Variety.
It’s funny that I should stumble across this thread this morning.
Last night I did a comedy gig in downtown Toronto, one of which required me to walk a distance down College Street, west of Bathurst. Along the north side of the road there are stretches where essentially every single place of business is a restaurant. I can’t even begin to guess how many different types of cuisine were offered; one place was a “Korean taco” joint, a combination I’d never heard of before. In a space of 300 metres I could have sampled 40 different kinds of food, at every price point from “takeout” to “I hope you have a lot of room on your Visa.”
Granted, this was downtown in one of the biggest and most diverse cities in North America, so you might think I’m cheating. But right here in my sleepy suburban hometown of Burlington, I can think of five or six pretty damn good sushi places, Thai restaurants, authentic Chinese, haute cuisine, five-star-level restaurants next door to family joints, cheap brewpubs, pricey “gastropubs”, both high and low quality Indian, vegetarian restaurants, high-end Italian places, artisan bakeries, Korean BBQ, and on and on.
When I was a kid, 30 years ago, living in a city of equivalent size, you didn’t have any of that shit. For ethnic cuisine there was American-style Chinese, a cheap “Italian” restaurant, and that was it. It was something of a sensation when we got an Indian restaurant. The best restaurant in town was in a hotel, and the other good restaurants would be considered pretty middle of the road today, and weren’t of the same quality. Pubs did not serve food, or if they did, it sucked. Menus were generally unadventurous, and as has been mentioned, the selection of beer and wine was short.
I think what has happened, and what explains a lot of the changes mentioned in this thread, is simply that** people are much richer than they used to be.** We like to bemoan that wages aren’t going up, and in the last few years that’s true, but as compared to where they were in the 1960s and 1970s they really have, a lot. When I was my daughter’s age, 33 years ago, per capita income in Canada (adjusted for constant dollars) was half of what it is now. Many, many people have far, far more disposable income than they used to, and restaurant dining is the absolute #1 luxury good that increases in usage as a household moves from “Scraping by” to “doing pretty good.” In a day and age when dining out was an unusual treat for most people, you could not have sustained a whole crapload of restaurants in a small city. Kingston, where I grew up, just couldn’t have had three sushi joints in 1978 because people in Kingston didn’t have enough disposable income to entice enough curious customers out to eat that much sushi. Today it can.
I suspect the disposable income effect has a tremendous impact on many of the other changes people have noticed. Department store restaurants are dead because they aren’t as important in a day when you have ten million other choices and the money to try them out; my grandmother used to take me to the restaurant in Zeller’s and we’d love it, but it was bland diner stuff and those went by the wayside because if you can afford better, you buy something better. I’m sure the general loudness of restaurants is partially explainable by virtue of the larger market for dining out, too, although right now I can’t summon the reason why from my tired brain (and the current decor choices have a lot to do with that.)
