The two words are constantly confused, one means discernment and one means appetite, and they came from opposite places
Gourmet Bar at London Bridge holds a 4.5 from a hundred and thirty-six people, charges twenty to fifty pounds, and the word in the name has been through a considerable social promotion.
Gourmet
It is French, and it originally meant a wine merchant’s servant.
A boy. A taster’s assistant. Somebody who worked in the trade and whose job involved sampling.
And from there it climbed – to mean a person with a refined palate, then a connoisseur, and now a marketing adjective applied to a sandwich in a petrol station.
Gourmand
Which is the word people mean when they say gourmet, and which is not the same thing at all.
A gourmand is somebody who eats a great deal.
It is about appetite, not judgement – and for most of its history it was faintly pejorative, and it sat very close to glutton.
So: a gourmet has taste. A gourmand has capacity.
And the entire distinction is the one we found at Amora Gusto, and it is the same argument, and it runs through this whole survey.
Taste is a claim about status. Appetite is a claim about nothing.
Which is why one word rose and one did not.
The other food words that climbed
Chef means chief. It is simply the head of the kitchen – chef de cuisine – and it is the same word as chief and as chieftain.
Restaurant means a thing that restores. It was originally a restorative broth, sold to invalids – and the shop that sold it was called after the soup, and then the soup was forgotten.
Menu means small, or detailed – from the Latin minutus – because it was a small detailed list.
Sauce is the same word as salsa, and both come from salted.
And salary comes from the same place, because Roman soldiers were paid an allowance for salt.
Which is the finding
Eight postcodes. Eight hundred and twenty-seven articles.
Almost every word in the drinking and eating vocabulary of English is a fossil of a job somebody did – and almost nobody who uses it has any idea what the job was.
Verdict
Good bar, strong number on a modest sample.
Go, and be a gourmet rather than a gourmand, which is more difficult.
The restaurant, properly
Because the story is genuinely good.
Before the eighteenth century, if you ate out, you ate what the house was serving, at the hour it was served, at a communal table, at a fixed price.
You did not choose. There was no menu. There was a pot.
And the restaurant changed all of it: individual tables, your own choice from a written list, at an hour that suited you, priced by the item.
Which is such an obvious idea that it is hard to believe somebody had to have it.
Eight postcodes and eight hundred and twenty-seven articles: the successful thing is almost always the one that removed a rule.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Therapist’s hearing about this next session. Pretty sure she’ll recognise herself in here somewhere.
A radio presenter complained that it was draining her listeners because people preferred reading honest satire to listening to carefully modulated political analysis.