I live with my family in Hong Kong. Our holidays we spend in Greece. Eating in a restaurant couldn’t be more different in the two places.
But is there perhaps more to it than just a superficial difference? Might it be that the way we order food shows us something deeper, more fundamental about the human condition? Might it be that our very dignity as human beings is reflected in the way we talk to a restaurant waiter? – Let me explain.
Restaurant orders, dignity and freedom
In Greece, when you go to a local village restaurant, you’re often taken to the kitchen to see the available dishes. Sometimes these will be ready-made and you just point at a pot and get that thing. But sometimes, you will also just see components of food: french fries, tomatoes, cucumbers, pieces of meat, various small fish, pasta or rice, meatballs, and an array of appetisers. If you know the owner of the tavern well, he might produce additional dishes from the back of the kitchen, the best bits, kept only for his family and friends. And you will look around, look at this and that, ask a few questions about what is fresh and what’s only for the tourists, and then you’d order: a bit of this, but with the sauce from over there, a spoonful of that there, but on one plate with this, and the salad made of this ingredient and that, but leave out the third thing and replace it with something else that you fancy.
Later, when you go out and look at the other guests’ tables, you will see that everyone’s menu is as individual as their fingerprint, reflecting not only their tastes and dislikes but also their standing with the owner of the shop and his family. Every collection of dishes, every order of drinks is the result of a deeply personal history, of a number of choices and constraints that determine the particular configuration of dishes on every table.
It’s all very different in Hong Kong, and, I guess, in most other capitals of the so-called developed world. Here, you go into a restaurant where you are kept as far away from the kitchen as possible. The food processing area is off-limits to the guests. You order, not according to your taste, but following a rigid menu. You want dish 13 or 28, and that’s it, as far as choice is concerned. You’d like 28 but with the salad that goes with 13? Sorry, we don’t understand that order, that’s not in the menu, it’s not in the computer, and even if we could make it, somehow, we wouldn’t know how to charge you for it, or how to explain it to the computer system that processes the orders and that manages the inventory and supplies. You can’t have this, and that’s the end of it.
The cheaper and more popular the restaurant, the more mechanised it is, the more prominent the atomic choices on the menu become, the less freedom the customer is …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
