Even though my eyes were watching, it was my nose that noticed first. The flame unleashed a skinny stream of smoke. I inhaled the bitter fragrance of paper on fire and realized that the menu was ablaze. My breath, however, has always been weak. As a teenager, I quit smoking not long after picking up my first cigarette. And I’ve never been good at blowing out candles at birthdays, let alone being able to rely on my lungs to extinguish a small fire.

I summoned my deepest exhale, hoping it would kill the flame. A friend from London sat across the table in this nearly empty restaurant. We had just arrived in Oslo and were sharing our first meal, one too late to call lunch yet too early to count as dinner, even this far north. «Shit», she squealed. Huffing and puffing, together we blew the fire out as the waiter dashed to our table. He confiscated our candle and rescued the tarnished menu. As he left, I grabbed a tissue from my bag and swept the crumbs of ash onto the floor. In my hands, the menu had become a liability.

The Extreme Sport of Fine Dining

Historically, a menu is what made a restaurant, setting it apart from other places to grab a bite. There had been a myriad of ways cultures have sold and consumed food in public, from market stalls to taverns, but restaurants emerged in eighteenth-century Paris. Before it was a place to eat, it was something to eat, usually with a spoon. More specifically, it was a consommé, a healthful and restorative broth. The first restaurants hosted eating that was not exactly what you would consider dining—customers, including those following doctors’ orders, sipping bowls of soup. By the 1820s, restaurants in Paris had come to resemble what passes as a restaurant today, and in 1827, the first one opened stateside: Delmonico’s in New York City.

Seventy-one years later, in 1898, a New York Times article targeting middle-class female readers suggested most women were not fluent in eating out and had yet to learn fine dining’s grammar. «Upon entering the hotel dining room you will be met and escorted to the seat which you are to occupy, by the head waiter», instructed the newspaper. «This official, having seen you seated, will hand you the menu and place you in the hands of the waiter, who will proceed to take your order.» Welcome to the politics of eating out where restaurants enact, police, and sometimes challenge social norms. As a cultural historian, I read menus as maps, running my eyes up and down their inventory of flora and fauna and the labour required to transform them into food.

Today, dining out has become an extreme sport, one less about physical need and more about high performance. Lunch plays in the minor leagues compared to dinner. Competition to claim a reservation is tough. «Discovering» an unknown gem or being able to confidently pronounce Basque words are assets in the bank of cultural capital. Tasting menus have turned eating into an endurance test—a marathon that challenges you to stretch your appetite across hours so that no one dish will please it enough to dismiss it until the next morning.