be to stay at a place called ‘putakullamma illu’ literally translated means ‘house of the lady of meals’ (cant find a true translation for ‘puta’) where you pay to get food and stay as well. Of course information was a by-product. Selling food I dont think is a new phenomenon, its a product and that too one well in-demand. So I dont understand why Indians would get that idea only when Britishers introduced it.
Keerthi, “puuTakooLLa illu” was the first thing that came to my mind after reading Ravikiran’s post. ‘puuTa’ means ‘part of a day’.But I’m not sure whether or not this concept is there in the literature of 18th century. So, Ravikiran, if you believe fiction has some fact in it, then…..
I even read about such places in Jataka Tales.