Dying of Old Age

Karl Mannheim wrote “Das Problem der Generationen,” in 1928 and it’s been of questionable utility ever since. I was told recently that I was ‘the last year of the Boomer Generation’. Which means, as far as I can tell, that I’m supposed to have worn flares at Woodstock. I didn’t. I was at the St Matthias College Infants school and if I’d seen mud, I’d have probably eaten it. Generalising into broad, stereotypical age groups rarely withstands any closer observation. Even admen and politicians know that.

Really. Not at Woodstock.

And yet, the last couple of years of solid restaurant-going, both in the metropolis and out in the sticks, have forced me to acknowledge what can only really be described as an age-based phenomenon. I wouldn’t want to claim to have been ‘the youngest person in the room’… but often, looking carefully about, there’s nobody noticeably younger.

Of course, this should cause no surprise. Restaurant prices are rising inexorably. If young people can barely afford to rent, let alone buy flats, it’s hard to imagine they’re going to be as keen to stump up for a posh night out with quite the enthusiasm that their parents are spaffing the inheritance.

Dining in good restaurants has always been a luxury, a discretionary spend, and the old have been pushing the young out of that area since … well, to quote Generational Theory, since we Boomers apparently started ‘pulling up the rope ladder behind us’. But quite a large part of me doesn’t enjoy sitting in a place where everyone is my age or older. I’ll be honest, though. That large part is mainly vanity.

But I’m beginning to believe that this has ramifications. It doesn’t really matter if you’re older or younger than the couple at the next table. If you’re eating in the West End right now, it’s a racing certainty that you’re older than anyone on the floor or in the kitchen.

For a frighteningly long time now, certainly back to before the pandemic, we’ve seen a change in the young people coming into the industry. For a while, all they needed was talent and drive, and they could find a place to hang their shingle. But commercial property prices and private equity screwed that. A talented young person now needs old people’s money to start a restaurant.

And now, post pandemic with pressure on the workforce, we’re seeing further change. The person serving you or cooking your food can almost certainly not afford the experience you are expecting them to provide. For a while there, our hospitality industry was run by engaged enthusiasts. You could hope that your server knew what it was supposed to feel like to be served, that your cook was eating widely and experiencing the work of fellow chefs. Not any more. You have to go back to Orwell in Paris and London, to find a time when the income and attitude chasm between server and served yawned so wide and grew so fast.

Of course, things haven’t always been democratic. And that’s what opens the ultimate, even scarier worm-can.

Two decades ago, I came of age writing about a new face of British food. One that wasn’t happening in posh places inhabited by old gits like my dad. Back then, restaurants were, almost by definition, for older people … uniformed wine waiters… flaming food on carts. You maybe got to go once a year if an old person was paying. But we saw a revolution. Suddenly everybody was going to restaurants, many on most days of the week. Cool young people were opening places … because they could afford to. Oddly enough, it was what Mannheim would have recognised as an indicator of generational change. Sure, it wasn’t the scale of the Civil Rights Movement or the Depression of the 30s but for a culture like the Brits, forged by class division and austerity, an easygoing restaurant scene was earth shattering. It changed the economy and the attitudes of, yes, ‘a generation’.

I wrote hundreds of thousands of words about cool, young, democratic eating places. How ‘Modern British’ was a re-appropriation of our own tradition or a celebration of our multiculturalism. I cheerfully attacked pretentious, expensive places. The joyless elitism of Michelin and ‘International’ luxury restaurants. I was even had a go at Elizabeth David, and her patrician writing for an earlier generation of aspirational ‘gourmets’. Food and restaurants had been for the elite and the old, and I didn’t like it. I was happy and proud that things changed. I hoped, forever.

A generation in itself doesn’t necessarily cause change. Instead, its collective experience forms its attitudes. And the behaviour of the young presages what’s going to be ‘relevant’ to the future. What, then, if the absence of the next generation of consumers in hospitality environments indicates some kind of attitudinal change? Resetting to a reality in which, just maybe, we shouldn’t be eating out of five days in seven. Maybe cooking food was never something that ordinary wage earners, in a functioning modern society, could subcontract permanently to others. What if we’re supposed to take proper grown-up responsibility for buying ingredients, cooking for and feeding ourselves and our families?

If young people can’t afford to eat out now, it shouldn’t surprise us, but I can see no way in which restaurant prices are going to come down. No curve on which eating out becomes more affordable and democratic. Quite the opposite.

The Age Thing will not wipe out the restaurant industry by any means … but what if it signals something bigger? What if the idea that restaurants were ‘for every day and for everybody’ was a shared delusion we could only support for a couple of decades … for a generation? And what if the disappearance of a young generation from the West End indicates that hospitality is pricing the heart out of itself.