The Upstairs Delicatessen
A book critic on eating and drinking — or how to live.
Mōrena, and welcome back to Field Notes.
This week I have a review of a new book from one of my favourite critics, Dwight Garner. The book is The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading.
The Upstairs Delicatessen by Dwight Garner
Early in The Upstairs Delicatessen, Garner tells us “I read primarily, I sometimes think, out of an accelerated sense of what Tina Brown, in her Vanity Fair Diaries, called ‘observation greed’.” That is to say, he reads for advice on how to live.
In this book, we too might learn something about how to live. Not only through Garner’s anecdotes and observations but through the characters in novels and his quoting of writing heavyweights (Garner loves quotes and this book is chock-full of them).
There is plenty of advice on how food and drink might raise the spirits. Garner quotes A.J. Liebling as saying “A good meal in troubled times is always that much salvaged from disaster.” The English writer Jenny Diski says Assam, a black Indian tea, is a “particularly good hedge against life’s little disappointments.”
It’s not all from other writers though, Garner has advice to share as well. Of coffee, he says “If you can learn to shrink the hours between the morning’s last cup and the evening’s first drink, you’ve taken a baby step towards enlightenment.”
Garner brings a bounty of enthusiasm to food and drink. The Upstairs Delicatessen is an appreciation of what food can be, of how it can spark connection, passion, and delight.
I felt a connection to the writer Kingsley Amis (father of one of my favourites Martin Amis) who used HP Sauce “at full tilt” no matter what was being served. Also with Garner who says oysters are what you want at the start of a big meal, but that he was late to them. I was, of course, late to just about every food.
The book goes beyond food and drink, at one point extending to the nap, something Garner is a strong proponent of and which Winston Churchill, who Garner calls “the laureate of the nap”, said was best done with “no halfway measures”.
“Take your clothes off and get into bed. That’s what I always do,” Churchill said. “Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people with no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more.”
Garner’s enthusiasm for quoting things seems to be rubbing off on me. Time for a nap.
Other recommendations
If you like the viral tune “A Bar Song” by Shaboozey, you should listen to the full album Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, which came out a few weeks ago. It’s great.
On the plane home from the US I watched The Taste of Things, a beautiful French film about cooking and love.
The novel Ash by New Zealand writer Louise Wallace is brilliant. It’s short, sharp, and weaves in segments of poetry (don’t let this put you off).
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading.