Wednesday 4 April 2018

Restaurants

This evening, Sheila and I ate in the Spaghetti House which previously appeared on this blog here. We were at the table which is occupied by four people to the left in the attached image.

There must be comparable restaurants in the various fictional cities discussed on this blog:

Gotham City
Chicago Integrate
Archopolis
etc

The restaurants in the Technic History will serve outsystem foods, like Ansa soup. Furthermore, in the Solar Commonwealth period, they will also serve spices and drinks provided by Nicholas van Rijn's company, Solar Spice & Liquors. We should remember such concrete details when reading or rereading the texts. Although the author cannot explicitly state this every time, merely to refer to a city is to imply the entire life of a city, including the jobs, homes and places to go in the evening. I am sure that Gothamites and Archopolitans, like Lancastrians, enjoy pizza followed by cheese cake with ice cream.

4 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

We do see Old Nick dining at a high end restaurant in MIRKHEIM. And I recall Flandry discovering in WE CLAIM THESE STARS that Kit had never tasted ice cream before (because the environment of Vixen was unsuitable for a dairy industry).

It's a pity we never see any mention of people eating pizza in the Terran Empire!

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Pizza is an interesting food; the international variety was developed in America by Italians. There are analogous foods in Italy, but none that are precisely like it. The same thing happened with many other national cuisines in their eras of mass immigration.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Mr Stirling,
There is a chain of "New York Italian" restaurants in Britain, including 2 in York! An Indian restaurant owner in Birmingham says that "Balti" food is British Indian whereas his is authentic. Apparently, a restaurant in Manchester advertises as "Birmingham Indian."
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

Yes, when I visited Rome and Italy I noticed how the pizza I made a point of having for lunch differed from how it was developed in the US.

Sean