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Adam Gopnik

The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 25, 2011

by Adam Gopnik (Author)

4.1 126 ratings

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Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, and even our moralizing—“You still eat meat?” With our top chefs as deities and finest restaurants as places of pilgrimage, we have made food the stuff of secular seeking and transcendence, finding heaven in a mouthful. But have we come any closer to discovering the true meaning of food in our lives?

With inimitable charm and learning, Adam Gopnik takes us on a beguiling journey in search of that meaning as he charts America’s recent and rapid evolution from commendably aware eaters to manic, compulsive gastronomes. It is a journey that begins in eighteenth-century France—the birthplace of our modern tastes (and, by no coincidence, of the restaurant)—and carries us to the kitchens of the White House, the molecular meccas of Barcelona, and beyond. To understand why so many of us apparently live to eat, Gopnik delves into the most burning questions of our time, including: Should a Manhattanite bother to find chicken killed in the Bronx? Is a great vintage really any better than a good bottle of wine? And: Why does dessert matter so much?

Throughout, he reminds us of a time-honored truth often lost amid our newfound gastronomic pieties and certitudes: What goes on the table has never mattered as much to our lives as what goes on around the table—the scene of families, friends, lovers coming together, or breaking apart; conversation across the simplest or grandest board. This, ultimately, is who we are.

Following in the footsteps of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Adam Gopnik gently satirizes the entire human comedy of the comestible as he surveys the wide world of taste that we have lately made our home. The Table Comes First is the delightful beginning of a new conversation about the way we eat now.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Knopf
Publication date

October 25, 2011
Dimensions

5.81 x 1.19 x 9.52 inches
ISBN-10

0307593452
ISBN-13

978-0307593450
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2011: Adam Gopnik again demonstrates his considerable talents in The Table Comes First, a collection of musings on one of his favorite subjects: food. Fans of Paris to the Moon and Through the Children’s Gate know that Gopnik is a true gourmand whose tastes have been refined in the kitchen with his friend Alice Waters, on the velvet banquettes of Parisian bistros, and at chaotic New York City takeout counters. These essays cover a broad range of food-related topics, including the origins of the modern restaurant and the arguments for and against eating meat. But Gopnik’s overarching mission is to celebrate the pleasures of sitting around a table and sharing a meal with family and friends--a pleasure, he notes, that is at once universal and deeply personal. It is at this intersection of macro and micro where Gopnik’s insatiable intellect and warmth are best displayed. --Juliet Disparte

Review

“Adam Gopnik brilliantly weaves together the history, philosophy, and culture of food with his deep passion for cooking and the shared pleasures of the table. Anyone who roasts a chicken at home or eats chocolate mousse in a restaurant will be forever changed by this book. I loved it!”
—Ina Garten

“I need to read anything that Adam Gopnik writes, and this book on food, eating and—it follows—life is a particular feast. His acuity, grace, sensitive intelligence (in short, his brilliance) are, as ever, dazzlingly displayed and yet with the lightest of touches.”
—Nigella Lawson

“Gopnik would surely be the world’s greatest dinner guest; he can make any subject fascinating, and always backs up his curiosity with unhurried research and an acute eye for the telling detail. As the number of TV cooking shows piles up faster than the empty Pop-Tart wrappers in my kitchen, it’s time to ask: Why is the world so fixated on food? Gopnik explores the origins of restaurants, recipes and other grub-centered rituals.”
—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

“The perfect book for any intellectual foodie, a delicious book packed with so much to sink your teeth into”
—Padma Lakshmi, author, actress, model and host of the Emmy-winning Top Chef

“Adam Gopnik’s The Table Comes First: France, Family, and the Meaning of Food indulges gourmands everywhere . . . In Gopnik’s distinctive style, it is encyclopedic yet personal and funny, and it drives at deeper truths . . . His story is more ambitious than a history of restaurants—it’s about how we taste, dream, and argue about food. He explores the extremes of strict localism (exhibit A: Brooklyn tilapia). He gets into the heads of apparent adversaries—the meatless crowd and the whole-beast fiends, the Slow Food and molecular movements, the New and Old World wine advocates—and gives each its place in the grand foodie pantheon . . . Gopnik’s take on what makes eating glorious is at once sweeping and intimate.”
—Tracy McNicoll, Newsweek

“Adam Gopnik’s writing about food is highly intellectual and profoundly witty, while also being warm and personal and rooted in common sense. He thinks hard about the routines of the table, and makes you think too.”
—John Lanchester, author, The Debt to Pleasure

And praise from the UK:

“As a dauntless Francophile, a doting father, and a dedicated foodie, Gopnik joins a distinguished corps of essayists who have dedicated themselves to the important subject of gastronomy . . . He possesses the happy knack of combining intellectual curiosity with a quotidian interest in humanity and writes with intelligence, wit, and grace about culinary quiddities and contradictions. From the first restaurants to appear in 18th-century France to fast-food joints, Gopnik unfurls his napkin and tucks in.”
—Iain Finlayson, The Times (London)

“Adam Gopnik is an admirably versatile writer . . . The writing is light and bright throughout, the learning deep but informal.”
—Ed Cumming, The Daily Telegraph

”The Table Comes First is a pleasantly odd, heterogeneous book that never allows itself to be confined by the boundaries of its gastronomical theme. It presents a lavish buffet of history, autobiography, reportage and philosophy, among various other forms . . . One of the main pleasures of The Table Comes First is the way in which Gopnik continually manages to write about food while also gesturing towards larger themes and concerns: family, economics, philosophy, literature, ideas of justice and what it might mean to live a good life . . . Wonderfully eloquent and insightful . . .”
—Mark O’Connell, Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

”A compelling read about how cooking practices change with every generation, The Table Comes First should be on the shelves of all food enthusiasts. Gopnik explores culinary history, from 19th-century Parisian fine dining to our modern concern with sustainable food.”
—Stella magazine

“He has a voice that is by turns conversational and dandyish, fancy about everyday pleasures (sport, food) and defiantly unawed about those subjects that are supposed to matter more (art, philosophy) . . . These are personal essays in the fullest sense of the word, sieving the big subjects of the book’s subtitle—family, France, food—through one man’s well-furnished mind.”
—Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

“Adam Gopnik is the nearest thing there is—in the English-speaking world, at any rate—to a philosopher of food . . . [T]hese essays blend enormous erudition with great elegance of expression, and pack intellectual firepower too . . . Gopnik wants us to take food seriously, to believe that the table comes first. At the same time, he wants us to remember that food matters only in so far as we connect it with the broader project of living well, of staying at home with ‘our pleasures as much as our principles’ . . . These essays are a reminder that gastronomy, in order to be profound, must also know its place.”
—William Skidelsky, New Statesman

About the Author

Author of the beloved best seller Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986. He is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Reviews and Criticism and of the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. He lives in New York City with his wife and their two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Who Made the Restaurant?

A restaurant is a place where you go to eat. You usually arrive in the early afternoon or the middle of the evening, and you are taken to a table of your own in a room, usually on the ground floor of a city building in a space leased by a cook and made to look like a dining room. There are plush chairs and benches, and often mirrors. Someone, a professional go-between, often dressed in a parody of evening wear, whatever the hour, brings you a card that lists the things the cook is ready to cook, and how much it will cost to get him to cook them for you. You study this card-usually a list with decorations, sometimes bound in a leather pseudobook-and say what you'll have, and then the go-between goes into another room, the kitchen, which you can't see or hear or probably even smell. After a wait, the go-between brings the food you asked for. Very often, you will start with soup before having some grilled or roasted meat, followed by a sweet, almost always something made with sugar, a pudding or cake, rather than something naturally sweet, such as a plain piece of fruit. You are expected to have tea or coffee afterward, and then a bill is brought to your table. Prices are never mentioned out loud, and you pay whatever the card said you would. The place isn't a whorehouse or anything like it, but often you take someone there because you would like to have sex with them afterward, and sometimes you do, although, if you do, you go and do it somewhere else.

All the details, from soup to sex, of this setup, which by now seems as normal as eating itself, as obvious as breathing, can be found in more or less the same form from Sydney to San Francisco. And all of them-waiters, menus, tables, mirrors, closed kitchen, seduction, and silences, even the little table in the corner, tout compris-were thought up in Paris during a twenty-five or ten-year period right before the French Revolution and in the twenty or so years after. When you consider that eating is one of the few things that humans did even before they were people, it seems strange that restaurants should be so recent, but they are-as though the idea of having sex in beds had been discovered in Berlin during the winter of 1857, and then word got around.

There were places where you could go and pay for a meal before there were restaurants, of course: the tavern, the cookshop, the inn, the table d'hôte, the traiteur, or cook-caterer. The tavern as it evolved throughout Europe in the later part of the eighteenth century had many of the essential emotional traits of the modern restaurant. But the restaurant, with its special rituals and its particular look, began at one time and in one place.

The restaurant was known at once to be a modern and amazing thing. The great gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin marveled in 1825 that now "any man with three or four pistoles in his purse, can immediately, infallibly, and simply for the asking procure all the pleasures of which taste is susceptible." Yet how resilient, many- sided, adaptable, this new thing turned out to be, defying the rule that a picnic is made for one lawn and no other! If the restaurant is not the most original of modern instances and institutions, it is surely the most tenacious. It is the primal scene of modern life. Most modern urban people mark their lives by their moments in cafés and restaurants, just as ancient people marked their time on earth by visits to the local oracle, or medieval people by pilgrimages: we are courted, spurned, recruited, hired, fired, lured to a new job, or released from an old one at a table while a waiter hovers nearby. There are few marriages that did not begin at dinner at a table leased for the evening, and few divorces that did not first show signs of approaching doom in a sigh of resentment or an eye roll of exasperation in a similar setting. ("Can't you just make up your mind and stick with it?/Why do you always overtip?"...The "forever" sentiments of anniversary dinners out not rarely sugar over the approaching "no-mores" of domestic life.)

I love restaurants. I love them even though, after many years as a reporter spent being fully disillusioned about their behind-the-scenes- having labored once or twice in their kitchens and befriended their owners-I am aware of how brutal the work is, how long the hours are, and how, aside from the ventures of a handful of those entrepreneurs essentially indifferent to the food they serve, how tiny is the hope of profit. "Sale métier," the cooks and waiters alike mutter in Ludwig Bemelmans' memoirs of restaurant life in prewar Europe-"Filthy occupation"-and the muttering goes on still. Yet when I think of happy moments, I think of eating out.

Though they sometimes witness the ends of our love lives, restaurants surely have a ring of hope about them, a note of innocent celebration that makes them the right background for seduction. The man who asks the girl to dinner is not, after all, actually suggesting sex except by the airiest remote inference; he is pretending to be a better man than that: let's meet, talk, try. It offers the hope of happiness that gives greedy sex the look of lighthearted love, and, in the erotic sphere as much as the eating sphere, turns raw hunger into formal appetite. The restaurant offers not seduction but what precedes seduction, the false promise of pure motives.

I am, doubtless, prejudiced by particular experience. On my tenth birthday, I took the Moloznik boys from across the street to see a double feature of the first two James Bond films-this at a blissful time when the second run of movies in theaters was still a regular event, so that one had the pleasure of reseeing a good thing in the velvet padding of the cinema-not on the sofa, as we do now-with its thrilling moments in the dark: the trickle of sweet, forbidden Coke through a straw, and the chewy, burnt, semipainful edges of caramels. My parents, bless their kind hearts, were blackmailed into taking all three boys out to dinner at a Howard Johnson's on, as I recall, City Line Avenue in Philadelphia.

Howard Johnson's is gone now, reduced to a handful of sad motels, having receded from its excellence. But in its day it had something grand about it. There was the electric sign outside, in green and orange, showing, in rapidly animated yet obviously distinct action (you could see the unlit armature of the next moment of movement waiting just beyond the neon figure that was lit-an endlessly repeating flip book of colored light). Simple Simon and the Pieman enacting a brief drama of supplication and supply; one took eternally, the other fed over and over again, on the sign above City Line Avenue.

I sensed then that the sign, though meant as a come-on, was one of those strange, dense referents that used to be part of the pool of myths of ordinary people. Simon, as I recall, had the bent-kneed neediness of a Maxfield Parrish illustration, which, combined with the zigzagged lettering, made the sign, in retrospect, a kind of Saturday Evening Post cover come to life, or at least to electricity. (It was similar in spirit to, though far more pop in form than, the mural of Old King Cole in New York's St. Regis Hotel, a stylized comment on a nursery rhyme assumed to be known to everyone.) The sign's whimsical high voltage-the elaborate fable electrically enacted simply to signal "Eat!"-was conducted into the HoJo's interior as well, where the color scheme of blue and orange seeped even onto the margins of the many- paged menu. Its dishes were familiar along the highway to New York: the rubbery fried clams, the 3-D burger, the mint-chip ice cream, minted with green food coloring. The burger that I had that evening had the delectable aroma, now vanished from the world, of the griddles of my childhood, something buttery and of the soda fountain. The possibility of choice, the splendor of existence, was all present.

It was not the deliciousness of the food-my mother made better burgers- but the overcharge of optimism that made the meal matter. Its excellence involved the removal of the obvious signs of labor, which even then I took to be a benevolent fiction, for the better food at home was a benign good fortune but effortful. You had to have my mom to eat really well, but anyone could come here and share. It was a moment of transformation, lift-off, of anonymity transmuted into intimacy without the obligation of gratitude: you told the menu- bearing woman at the cash register "Four for dinner," and suddenly, inexplicably, you were in a booth, and there was dinner for four! This sense of being in the unimaginable right place with exactly the right company in the most welcoming of rooms attended by the most considerate of servers-whistling while they worked and candidly eyeing the reward-was a blessing felt there and sought ever since.

As museums cross or so Updike tells us, with the mystique of women, restaurants cross in memory with the optimism of childhood, with birthdays, promises, quiet, and the guilty desires of childhood, too: special treatment, special favors. The Cardinal, who never arrives, who sweeps you up into your carriage saying, "Child, you please me," becomes the maître d' who says, "Ah, sir, we're so glad to see you!" Some note of gaiety, of excess, of potential, lingers even at the most pedestrian lunch counter. (I have never looked at the Edward Hopper study of loneliness without thinking happily about how cozy the combination of diner chili and lemon meringue pie must be that late at night.)

Years went by-and here one must imagine calendar pages blowing and stock shots of jets crossing the Atlantic-and I found myself in Paris, just at a moment when the Grand Véfour had changed hands from Raymond Olivier's to the great cook Guy Martin's. Jet-lagged in the golden light of the Palais Royal, I recognized instantly the same sweet charge, the sibling resemblance to City Line Avenue and the Howard Johnson's of my tenth birthday. The enameled nymphs and goddesses, the mirrors, the red velvet couches-it was, for all the Palais Royal sophistication, this resemblance that made it moving: the experience of overcharge, of more than was necessary, of décor and joy, and sobriety of eating. Both were places of possibility, the illusion of potentials: we shall be blessed, and know that we are.

Even purely "social" restaurants, where dramas of snobbery play out, can be turned to such pleasure. In my misspent editorial youth, I used to take two gifted, hard-drinking writers, Mordecai Richler and Wilfrid Sheed, to lunch once a month at the Four Seasons. While Tina Brown and Helen Gurley Brown dined on water and lettuce, my two authors would let themselves go on shrimp with chipotle sausage, linguine alle vongole, crab cakes...and a bottle of red wine and a bottle of white (and too many Cognacs at the end; it was the last decade of hard-drinking writerliness, the last gasps of literary alcoholism that Sheed wrote about movingly and bravely in his In Love with Daylight). While Tina and Helen and the rest sipped and barely munched, the maître d' would wheel out a kind of chocolate bombe, for the express and sole purpose of having them squeal with indignant denial of interest. But the writers would demand a piece, and then another, with whipped cream (or "crème fraîche," as the arc had bent again toward France).

The restaurant, whether in its most abstract, ritzy form or at its most elemental, can always be diverted back toward a primal magic, a mood of mischief, stolen pleasures, a retreat from the world, a boat on the ocean-years later, having ice cream aboard a cruise ship in a storm, I would find that sense of stolen kisses, of clandestine joy, instantaneously renewed. That is what the restaurant promises, and how its prosaic purpose-cooked food exchanged for money-passes into the poetic, which explains why when the young man, from Balzac to Scott Fitzgerald, comes to the city, the first thing he seeks out is the place to eat that he has read about.

Who invented the restaurant? How did it begin? How did it happen that the long history of paying for food in a setting so singular and set became such a resilient institution-so resilient that a single restaurant, like Gundel in Budapest, could survive wars and revolutions, communists and the new economy, only to end much as it began? How did restaurants happen, and why did they happen first, or best, in Paris?

Until recently, most cooking history was pop history, filled with canned "Eureka!" moments and arch legend-making. ("The great chef Dunand found himself after the battle with nothing but crayfish, chicken, some eggs, and a couple of tomatoes. What, he wondered, could he make from such a motley assortment of ingredients? A moment's thought, a minute's chopping, and an hour later, on the Emperor's table, chicken Marengo was born," etc.) The birth of the restaurant had its myth-made tang, too. The old, potent, and long-standing story was that it was the French Revolution that had made the restaurant: After the revolution, the cooks of the French aristocrats were out of work, since they no longer had any mouths to feed. With nowhere to go but the streets, they opened cafés and started selling in public what before you could get only in private. Willy-nilly, the modern restaurant came into existence. A little later, a few high chefs, the great pastry architect Antonin Carême among them, made up a "grammar" of French cooking; that is, they wrote down recipes. Together, the dining room on the street and the recipe book in the kitchen made a new place. The aristocrats lost their heads; their cooks lost their jobs and found a new way to make a living in a democratic world.

A clutch of scholars, many of them, interestingly, women, have in the past decade or so proved the expelled-from-Eden myth all wrong. (Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Rebecca Spang, and Rosemary Trubek have all figured in this work, and so has the British historian Giles Macdonogh.) The invention of the restaurant, it turns out, predates the revolution by at least twenty years, and chefs being out of work had nothing to do with it. (The nobles' cooks were more like head butlers than like chefs in any case, and most stayed loyal to their old bosses after the fighting started.) The old story goes that the essential ways of cooking and practice already existed behind château doors but were democratized when chefs entered the ungilded world. But in truth the cooking they did wasn't anything like the new cooking of the restaurants. Carême, though a great figure in his way, as a writer and provider, belongs more truly to the history of catering.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First Edition (October 25, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307593452
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307593450
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.81 x 1.19 x 9.52 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #471,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #274 in French Cooking, Food & Wine
- #510 in Gastronomy Essays (Books)
- #514 in General France Travel Guides

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teddy

Worst book I ever put down and couldn't pick up again.

Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2021

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Perhaps this conglomeration of words masquerading as an informative source of food knowledge is best appreciated by keeping it on the shelf to remind oneself of how many truly phenomenal books about food, especially cookbooks exist. I myself buy about 4 cookbooks or books re: food/wine per month in addition to subscribing to 8 different periodicals. People of course say to me "you'll never be able to cook everything in these books -- you've got over a thousand of them." True!! But if I can get just ONE singular recipe from the publication that is truly exceptional and unforgettable, then it's worth it. I wish I could say one positive comment about this book.
So why do I have such strong lamentations about Godnik's "The Table Comes First?" Well, for starters it's written in a style of what can only be termed "pontifications of self aggrandizement" that from the get go either have no truth or basis in fact or leave out what "Captain Obvious never would."
Some examples: 1) Godnik states how good food has become "a popular sport" and even those who prefer fast food get to "prefer it loudly." REALLY?? I just don't see that at all. I've seen plenty of people say "why go to those fancy expensive restaurants -- by the time they finish putting all those spices and gravies on the fish, you can't even taste it." And what about all those people who go into marts and consume sandwiches that have been wrapped in plastic for gosh knows how long?? And like them no less?? This is not even to start talking about fast foods. So no, there are plenty of people who could care less about the growth, preparation, and culinary skills that go into making a complex (notice how I don't say great or better) meal with layer upon layer of taste. They view food as a source of calories and little else.
2) Godnik states that "food becomes less intimate the more intensely it is made to matter." FALSE! If anything, the exact opposite is true. When I give a summer dinner party, I might start c halved figs I grow dipped in Tunisian olive oil on a bed of fig leaves with goat or Brie or Epoisses that has been baked to perfection followed then by topping them with jelly I make from cabernet sauvignon, all served with a white Burgundy or Rhone. As we enjoy, I see my guests gazing into my garden. As they take in the heirloom tomatoes, rows of onions/shallots/chives/garlic and basil, parsley, sage, fennel fronds, carrots and celery, they know that soup with all those ingredients and a combo of thyme, marjoram, oregano, rosemary, Indian peppers, and other spices for depth is the source of the bouquet they're enjoying wafting from the kitchen to the deck. They know from the stubborn scales left on the deck that the stock came from several sea bass I just caught and that the the soup will be ladled over fillets which have been seared in home made butter and garlic. But more than that, they know that this course will be followed by several more that are beyond the scope of this discussion, they know for certain that all these INTIMATE preparations have been made just for them. They know I demand they arrive emptyhanded and ask nothing in return. How could anyone even think ( the way Godkin suggests) that a soggy set of hamburgers from a fast food joint could be more intimate.
3) Godkin goes on to state "the attempts to make it (ie food) an adventure I found absurd." Just read the above and anyone can see why it IS an adventure; combine this with the innumerable adventurous trips to the city ( New York) to take in an incredible meal and you'll have another of many reasons why good food is -- yes -- an adventure!!
4) Godkin continues with the very next word how he "recognized sexual politics" and how traditional women's work is now being done by men. He then goes on to talk about how guys are cooking more. Great. But what about all the other aspects of a "traditional relationship" he doesn't touch on? Guys may be cooking more (although he doesn't offer any data to back him up), but study after study in academia has proven that women still do the laundry, do the majority of the cooking, cleaning, homework with the kids, administering health care to their family, and being the one taking care of elderly in laws. By he way, when is the last time a husband took his mother in law shopping for pant suits?
5) Godkin goes on to state that two big things happened in the world of fancy food; "slow food" and "techno emotional" cooking. I get it, I guess. But I believe others bigger than that exist that are way more important should have been included in the discussion, but weren't. First and foremost is the internet. As opposed to when I was growing up and one had to wait until something appeared in a supermarket, one can now get all sorts of ingredients or items one could ever want. Gigantic king crab legs? No problem. One lb Nigerian shimp? Be there in AM. Rare Arabian/Korean/Indonesian ingredients? Just click send. This phenomenon and that of a diminution in the fast food craze coupled with the belief that foods one prepares oneself are healthier also drove this change toward consuming more complex dishes; again, all not mentioned by Godkin.
OK, so why did I go through the trouble of listing these complaints. Because as so many one star reviews above this one have indicated, one simply cannot read a book they don't agree with or feel is fundamentally lacking in "telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." MIND you, The above five points all represent material in just three and a half pages of the first several pages of the book!!!!! As I read on and realized this phenomenon continued to repeat itself, I found myself literally getting nauseated at how incomplete his arguments are, how biased and opinionated an author he is, and how his opinions have little truth or basis in fact -- at least compared with my experience. By the time I pushed to the end of the first section, I realized I had to commit what is tantamount to "walking out of the theatre."
Summarizing, I will always treasure this book as it will remind me what an excellent book on the subject of food shouldn't be. I will keep it on my shelf for sure.

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A highwaycribery Book Report

Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2011

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Eat this book!

How far things have come since Yippie philosopher Abbie Hoffman's publisher invited consumers to "Steal This Book," by giving it that very title.

Maybe author Adam Gopnik remembers former French President Francois Mitterand remarking that the United States was "a country waiting to be entertained" when he launched a body of work that mixed food and literature quite so lovingly.

A few chapters into "The Table Comes First," and you may very well try to eat it, or at least take a crack at one of the half-recipes he drops in throughout the essay.

It may be the case that the enjoyment of Gopnik's book rises inversely as one's familiarity with "food writing" drops. That was the case here. highwayscribery cannot say if the food talk contained is food news, only that everything else about it was fun.

Subtitling his essay, "Family, France, and the Meaning of Food," the author stakes out a large swath of human interest and then highlights the ties binding food to our larger life.

"The Table Comes First," passes from the particular (food) to the universal, reading in the tea leaves of peoples' food choices their politics, history, culture, the French Revolution, and the reasons for Catalonian cuisine (to name a few).

In doing so, the book becomes something for everybody, which is somewhat the point: Everybody loves food.

By way of one example, Gopnik discusses a "rule of three" he applies to cooking and life-living.

"Is there a pattern of making here, more universal than it might at first seem?" he asks. "Jasper Johns once said, with the high, significant disingenuousness of faux-naif genius, that the way to make art is to take something and do something to it and then do something else to it."

And it is applied to cooking how?

"There is first the raw thing, then there is the transformative act, and then there is the personal embroidery" and then back to the larger world, "Something borrowed, something done, something only I can do. Natures Way; Our Tribe's Way' My Way. Or else History, My Time, My Talent."

You may or may not find that particular line of analysis useful to your life, but it's a good bet other things Gopnik writes, while conjuring butterscotch pudding from scratch, will ring true.

The writer, who is a remnant of the old Manhattan talky-smart crowd, and writes for no less than "The New Yorker," has a whimsical touch, though there will be times you'll have to bear down and work a little.

It should be worth it.

The investigation into how restaurants came about, took form, and held it, is interesting stuff especially for those who frequent them. It is light fare (pun intended) yet thought-provoking.

The writer provides an exacting yet almost apolitical look at the meat debate. He puts the "local" strain of food-eating to the test in New York and comes out less-than-convinced the means are resulting in the desired ends (while ingesting a good-sounding repast).

Gopnik hews not to any ideology. He pulls what is good for his diet and mind from raging trends, rejects what does not work, and lets food-love be his guide.

The second half, less historical and less researched, lags a little by comparison. Still there are conversations with top chefs and culinary thinkers in "The Table Comes First," that enlighten.

And those who have only heard in passing what happened at elBulli outside Barcelona will enjoy the insider's view of the process Gopnik provides towards the end. Others mystified by "molecular" cuisine may find their nerves calmed, or irritated further by the contents.

Where the writer seems to be going, without banging the gong too hard, is that breaking bread has a sacred component. A strong one. That may not be a revelation, but how and why are worthwhile topics in this world where everything has already been written or said.

"Losing our faith in art is, in a secular culture," Gopnik closes, "what losing our faith in God was to a religious one."

Frothy dinner guest though he may be, a "Tea Party" invitation is probably not be forthcoming.

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A Bit Off Gopnik's Best, But Still Superb

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2015

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To see Adam Gopnik on the byline of a New Yorker article is to realize that you are in for a treat of fine writing and trenchant observation. The same thing can be said of his earlier books Angels and Ages, Through the Children's Gate and From Paris to the Moon, all of which are kept on my favorite "close-at-hand" shelf. In many ways The Table Comes First echoes the best of Gopnik's work,especially in his meditations on the meaning and significance of food, its conception, preparation, and above all, consumption. (This book should not be read by anyone who is on a strict diet!).

Nevertheless I do feel there are some weaknesses in this book that are not characteristic of Gopnik's best writing. His meditations on the art of fine cooking and dining are indeed enticing, but they do tend to wax overlong at times and indeed become somewhat repetitious. I enjoyed much of his history of the development of the modern restaurant during the French Revolution, but I was disappointed that he didn't carry that history on with as much fine detail. And unfortunately "Family" and "France" take something of a back seat to "the meaning of Food" as far as emphasis and development go.

I did enjoy The Table Comes First very much, especially its reiteration of something that I had forgotten: that so much of what we now consider fine cuisine has its origins in the simplest of peasant cooking. This is a book to be read and savored, and if not kept on a shelf with your cookbooks, at least kept comfortably close by.

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David Barlow

superp. erudite funny and in places deeply moving

Reviewed in France on December 18, 2022

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The overall and knowledgeable approach to food wine and life. A must read. Very special book for which many thanks

F. VALDES Perezgasga

Primera vez con este escritor

Reviewed in Mexico on May 30, 2018

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Descubrí a Adam Gopnik en los podcasts de la BBC (A point of view). Sus puntos de vista son originales y retadores. Eso me llevó a buscar leerlo en un libro. Resultó ser un escritor original y retador pero también muy informativo. Una delicia de lectura.

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AA_Basel

Not very engaging

Reviewed in Germany on May 13, 2018

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I've not managed to get past the first chapter - the style is too forced, convoluted, and although the book is well researched, it misses a bit of sparkle and that je ne sais quoi that makes French culture and cuisine so light and so sophisticated at the same time.

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Irene Rose

s a book on the sociology of cooking directed at academics rather than at people who want recipes(although there are a few of those too) I enjoyed very much as it combines my interests in french ...

Reviewed in Australia on February 13, 2018

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It;s a book on the sociology of cooking directed at academics rather than at people who want recipes(although there are a few of those too) I enjoyed very much as it combines my interests in french food and french life generally with my love for beautiful language

Russeller

Good, not what I was expecting

Reviewed in Canada on December 14, 2013

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I've been doing a lot of study towards food security, and attitudes toward food. I was expecting this to be more of a narrative about food attitudes, instead it was more of a history. Still a good read, interesting and well written; just not what I had been expecting/hoping for.

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The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 25, 2011

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