Harry's Bar by Arrigo Cipriani

Author:Arrigo Cipriani
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611453201
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

But all the attention paid to tables, chairs, and tableware will not make up for any flaw in what constitutes the true soul of a great restaurant: the people who sit at those tables, commonly known by us restaurateurs as the clientele.

The clients of a restaurant are divided, more or less, into two categories, according to the function of the table they sit at: those who “make” the table, and those who need a table to feel important.

The main motivation of the clients belonging to the first category is to enjoy to the maximum all the positive things that their chosen restaurant can offer. Therefore, they do not care much about the table’s location. Before the enlargement of Harry’s Bar in 1960, I remember we were often patronized by a very rich Parisian banker who never refused a table, no matter how crowded we were, how poorly placed the table. One evening he ate in the middle of the service entrance without complaining. He calmly ate his dinner with his wife sitting next to him, surrounded by the confusion of the waiters, the cooks, and the busboys who were rushing by with trays piled high with dishes and glasses.

But it is an unfortunate truth of the restaurant business that such clients are rare, and that those who need a particular table to feel important are a vast majority. The widowed wife of that same Parisian banker demanded, and still demands, to dine only if she is given a table in a corner. Anybody who wants to open a restaurant today would be well advised to shape the dining room like a star, as that is the only way to please all the customers who demand to be seated in a corner.

It has always seemed to me that, while the forces that move the heavenly bodies and everything else in the universe are many and mysterious, there are basically two forces that motivate people: luxury and snobbishness. And there is no better place in the world to see the difference between these alternating impulses than in a restaurant.

After years of careful observation, I have come to the conclusion that snobbishness can flourish only in times of great affluence, while luxury appears in times of crisis as a source of equilibrium. Snobbishness consists of the desire for the superfluous and in the intentionally careless use of the things that we use every day. When it is allowed entrance into the world of gastronomy, it leads to the most absurd sets of priorities and generally means giving a lot of importance to things and very little importance to people. In fact, the snob always qualifies almost everything that is obvious and normal as “divine.”

Luxury, on the other hand, is the quest for quality, and hence for what is rare. In contrast to the snobs, those who seek luxury are interested not in the quality that can be found in things, but in the quality that only people know how to give.

I remember the

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