Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 10:18:06 -0400 From: Mitchell Davis Lunch Time: The Temporal Elements of an Afternoon Meal at a French Restaurant in New York City By Mitchell Davis When we think of time as it relates to restaurant dining, what comes to mind first is fast food. For as the directors of the multinational fast food corporations have demonstrated (Reiter 1996, 85; Love 1986, 14) and social theorists have shown to be true (Ekelund and Watson 1991, 613), such high volume, quick service eateries are in the business of selling not only food, but also time. Until relatively recently, when broader lifestyle considerations have become almost as important as speed to attract fast food customers, just about every decision made in a McDonald's or Wendy's or Burger King hinged on whether the outcome made the process of producing food quicker and more efficient. Ekelund and Watson have shown a strong correlation between the time it takes to eat at a fast food restaurant and the decision to do so, qualified by perceived value expressed as a function of wages (1991, 615-619). It is no coincidence that every machine in a McDonald's kitchen has a timer, every employee a watch. Although the medium of fast food exchange has historically been burgers, hot dogs, and fried chicken, the commodity-implied by the very name given to the genre-has always been time. But time affects dining experiences other than fast food. Although temporal considerations factor heavily into every aspect of modern society (see Sorokin 1943, 158-225; Moore 1963; Lauer 1981, 1-17; Zerubavel 1981), the number and variety of temporal elements that converge to produce the restaurant fine dining experience is extraordinary. Fine has shown that the complexity of the temporal framework of the restaurant kitchen alone is impressive (1990, 95-114; 1996, 54-79). When combined with the temporal elements that come into play in the dining room, on the menu, and in the lives of the diners themselves, the resulting temporal structure of a simple lunch is awesome. Moreover, whereas the conservation of the diner's time determines the value of fast food, it is the consumption of time in its myriad manifestations that determines the value of a fine dining experience. The more time consumed-imbedded in the scheduling of when you eat, the complexity of the dishes and their historical references, the age of the wines, the multiplicity of the courses, the pacing of the service, the seasonality of the flowers in the dining room, and the overall transporting quality of the meal, just to name a few temporal elements waiting to be devoured-the more valuable the entire experience. This paper will explore the temporal elements of lunch at a French restaurant in New York City, Restaurant Daniel. After a brief account of a typical lunch at Daniel, the dining experience will be divided into four categories to provide a framework for the discussion: the decision to lunch, the menu, the kitchen, and the dining room. Emphasis will be placed on the interconnectedness of these four components to produce a valuable gastrotemporal experience, keeping in mind the distinction between primary temporal elements, those that refer specifically to the quantifiable passage of time, or clock time, and secondary temporal elements, those that refer to the psychosocial conceptualization of time, or social time. The goal is to demonstrate that the temporal elements of lunching in a fancy French restaurant transform the experience from a simple nutritional exercise into a socially charged phenomenon in which time is the main ingredient. Lunch at Daniel Restaurant Daniel is considered by many to be the best restaurant in the United States. Since opening in June 1992, it has been selected by international reviewers (Wells 1994) and guidebooks (Gayot 1994) as one of the top dining destinations in the world. As a result, reserving one of the restaurant's 85 seats at lunch or dinner Monday through Saturday can be a challenge. The reservation books open at 9:00 a.m. 30 days prior to each date and are often filled by 10:30 a.m. Three people are employed just to handle the phones. Lunch is less popular than dinner, but still requires at least two to three weeks advance notice. Generally, the last time slot to fill up is Saturday lunch, when most of the business clientele and socialites who fill the dining room during the week stay away in anticipation of their Saturday night outings. The atmosphere on Saturday afternoons is more casual than at other times, the pacing somewhat more relaxed. By the time Saturday dinner arrives, however, all of the formality has returned. It is not unusual for the restaurant to serve 200 people on a given Saturday night (or any other night for that matter), seating guests as late as midnight. Because I felt the temporal considerations of the people who could afford to take a leisurely lunch on a Saturday afternoon might be more interesting than those who are constricted by having to return to the office during the week, for the purpose of research I chose to lunch at Daniel on a Saturday in the beginning of April. Even more to the point, I made my reservation only one week in advance and I wasn't given another option. When my guest and I arrived for our reservation at 2:30 p.m., the dining room was packed. Captains, waiters, bus people, the wine steward, the chef/owner Daniel Boulud, himself, and even some of the other guests were whirring around the restaurant, navigating the small, crowded room as they hopped from table to table. We were seated within five minutes of our arrival. Remarkably, two tables were seated after us. Once seated, we were presented with an extensive menu titled "Lunch: Winter 1998." The menu featured 12 appetizers, ranging in price from $17 to $130 (for Beluga caviar), and 11 entrées, ranging in price from $33 to $38. In addition to these basic categories, several other special menus were indicated. They included a three-course, prix fixe lunch menu (for those in a hurry), "A Celebration of Black Truffles from Provence," three different seven-course menus built on the "themes" of North Atlantic seafood, foie gras, and truffles, and five "plats classiques," traditional French dishes, such as bouillabaisse, whole-roasted foie gras, and beef Wellington. A note read, "These very special tasting menus and classic dishes can be ordered for your entire table with one week's advance notice." A separate menu insert listed ten special dishes based on what was available from the market. The copy made every dish sound so delicious, deciding what to order was difficult. Our lunch proceeded seamlessly. While we were looking at the menu, a plate of hors d'oeuvres, amuses-bouches, arrived, "compliments of the chef." We placed our order with a captain. I decided on a chilled cucumber soup with yogurt, shrimp, fresh tomato, and mint; roasted salmon on a cranberry bean and artichoke fricassee with zucchini-basil pesto; roasted farm-raised veal with spring root vegetables; and because the menu structure I'd chosen required me to make a dessert decision up front, a bittersweet chocolate bombe filled with soft salt caramel flavored with Earl Grey tea. My guest skipped the soup course, ordering instead an appetizer of nine-herb ravioli with chanterelles, ricotta and a tomato coulis; pan-roasted cod with lemon, capers and croutons, crushed acorn squash, and cauliflower in Banyuls wine glaze; and a selection of cheeses (not indicated on the menu). He decided to wait to order dessert. As the captain retreated, the sommelier arrived. Based on our order he suggested a reasonably priced 1994 white Burgundy. The table setting was changed to reflect our anticipated glass and silverware needs for the first course and a man arrived with a selection of four breads. The courses rolled out of the kitchen with such precision and smoothness, we hardly noticed that by the time the entrées were presented, our fourth course if you count the hors d'oeuvres, it was almost 4:00 p.m. After the table was cleared and crumbed, a waiter produced the cheese plate. My guest received a dessert menu that featured ten chocolate desserts and ten desserts made from "the fruits of the season." A surprise course of two chilled dessert soups was presented. Our coffee order was taken. Our desserts arrived, followed by our coffees, a tray of petit fours, and a tray of chocolates. We asked for the check at about 4:30 p.m. and with it came a napkin full of madeleinettes hot out of the oven. We walked out of the restaurant just before 5:00 p.m., sated but surprisingly light. Dinner service was slated to begin with the first seating at 5:45 p.m. Doing Lunch The very idea of lunchtime is a socially constructed temporal phenomenon. Visser traces the history of the midday meal in England from the largest meal of the day, "dinner" at 11:00 a.m. in the 16th century, through the 18th century "nunch" or "luncheon" defined in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary as, "as much food as one's hand can hold," up to the 19th century "furtive snack," "a sit-down meal at the dining table in the middle of the day" (1991, 158-159). Visser goes on to explain how men began to take lunch together during their busy days in the city, while the luncheon became a social occasion mainly for elite women at home (1991, 159). (Evidence of such ladies remains in the dining room at Daniel during weekday lunchtimes, when "the ladies who lunch" are conspicuous in their Chanel suits and coiffed hair.) Those city lunches of the men folk grew into the New York "power lunches" of the 1980s, at which million-dollar deals would be sealed over steamed "spa cuisine" entrées at restaurants such as The Four Seasons (Mariani 1994, 146) and other temples of gastronomy and clout. Levenstein attributes the act of eating lunch outside the home in America to the rise of the modern industrial society in the late 19th century, when shorter lunch hours and increasingly disperse populations no longer made returning home during the day feasible (1988, 185). Although provisions for lunch were often made in employee cafeterias and executive dining rooms, the shift in the belief that lunch was a meal taken at home was a prerequisite for the acceptability of going out to lunch in restaurants. Ironically, the act and timing of lunch has had little to do with actual pangs of hunger or any other biological or nutritional needs. Instead how, when, and where we eat lunch, like most of our routine daily activities, has actually been scheduled by other societal factors (Zerubavel 1981, 7). More than just societal convention comes between the biological time to eat and lunch at Daniel, however. The reservationist sits somewhere in the middle. Because reservations must be made so far in advance, the decision to lunch requires forethought and scheduling. This scenario represents a reversal of power over temporal decisions usually associated with eating. Generally, we eat when we can leave work, when our friends are free, or, on occasion, when we are hungry. Fast food restaurants that try to get every customer served within a predetermined time frame, must organize themselves to accommodate the arrival of guests, particularly during lunch and dinner rushes. Although there is certainly a higher demand for prime meal times at Daniel, the restaurant exercises considerable power over its guests' schedules because of the high demand for seats. Guests are willing to make the concession of eating lunch at 2:30 p.m. on a Saturday because they are eager to experience a meal cooked by the greatest chef in the country. The cost is some temporal freedom. Just getting through to the reservationist in the first place may prove a discouraging temporal challenge for some. With thousands of people calling to make reservations, some so desperate they lie about relatives and friends, the lines are often busy. Many regulars are given the number for a separate, secret telephone line (access to which is one of the perks of my job). Others keep their assistants busy with the redial button. Once connected, you can expect to wait anywhere from two to 15 minutes, while against the background of an old French song, a softly accented voice tells you about the restaurant's hours, some menu highlights, and Daniel's new mail order caviar business. Being able to take lunch late in the day is not without its social significance, however. Although one could, and many do assert one's status by demanding a prime dining time and eating elsewhere if it is not available, an equally effective statement is made by accepting what would normally be an inconvenience for someone with less discretionary time. Lauer explains that generally the more status people have, the more discretion they have over their time (1981, 97). By being able to accept a reservation for lunch at 2:30 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, you are in effect saying that you can take off a period of time reserved by others for more mundane tasks, and wile it away on an indulgent eating experience. Taking a long lunch during the week, when lunchtime parameters are even more inflexible for most people, is further indication of elevated status. (Note that the cost of the lunch is an important consideration here, because a poor, unemployed person may have all the time in the world, but not the means to spend upwards of $100 on a meal.) Choosing to lunch with a guest in a restaurant such as Daniel also has temporal significance that results from a juxtaposition of Zerubavel's concepts of private time and public time (1978). Finkelstein shows how the seemingly civilized act of dining out thrusts the most private, personal aspects of eating, namely taste and desire, into the rather uncivilized public realm (1989, 162). In a similar way, dining out confounds public and private time, giving the people you are with the feeling that you are sharing an intimate private moment (i.e., eating and sharing food) without having to expend any real intimacy because the moment is transacting in a public space. Inviting someone to lunch on a Saturday afternoon, a socially recognized private time, is even more intimate than inviting someone to lunch during the week. Although ostensibly the focus of a meal in a restaurant is on whatever is happening at your table, Daniel often seems like a high school cafeteria, where prominent individuals move from table to table, greeting their friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in a status affirming dance of self worth. Spotting someone you know at Daniel asserts your membership in a special club. Being spotted is even more affirming. Thus although by deciding to take someone to lunch particularly on a Saturday afternoon you are giving up some of your private time, you don't stand that much to lose, and in terms of the power dynamics in the relationship with your guests, not to mention your self esteem, you stand a few things to gain. Obviously time is not the only factor taken into consideration when making the decision to eat out. In fact, given the adage that time is money, a simple measure of the cost of clock time required to eat lunch at Daniel would make the experience prohibitive, particularly for the high status clientele whose time is generally considered (by their own account if no one else's) worth more than most other people's. Beardsworth and Keil support this belief that people do not eat out to save time during the work, noting that restaurants are busier on the weekends (1997, 119). A more compelling reason must keep the "ladies who lunch" away from McDonald's. Still, the costs of clock time, incurred even before arriving at the restaurant, are offset in part by the anticipated rewards of social time. Value is added to a lunch at Daniel, through a framework Zerubavel calls the semiotics of temporality (1987), just by making the decision and taking the steps to eat there in the first place. The Flavors of Time on the Menu The restaurant menu is a document that establishes the temporal parameters for the entire dining experience. It provides expectations about how the meal will unfold, laying the temporal foundation against which the success of the experience will be judged. The menu determines how the kitchen is organized and what level of service is appropriate. It suggests a sequence of courses and places the meal in the context of a season. Although we ate lunch in early April, by all accounts spring, our menu said Winter 1998. This discordance was immediately disappointing because it made us feel we had come at a bad gastronomic time-the tail end of the dreary winter season, too early for the fresh ingredients of spring. We were relieved, however, to find the menu insert, a list of "market" dishes that highlighted the ingredients we were looking for-tender asparagus, baby soft-shell crabs, and briny shad roe, among them. In her four-star review of Daniel, the New York Times restaurant critic called Daniel's market specials, "celebrations of the season" (Reichl, 1994, C20), and we were ready to have a party. According to Zerubavel, we use repetitive temporal patterns, such as the seasons, to establish expectancies we consider normal (1981, 21). My guest and I were looking for gastrotemporal indications of season, markers of what Mohabeer calls organic time (1998, 9), to give our lunch an important temporal reference point. Luckily, we found them. The menu is also a document that prescribes a sequence of eating, a socially constructed order of courses developed over a long history of French gastronomy. The arrangement and enticing wording of the dishes on the lunch menu at Daniel make you want to include as many courses in that sequence as possible. In fact the wait staff are eager to guide you through the process of building a properly sequenced tasting menu. Otherwise, if you have the foresight to call ahead a week in advance, as the menu suggests, or if you put yourself completely at the mercy of the chef on the day you are dining, the selection and sequence can be decided for you by the kitchen. Either way, the menu represents a socially constructed temporal guideline of how your lunch should progress, regardless of what you feel like eating. It takes a strong culinarian with temporal confidence to alter the conventional sequence (see Escoffier 1997, 119), although the staff at Daniel would most certainly be accommodating. By disrupting the determined sequence of courses, the order, the staff of the restaurant manipulates an element of time that can add value to the dining experience. The arrival of extra courses-our amuses bouches, the fruit soups, petits fours, chocolates, and madeleinettes-added to the excitement and enjoyment of our lunch. They also made us feel special, no matter that every table around us received virtually the same treatment. Although the price of preparing a batch of madeleines is probably less than $1, by sending them out "for free," the chef adds considerably more value to our expensive lunch (which includes the temporally charged Proustian reference). Of course, a disruption in sequence-bringing the wrong dishes, for example-can have a detrimental effect on the overall experience. The dishes on the menu themselves are enriched with time. The complexity of the preparations, which directly affects the time it takes to produce them, is indicated both in the wording of the copy and the price of the items. Only a small portion of that price covers the ingredients. The rest represents the staff of more than 40 people working in near perfect synchronization to make them arrive at your table when and how they are supposed to. In her discussion of different economies of time, Sirianni explores the Marxian measurement of production value as a function of labor time and the opportunity cost of disposable time, all told finding what she believes is a difficult contradiction in Marx's equation concerning the cumulative production of real wealth (1987, 163-169). Still, the notion that labor time equals value adds to the temporal discussion of the menu. As Whyte observes, the restaurant is both a production and a service unit (1948, 17). As such, the value of the production, in Marxist terms, stems not from the raw ingredients, but the time required by the labors to turn them into the product, the complex dishes that arrive at your table. At Daniel, that amounts to a small fortune. The value of time on the menu can also be seen in the emphasis placed on both the oldest and youngest ingredients, each of which are cherished and priced accordingly. On our menu, the valuable aged products included cheeses, Virginia ham, wine, and balsamic vinegar. In addition, there is the hefty wine list that includes a large selection of fine old wines, many priced around the $1,000 mark, and one even priced at $4,000. The youngest ingredients included baby greens, spring vegetables, baby lamb, baby wild leeks, and by extension, tuna tartare and scallop seviche, both of which are served uncooked and therefore must be made from the freshest available ingredients. Why both of these categories of items, the very old and the very young, are so valued is an interesting temporal discussion in itself. Aging a product requires time, and guarding something for a long period of time requires space, which comes with a cost. Scarcity also factors into the value equation of aged products. I believe, however, that there are other gastrotemporal elements which are even more important when we assign value to aged foods. Most aged foods fall into the category of acquired tastes, meaning that appreciation comes only after exposure over time. The value of this time spent learning to like them is certainly reflected in what we are willing to pay for these products. I also believe we ascribe a psychosocial value to the act of consuming history, ingesting a piece of our past in the present. Why the freshest, youngest ingredients in other categories should be most prized is open to similar gastrotemporal analysis. Sure there is the elevated cost of gathering and distributing the best examples of highly perishable ingredients. But there is also an enticing psychosocial value placed on consuming the "first" of anything. The first ingredients of the season, especially spring, which is a time of renewal and rebirth, brings excitement and hope, two emotional states on which our society places a premium. Robust, aged foods are prized for the taste of tradition and knowledge they provide; tender, young foods are valued for their flavor of innocence and naiveté. Inasmuch as memory is a temporal phenomenon, time can also be found on the menu in the form of traditional dishes and, for that matter, any dish for which the diner has a historical reference. Taste (at least the retronasal olfactory component of it) is known to be a highly effective memory trigger (Cain 1984). But even before we ingest anything, the names and descriptions of dishes on the menu can evoke strong feelings rooted in the past. On Daniel's menu, the "plats classiques" provide an obvious historic link to France. The mere suggestion of a bowl of fragrant bouillabaisse may transport a diner to a summer vacation once spent in a seaside town outside of Marseilles. With the memory comes all of the feelings associated with that time. What we eat and what we ate serve as one aspect of the social environment that Zerubavel shows is so important when we consider the way we remember the past (1996). The Kitchen Clock Gary Fine has explored the complex temporal matrix that helps determine the social framework of restaurant kitchens (Fine 1987, 1990, 1996), noting, "Time is as important to cooking as any herb" (Fine 1996, 55). In a restaurant the caliber of Daniel, where the level of service and complexity of food are much more complicated than those in any of the Twin Cities restaurants Fine studied, however, time can be even more important than most herbs. Almost every decision made in the kitchen at Daniel, from the garnishes on the plates to the placement of the stoves, rests on temporal considerations that, from the perspective of the cooks and diners alike, have the potential to ruin the guests' dining experience. Because much of the value at this level of dining comes from increasingly complex preparations (even if the final product seems simple), the chef is always pushing the temporal limits of what the kitchen and the cooks can produce. A complex menu requires a large kitchen staff. During lunch 19 cooks work the line (which, as I will discuss later, is in fact not a linear configuration at Daniel). Coordinating large numbers of people increases the temporal demands exponentially. In addition to the cooks, there is also a steady flow of waiters, captains, back waiters, bus people, and even guests into the kitchen during service. Ironically, while the focus of the entire restaurant is temporal serenity in the dining room, the byproduct appears at first glance to be temporal chaos in the kitchen. Although the clientele sets the temporal boundaries of the dining experience-how long they can allow for lunch, what they order, and how fast they eat, for example-the kitchen maintains a locus of temporal control. In fact, some menus in upscale restaurants, such as the beautifully embossed silver triptych presented to diners at La Tour d'Argent in Paris, advise that the best food takes a long time to prepare, "la grande cuisine exige beaucoup de temps.," reads the note at La Tour d'Argent. Diners are willing to give up some of their temporal control for the same reasons they are willing to make Saturday lunch reservations at 2:30 p.m. Dining at Daniel is a privilege and for it you are not only willing to alter your schedule to be there, you are also willing to change the way you eat, right down to the pacing of your meal. Of course this does not mean that the kitchen can totally disregard temporal dining conventions. The fact that we hardly noticed our lunch took over three hours to consume speaks to the ability of the staff to manipulate your perception of time to make you feel that it isn't being wasted. Free food sent out by the kitchen, helps buy the cooks time to prepare what the guests ordered while making them feel special. Still, after some socially determined point, the guests will begin to notice. When that point occurs depends on the temporal skill of the wait staff, which will be discussed in the following section. To present a course of many complicated dishes to a table at exactly the right moment is an amazingly complicated temporal endeavor. It requires advance planning to ensure every ingredient is available, every component ready to prepare. Many cooks will tell you that mise en place, literally putting everything in its place before service begins, is the only way to ensure the kitchen will run smoothly. With a menu as vast and as varied as the one offered at Daniel, that means many things must be put in many places. Some of those things, such as flavored oils and cured meats, for example, may take weeks of advance preparation. Other highly perishable products, such as breads and flans, aren't kept from lunch to dinner. As restaurant consultant Martin Dorf stresses, the design of the kitchen is "the single most important element" in planning a restaurant (1992, 42). That importance stems from the affect the design has on the kitchens ability to manage the temporal demands of the menu and the clientele. When building the kitchen at his restaurant, Daniel tried to reconceive the organization of the classic French kitchen, believing the physical separation and task specialization of stations espoused by Escoffier (Mennell 1996, 159) posed unnecessary temporal challenges. Instead, he built a central island of stoves around which cooks could see and hear each other, and time their work accordingly (Pooley 1993, 50). Although to the observer the result may seem like chaos, in fact the shift is similar to the modern arrangement of the musical ensemble, in which every musician has a view of the conductor, in this case the chef/expediter, as well as the other members of the group. Of course things in Daniel's kitchen do not always run smoothly. For one thing, the kitchen at Daniel is almost always operating in what other restaurants would consider a "rush" mode. When every seat in the dining room is booked weeks in advance, you can expect very few slow periods. That we were seated for lunch at 2:30 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon and that we were not the last table to be seated highlights the extended duration and intensity of the kitchen operation. When we left at five, the kitchen was gearing up for the first dinner reservations just 45 minutes later. The last tables on Saturday night are seated as late as midnight. And when you consider that a seven-course tasting menu is still an option at that hour, you can't help but appreciate the temporal demands placed on the staff. As demonstrated above, the timing of lunch is highly socially regulated, perhaps even more so than dinner. Because people want to eat at Daniel so badly, the reservationists can to some extent spread the arrival of guests out over the duration of the meal period. But Boulud himself admits that from the perspective of the kitchen, "dinner is always more fun, because it builds slowly; lunch comes all in a rush" (Pooley 1993, 51). Cooks are not generally fond of working lunch. As Katherine Shepard of the Culinary Institute of America told Michael Ruhlman while he was researching The Making of a Chef, "Some people, even within the industry, feel that the breakfast line and the lunch line are where you put people who aren't worthy yet of doing dinner" (Ruhlman 1997, 134). Others Ruhlman met at the CIA concurred. One chef went so far as to begin a campaign to change the negative perception of working lunch, noting that nationally lunch is the biggest selling meal restaurant meal period-according to National Restaurant Association statistics, 26 billion lunches are sold each year compared to 15 billion dinners-and that because it happens so quickly, it requires much skill to be able to handle it (Ruhlman 1997, 16). Though cooks prefer dinner, lunch is still important at Daniel, evidenced if only by the fact that Daniel is in the kitchen during both lunch and dinner services. Because everyone wants to eat lunch faster than dinner, and the complexity of the menu stays about the same, managing the temporal demands of the kitchen in the afternoon can be even more difficult than in the evening. You have less leeway to get into the rhythm that gets the food on the pass just as the waiter enters the kitchen to bring it to the table, where the guests await their next bite of time. The Ticking in the Dining Room The dining room is the physical space in which the temporal success of the dining experience will be determined. Ultimately, all of the efforts of the staff are focused on what happens at the table. Managerial decisions are made and systems put in place to regulate the timing of each element required to produce the dining experience, so that, from the guest's perspective, the restaurant wheels turn in perfect synchronization. The challenge is that every guest is keeping time by a different clock. So many factors outside the restaurant environment affect the temporal state of each diner that managing the temporal experience of any particular table can be frustrating, a roomful of tables, daunting. Clock time provides only a marginally useful reference. Monitoring social time is key. In essence, one of the signs of a truly great dining experience is the suspension of the perception of the passage of time. At a perfect meal, everything about the service appears so smooth, so effortless, so harmonious, that guests don't realize how much time has passed. Because of their proximity to the guests, waiters are the ones in the position to most dramatically affect the temporal experience of the diners. If the food does not arrive promptly, or in the right sequence, whether its the fault of the kitchen staff or the computer, the waiter must deal with the consequences. In the dining room, as in the kitchen, the measure of success is tied to how effectively the elements of time are managed and coordinated. Unlike in the kitchen, however, the waiter has the added responsibility of determining what and how to communicate this information to the guests. Further complicating the temporal framework of the dining room is the elevated level of service expected by the guests at Daniel. Just as the complex menu necessitates a large kitchen staff, it requires complex service, which in turn requires a large wait staff. As in the kitchen the increased number of people in the dining room increases the challenge of synchronization. Unlike in the kitchen, however, where the chef is the conductor, albeit with considerable input from the wait staff about the temporal state of the guests, in the dining room the baton of time is held by the guests, themselves. The guests determine when they want things, what should go together, how long they are willing to wait. Waiters must be keen observers of time and its passage because they provide the clues to the kitchen on how to regulate their time. A perfect dish brought to the table before the place setting has been changed or while one of the guests has ducked into the rest room is ruined. It doesn't matter if the kitchen's timing in getting every element of the course together at exactly the same moment was perfect. If that moment doesn't coincide with what is happening in the dining room, the effort is wasted. Waiters look for temporal cues from their guests. My roommate Izabela, a waiter at an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan, explained how she tries to determine the timing of the meal by watching how quickly a person eats the first course (Wojcik 1998). Does she talk a lot without taking bites? Is he shoveling in his food without paying attention? These cues indicate how much warning she needs to give the kitchen to prepare the next course. Of course her assessment takes into account her experience with how long it takes the kitchen to put up an order. Timing courses to the individual guest's needs, the responsibility of the waiter, requires a complex temporal calculation. That's not to say the dining room staff is at the mercy of the guests' temporal whims. Waiters have many techniques at their disposal to alter a table's perception of time. In a study of restaurant workers conducted in Florida, Felz demonstrated how waiters could strategically manipulate the tempo of the dining experience to affect the guests' moods (Munn 1992, 109). By gesturing, conversing, offering drinks, doting, even admitting that something is taking too long, the perception of time passing can be manipulated to change the dining experience. Of course, manipulation can only go so far before it is noticed and causes resentment. Anticipation is a subtle temporal element of service that separates good service from great service. The most obvious way that a guest reckons the passage of time at a table in a restaurant is by waiting for something he or she needs. As already stated, the more aware of the passage of time the guest is, the less pleasurable the dining experience. The job of the four-star waiter is to anticipate the needs of the guests before they are even aware they have them. Having the glass filled before a guest goes to reach for it, bringing a steak knife before the lamb chop arrives, or removing the dirty dishes before the guest has to push them away requires an attention to temporal detail that is rare. Although the complicated menu means that the food at Daniel can take a long time to prepare, a hazard as far as service is concerned, because the service is also so complicated, there is a lot to do to fill time. For as long as something is going on, i.e., a fish fork is being set, a glass of water is being filled, or a rare wine is being decanted, the guests are less likely to notice how much time has actually passed. In the context of this complexity, making special orders, requesting things on the side, skipping courses, or anything that changes the normal sequence and timing and interaction of the kitchen and dining room can have disastrous effects on the experience of a particular table and has the potential to interfere with the entire operation of the restaurant. Of course, since restaurants such as Daniel are proud to be able to accommodate any whim, the staff is prepared to some extent to take whatever comes. Still, every once in a while something, a table of 20, a group of vegetarians, throws the whole ship off course. During our lunch, the sequence of our courses might have had negative temporal ramifications. Although we each ordered the same number of courses, they fell at different times in the meal. I had a soup, a fish, an entrée, and a dessert, while my guest ordered a pasta, an entrée, and a cheese course. Because proper etiquette suggests the entrées should arrive at the same time, I was one course ahead. The temporal balance is precarious when one person has food in front of them and another does not because the one without food is much more likely to notice the passage of time, particularly so if he or she is hungry. To help secure the balance, my guest was given an extra spoon when my soup arrived, "just in case he wanted a taste" (a safe bet when Daniel is making the soup). Still, the gesture made my guest feel as though he didn't have to twiddle his thumbs while I ate. The cheese course was handled similarly, with an extra plate of breads presented to me, just in case I wanted a nibble. One final temporal challenge that arises in the dining room is balancing the guests consumption of time and perception of timelessness with the need to reset the table for the succeeding reservation. Because of the high demand for tables at Daniel, only the last seating in a particular mealtime service has the luxury of open-ended use of the table. Yet, because part of the value of the experience, as I've shown, derives from the consumption of copious amounts of time, it is difficult to bring closure without seeming to rush the guest and thereby draw attention to time in a way that would reflect badly on the service. The rush of sweets at the end of the meal in some way serves to indicate that the experience is over and softens the presentation of the check. Although some people might be tempted to linger over the petits fours and chocolates until enough hunger returns to want to sample each of them, the temporal sense is almost literally, everything's out on the table, we're done, it's time to go home. By reinforcing the feeling that you just can't eat another bite, the restaurant is asking you to leave in a most deliciously polite way. The difficult temporal challenges in the dining room result because time reckoning happens at the level of the individual and the goal of good service is to suspend it for everyone in the room. As Zerubavel notes, the number of ways to anchor what is going on in the present is infinite (1982b, 1). And most of the ways restaurant guests are set to do it during any given meal are determined outside the restaurant environment. The best waiters look for cues about how the passage of time is being perceived by each guest and respond accordingly. The goal is to keep the guests from noticing time, encouraging them to consume it, instead. Consuming Time Although certainly the food served at Daniel is exquisite, it is clearly not the only reason people are willing to wait weeks to get a table to eat at a time they might not be hungry for a price that by all accounts is exorbitant. It is not a coincidence that none of the four-star restaurants in the city are known for speedy service. Dining in an elegant restaurant, particularly at lunch, is a temporally rich experience, made valuable in part by the skill with which time is controlled and manipulated. If you consider that for a typical three-hour lunch service at Daniel, some 40 people are on staff for approximately 6 hours to service the 95 odd diners who will be able to get a seat, you and a guest will consume a total of roughly five hours worth of someone's time, not including any advance preparation or the age of the wines. According to Biasin, food is a process, a transformation that derives meaning from the juxtaposition of pleasure with the value of nourishment (1993, 3). As a process it undergoes transformation, from raw to cooked, fresh to stale, nourishment to waste. As with any process (Bourdieu 1990, 98), this temporal dimension of food, which makes it highly perishable, also gives it meaning. The dining experience is a similar temporal process that juxtaposes pleasure with the value of nourishment. And because none of the individual elements can ever coincide in the same way again, the dining experience is also highly perishable. As an experiential society that values perishable phenomena, it's no wonder restaurants such as Daniel are so popular, even if only a certain strata of clientele can afford them. As things move faster, there will always be people looking for ways to slow them down. "We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods," declares the official manifesto of the Slow Food movement that began in Italy 1989 as a reaction to the growth of the fast food industry and has spread to more than 35 countries around the world. "A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life...our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food...Slow Food guarantees a better future" (Slow 1989). The group claims to have a cultural agenda, promoting a philosophy of pleasure to "safeguard traditional food and wine heritage." Through a stunning quarterly journal, Slow: The International Herald of Tastes, and conferences and events around the world, the movement hopes to bring people back to the table and keep them there for an extended period of time, not only to rediscover the pleasures of food, but of people and life as well. Will there be a cap to the temporal value of lunch in a fancy French restaurant? Will life move so quickly that everyone will consider $100 for lunch a reasonable price for consuming copious amounts of time? Only time will tell. WORKS CITED Beardsworth, Alain and Teresa Keil. 1997. Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society. London: Routledge. Biasin, Gian-Paolo. 1993. The Flavors of Modernity: Food & the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. 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