In the nicer restaurants, a waiter will bring around a big wooden pepper grinder and offer to grind pepper on your salad.
What is the origin of this custom? Why not just have a little wooden pepper grinder on the table with the salt?
My guess is that it is just a matter of style. Some fancy restaurant started the custom as a special way of paying attention to the customer and it caught on. I would be happy to hear from anyone who can shed more light on this question.
–Bkos
It is a matter of style but also of custom and quality. Peppercorns weren’t always available pre-ground in little tins at the supermarket. The conventional way was to buy them whole and grind them as needed. That leads us to point two. Pepper is actually slightly better if you grind it yourself. There is the matter of freshness which isn’t overwhelming by itself but also the fact that you can grind it to different coarseness to suit your taste.
Of course, the biggest reason you see this in fancier U.S. restaurants is because it is a cheap way to add show and pretense. It is rather nice.
In my house, we use both a sea salt grinder and a pepper mill exclusively. I don’t think that is very common though.
I barely grazed part of your question. Pepper grinding is used as a service partly because small pepper mills don’t always work that well. They get jammed and can be hard to turn. That wouldn’t be very appealing to most people. Big ones work great but those would look funny on the table. That sends us back to regular pepper shakers but some restaurants want to do better than that.
That leads us right back to the solution of large, pretentious pepper mills presented nicely by staff.
People would steal them. While people might also steal salt shakers, they’re a lot cheaper than pepper grinders (i.e. there’s less incentive to steal them, and they’re cheaper to replace).
I seem to recall the “fresh pepper??” craze beginning in the 1980s or maybe 1990s. I find the practice faintly surreal.
Small pepper grinders are available for $15 list. This isn’t sterling silverware, folks.
I hypothesize that “fresh pepper??” delivered from the staff is an example of “service”, sort of like the turn-down-and-leave-dinner-mints ritual observed in various hotels.
I’m not sure what to make of the small pepper mill critique, other than to say that I’ve never had to clear a pepper jam.
I read somewhere it was supposed to be a survival of a tradition from medieval Italy, when pepper was expensive and the owner of an eating establishment wanted to control how much was used. Why on earth an economic measure from a time of scarcity would become a yuppie trend is a complete mystery to me.
One possibility I can think of is that if pepper corns were sitting on your table, they could eventually go stale and lose their flavor unless you dumped the corns and reloaded them every so often. Centrally planned grinding means the corns are used as needed and the freshest ones are always chambered. That’s the story at least, but I’m sure in some restaurants they hide behind this rationale to maximize their image and minimize costs.
I think you’re on to something here. Pepper mills are cheap now, but before globalized manufacturing, goods were more expensive. High quality pepper mills are still upwards of $50, and setting them on the table means that you’d be putting the patrons to work.
And spices are relatively cheap now, but “back in the day”, they were the stuff of wars and conquest ("'Bye honey, I’m off to fight for some allspice and nutmeg").
So, we have two factors which were formerly prohibitively expensive, one recently and one ancient, combined in another way to add value to the restaurant experience by adding service. That makes sense.
The fact that pepper mills are inexpensive doesn’t mean people won’t steal them. Ashtrays, salt shakers, packets of artificial sweetener, beer mugs and cheapo silverware all disappear at an astonishing rate.
Nope, the main reason is that people steal them. Seriously. They pay $400 for a nice dinner and then they cap it off by stealing a $15 pepper grinder. It’s not so much a money thing as it is a power trip or whatever. A guy who manages a high end restuarant claims he tried individual pepper grinders but had to replace up to 15% of his stock per week due to theft.
It was alive in the 50’s. During the Eisenhower years there was a novel food item called “the tossed salad” and cooking shows would show how it was done, always prepared at your table, with the oil tossed first, then the vinegar and finally the pepper.
Strangely, the salad was usually just lettuce. Not even a starter salad at a diner today.
Maybe that’s still the motivating factor.
I’m thinking of the 11-13 individual flakes of pepper that they tend to grind onto my food before stopping and looking at me as if astonished that I haven’t said “That’s good, thanks”. I’m always tempted to say “Yes, that’s the kind of pepper I want, grind me up some of that, will you?”
I do like it freshly ground but in significantly more than sample quantities.
Ok, but these are different traditions.
Fixing a salad in front of the patrons is one thing.
Serving the appetizer (soup or salad) then rushing in with a six foot pepper grinder is a more recent practice.
Incidentally, I have dined in restaurants (Italian, ~$15/plate, tops) with mini pepper grinders. (Heh. I turned the grinder the wrong way, made continual loud crunching noises, and had to be duly corrected by the waitress. Jeez, you can’t take M4M anywhere.)
I don’t really buy this. This chain, Texas Land and Cattle has pepper mills on all its tables and it has never been an issue or it doesn’t seem to be an issue. Next time I am in one, I’ll ask what the lose rate is on their pepper mills.
I also remember an Italian restaurant that had the cheap plastic pepper mills that you can buy at the grocery store.
I think that we are starting to stratify into different kinds of restaurants here. Texas Land and Cattle may not be typical of the type of place that some Americans consider to be refined dining. I was thinking of the top restaurants in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco and I am pretty sure the OP was talking about roughly the same thing.
[Dana Carvey]This is the art of the Pepper Boy, Carlo. Don’t let it die with me.[/Dana Carvey]
Perhaps your server is used to the hotshot businessman whose converstion is *far *too important to interupt for a nanosecond to acknowledge the food placed in front of them, and who continues to jabber away while everyone else at the table responds to the “Fresh pepper, sir/miss?” question, and then rudely tosses out an “Ex-*cuse *me?” as the server begins to walk away, and then launches back into conversation once the server begins to grind the pepper, only to angrily point out the he didn’t realise he was being served “a bloody pepper steak” when more than three quick grinds have landed on his plate, and makes a big show of then scraping the pepper off his meal?
I know some servers take the pepper grinder to the table right after the food has been dropped off, but I always waited until I could see the customers had taken a bite of food. So for them, they knew how seasoned they needed their food to be (how can you know how much pepper the food needs until you’ve tasted it?), and as a server, I could quality check the meal at the same time.
And yes, people will steal anything on the table, whether it’s the crappy salt and (pre-ground) pepper shakers or the sugar packets or sometimes even the cutlery. No point in having anything expensive to replace left out. And again, it’s easier to judge the freshness of the giant pepper mill than 50 small ones left out on the table.
I know this is GQ, but I really think one issue would be freshness. Peppercorns lose their flavor over time. I’m thinking of a few waiter/waitress-weilded grinders which are replenished fairly often, versus individual ones at the table whic may sit for weeks at the tables before being refilled.
Funny, but I don’t recall any really great restaurants that use pepper mills. In the top end restaurants, your food is already perfectly seasoned, a pepper mill would be redundant and almost insulting. The pepper mill reminds me more of the Olive Garden than a fine dining experience.
I’m with you. A shot of pepper on your salad if you want, but they don’t come around to season the entree, it’s supposed to be perfect as is. If you really want to insult them, ask for salt.