Dining rooms will soon be obsolete, if they are not so already. The phrase sounds almost Victorian. Ten years ago, when I lived in north London, the local caff in Hannibal Road was quaintly called the Hannibal Dining Rooms, and came complete with ancient glass-panelled frontage and brown paintwork. At the time, I was writing about a 19th-century medium who lost no opportunity to meet her seedy mentor in those dining rooms and tuck into a plate of spotted dick with custard.
I started thinking about dining rooms because last night I sat in a very grand one. The French embassy hosted a dinner to celebrate awarding a medal to a writer friend. The ceremony completed, the champagne drunk, we moved into the salle a manger. On a hot summer night, 20 of us sat in semi-darkness, a door open to the garden behind, around an elongated oval table draped in white, lit by candles hoisted aloft by carved cherubs and decorated with big bowls of pink roses. Prodigal drifts of petals scattered the cloth. Gilt-framed paintings gleamed in the darkness. We ate the kind of exquisite, unrecognisable food that, like conceptual art, requires an explanatory text. A fraIcheur d'asperge verte on which floated a cappuccino of asperge blanche a la truffe. A poitrine de pigeon farcie de foie gras, sauce aux cerises. We understood the delice glace aux abricots et rhubarbe, but how did we recognise the bergamot scenting the compote? It didn't taste like Earl Grey tea, anyway.
The dining room at home, when I was a child, served several functions. At weekends, it became a shrine to roast beast. In the evenings, during term time, it metamorphosed into a study where the four of us sat for hours struggling with homework. At other times, it turned into a handicrafts studio and hosted my mother's Christmas decorations, logs stuck with silvered foliage, which she made for the annual school bazaar. Or, when necessary, it was where my twin sister and I lounged about on Saturday mornings with the sewing machine, running up dance outfits for that evening's outing to the youth club.
Restaurants substitute for dining rooms. Jim and I used to take the boys to Pizza Ciao on the Holloway Road, and lovely and cheap it was, too. George Sand finally got an invitation to Magny's restaurant in Paris, where all the writer chaps hung out, and met Gustave Flaubert for the first time. The Goncourts, bitchy as ever, wrote in their diary, Le Journal des Goncourt, that she'd put on peach satin to ravish Flaubert, but I think she was just dressing up to have fun. I've got a photo of my darling papa dining in an upstairs room at the Criterion with his fellow sales managers in the early 1960s. They're all in black tie, ranged like soldiers. He's the only one smiling. I wish someone had thought to scatter his place with rose petals.
