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Focus May 2020

Conviviality and friendship will return among us

In the food and restaurant sector, many problems remain unresolved.


Shortly before mounting the scaffold, Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, had this to say: “It is through hardship that we each discover who we truly are”. We might paraphrase that wise observation by saying that “It is in times of trouble that human stupidity truly shines through”. And silliness has indeed abounded in these days of seclusion, in every country, at every level. Details are unnecessary, as we must all surely have perceived this phenomenon; but, apart from the horror of the many unattended corpses of the victims, two words, at least, will remain etched in our memories: ‘fragility’ and ‘friendship’.
Around a third of the population, namely those over sixty, have been defined as high-risk, to be protected and confined at home until further notice for their own good. Until a few months ago, these people were the pillars of society: scientific luminaries, politicians, actors, journalists, professionals and even simply grandparents formed the core of civil society. Suddenly they became vulnerable creatures to protect. A very dangerous, as well as daft, concept, which undermines the ethos of equality. The second word which will remain with us, at least in Italy, is ‘friendship’. Cicero wrote: “Friendship is one of the best things granted to humanity”. Even earlier, Aristotle declared that “Without friends nobody would choose to live despite possessing every other resource”. And we Academicians well know the crucial value of friendship and of conviviality, whose etymology is from the Latin ‘con + vivere’: ‘living together’. Some, judging by the Italian government’s new social distancing regulations, may accord fourth-degree in-laws, though we may never have met them or even know who they are, precedence over friends. Beyond these general considerations, many doubts and problems remain unresolved in our own food and restaurant sector. We read numerous frantic restaurateur interviews proposing fiscal and behavioural measures to adopt, but things will only normalise when the virus has vanished, either spontaneously as has been known to happen, or through medicines and vaccines.
We must admit that a surplus of restaurants exists today: in Italy there are over 112,000 full-service restaurants and 35,000 carry-outs (e.g. pizza or chip shops). More spring up every year, but statistics tell us that a sobering 75% of newly opened restaurants are shuttered within 5 years. Too much improvisation, too much underwhelming food, too much competition in streets and neighbourhoods crawling with eateries. When restaurants resume full operations, many, through natural selection, will not reopen.
What fate awaits restaurant guides? We know that most (the Michelin guide, published later, is an exception) of the ‘2021 Guides’ should be publicly available in September and October 2020. However, they are printed before summer, using assessments made in 2019 and the first two months of 2020. Yet things ground to a halt in March. How many restaurants will reopen? The food guides will probably not appear this year. The guide sector was already in hot water; this may be the catalyst for abandoning print in favour of constantly updateable online formats. The Academy too, having begun a wholesale revision of the Good Table guides, has paused this in the face of prevailing uncertainty. Many venues are setting themselves up for carry-out and home delivery, but for us Academicians, restaurants aren’t merely a means of obtaining re-heatable food to satisfy our hunger; they must be places of conviviality and gathering: words that will remain forbidden for a while, but which will surely be with us again.

Paolo Petroni
President of the Accademia