Running the Restaurant

Chapter 2 examines the restaurant as a business. It offers an explanation for the dramatically contrasting fortunes of London’s restaurants, a sector of the economy characterized by success and expansion as well as by failure and bankruptcy. Consideration is given to how restaurants were financed, how they secured staff and supplies, the incorporation of new technology, and the often ingenious ways that they sought out customers. Restaurant proprietors and managers (and even cooks and chefs) explored a variety of schemes to establish their status as professionals, but these rarely compromised the vigorous pursuit of financial reward, in a sector of the economy in which profit margins were often relatively small. In an era characterized by a moving frontier between state and economy, the restaurant revealed the ongoing commitment in Victorian and Edwardian culture to the power of free enterprise and the maintenance of a robust commercial domain.