Epilogue

The epilogue begins with consideration of the way the nineteenth-century London restaurant features in individual and collective memory. It insists that such memories were not exclusively characterized by notions of dispossession, melancholy, or regret, and the distance between eating out in the middle of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth century was often expressed through the sentiments of progress and improvement. It then moves on to a reflection on how returning the restaurant to a central role in our understanding of metropolitan history in the Victorian and Edwardian period has important connotations for how the history of Modern Britain, more broadly, might be researched and written. In particular, the restaurant requires more attention to be given to the more materially grounded aspects of the urban experience as much as it does to the more abstracted motifs of representation, performance, and subjectivity.