A Revolution in Taste, or, Is there Haute Cuisine without the Michelin Guide?

independently of hotels and clubs became part of the dining scene from the 1850s onwards. In Sydney the Cafe Restaurant Francais opened in 1853, advertising ‘service a la Parisienne’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 30 May 1853). In the following year, M. Cheval opened the Maison Doree where he hoped ‘to introduce into this colony the elegance and refinements that are found in the celebrated Maison Doree in Paris’ (Empire, 10 November 1854), and Ernest Budin, invited all those seeking ‘good and fashionable refreshment’ to his Aux Freres Provencaux (Sydney Morning Herald, 27 May 1854). In Melbourne, Spiers and Pond opened the Cafe de Paris in June 1858 (O’Brien 2008, p. 74) and, by the 1880s, gentlemen could dine well at the Maison Doree,, the French Club, La Mascotte, the Crystal Cafe or the Cafe Anglais (Comettant 1980, p. 64; Symons 1982, p. 119). The most famous of the early French restaurants in Sydney was Paris House. M. Desneaux announced the opening in the Sydney Morning Herald on 16 November 1886 promising that ‘the Bill of Fare will be inserted daily in this journal so that the real epicure who wishes to have a good lunch can, without the least trouble, be aware of the provisions thereof ’. The sample menu lists: crevettes, Potage Julienne, Schnapper les Anchois, Aloyan de Boeuf, saucisses aux choux, pommes nouvelles, salad, beurre, fromage and glace a la vanilla (Sydney Morning Herald, 18 November 1886). By 1896 Paris House was described as the oldest and best restaurant in Sydney, the ‘haunt of the epicure, the abode of the gourmet’ (Sunday Times, 26 April 1896) and, twenty years later, it was lauded as ‘the premier restaurant of Australasia’ (Evening News, 25 March 1912). Paris House continued to operate under various owners until 1931. How truly French, or how closely the food served at any of these restaurants approached French haute cuisine, is hard to judge. Whilst Frenchness, achieved in part by appropriating the names of famous Parisienne restaurants, was an important gastronomic signifier, in the absence of a moneyed and knowledgeable aristocracy it is unlikely that there were many epicures and gourmets in Sydney or Melbourne to haunt any of these establishments. European visitors certainly found that the antipodes offered little that was to their taste. The English journalist Richard Twopeny first came to Australia in 1876 and published his observations, Town Life in Australia, in 1883. Twopeny was not impressed with the state of gastronomy observing that ‘cooking is an unknown art’ across all classes of society (1971, p. 64). He considered the local meals to be monotonous and unimaginatively prepared, and commented ‘If it be true European colonisation of the Australian continent only began in 1788, at around the same time as the restaurant, as we know it today, was beginning to take shape in Paris. For many years the penal colony at Sydney Cove was only concerned with eating to survive but gradually a restaurant culture developed. This paper begins by looking briefly at the history of restaurant dining in Sydney and Melbourne and, drawing on the work of Mac Con Iomaire (2014), considers some of the differences and similarities between these antipodean cities and the growth of restaurant culture in Dublin. As in Dublin, the 1960s and 1970s saw a growing number of restaurants run by enthusiastic amateurs and a trend towards more suburban restaurants in Australia’s major cities. From the 1970s onwards restaurant critics and restaurant guides played an increasingly important role in fostering discerning diners and encouraging creative chefs. In the absence of a Michelin Guide to restaurants in Australia local critics have been the sole arbiters of good taste in Sydney and Melbourne since the restaurant revolution of the 1970s when eating out became a fashionable and popular leisure time activity. In this paper I argue, with reference to Lane’s assessment of the influence of the Michelin Guide on chefs in Britain and Germany (2014), that this local approach allowed Australian diners and chefs to follow a more eclectic and adventurous path than may have been the case had they been constrained by Michelin standards.