I listened this evening to a conversation between people who know a lot about restaurants and bars.  Ruth Rogers, who has run for nearly thirty years the outstanding restaurant (The River Café) she co-founded with the late Rose Gray; Nemanja Borjanovic who, with his girlfriend, gave up a career in finance after a spontaneous stopover in San Sebastian and started his own place in London (Donostia) to pursue his love of Basque food; and Alice Lascelles, who writes about bars and drinks for the Financial Times.  The occasion was the London launch of The Monocle Guide to Drinking & Dining.

They talked so passionately and humorously about how it’s communities that build great restaurants and bars and that it’s restaurants and bars that build great communities.  They talked about how we use food and drink to celebrate love: our love for our partners, friends, families, and businesses.  They were scathing about formulaic, cookie-cutter restaurants and food fads, and excoriated the “turn a quick buck” mentality that almost always ends in commercial failure.  They all celebrated the essential ingredient for success: not the celebrity guests, not the critics, not the bloggers, not the tourists, but the “regulars”: the people who live within a mile of the restaurant and visit once a week.

There were many American restaurateurs and chefs in the audience, all of them from Los Angeles or New York City.  Several of them asked questions and all of them complained about the conditions – high rents, short leases, clients less interested in food than fads – that made long-term success so difficult in their native or adopted cities.  Many were resigned to a future (at best) of short-term, serial successes, something none of them wanted and all of them would have gladly traded for feeding and nourishing real established communities.  They feared for the future of great, simple, and honest food and of authentic restaurants, but most of all they feared the disappearance of the diverse and permanent urban communities necessary to sustain them.

After a really thought-provoking evening, there was only one thing to do: eat and drink.  I chose Daylesford, a London outpost of an organic farm in Gloucestershire.  I like to think the panelists would have approved.