The Comedy Of Manners

Is etiquette more than snobbery? Is the egalitarianism of the present, the informality, any more inclusive, or is it just a pose.

- Michael Snyder

THE LAST TIME I REALLY fought with my older brother was back in March 2016, in a tiny restaurant somewhere in Provence where we—he and I and our younger sister and our parents—had gathered on one of our increasingly rare family vacations. The evening was raw and damp in the way that early springtime tends to be in temperate climates, but inside, the restaurant was cosily anachronistic: ochre walls, wooden beams, smooth table linen, tiny glasses of purple blossoms scattered among flickering candles; there was white asparagus and red wine and not an exposed brick or Edison bulb in sight. If we hadn’t had the restaurant entirely to ourselves (the joys of low season), we would have been in breach of every rule of etiquette as voices and tension rose—ironically, since etiquette was precisely what we were arguing about.

The gist of the argument was something like this: My brother, a Washingtonian through and through, possessed of all that city’s preoccupations with propriety, felt that restaurants had become too casual, that people, on the whole, had stopped bothering to dress up for nice meals and that that ruined the experience for everyone else. Having cut my teeth in New York in the early-aughts, when the Brooklynisaton of fine dining was just beginning (but before the inanities of Angeleno wellness culture had made their way east), I naturally disagreed. No city, I argued, needs more than a couple of old-school, white-tablecloth places. Making things more casual and eliminating some of the more baroque rules of decorum removed a barrier to entry and, in effect, democratised fine dining (we were both obviously wrong, on which more later).