I needed a break from this harrowing ordeal, and watched a “Compass” episode online. The ABC program is running a series asking the question – “What is a good life?” In a recent episode, writer and former restaurateur Gay Bilson answers that question. I watched with delight, as this woman echoes so many of my own sentiments, particularly in my role as wife, mother and Phd candidate.Click below to watch the episode.
Portrait by Peter Fisher, hangs in the National Portait Gallery, Canberra.
Gay is also the author of a 2004 book, “Plenty: Digressions on Food”.
Gay Bilson ran a successful Sydney restaurant for two decades. She now lives in the McClaren Vale South Australia, where she lives in solitude and where she has found the recipe for a good life.
She is a very interesting person, and the introspective Gay Bilson being interviewed seems a different person altogether from Gay Bilson, chef and restaurateur, smiling and convivial in archive footage.
It is hard to imagine that a person who craves solitude should put herself into public light in that way. Her restaurant was open to the public only three days a week to accommodate her need for privacy. But after nearly two decades, she said even that was too much. She wanted solitude seven days a week.
As I began to think about writing a blog entry tonight, I discovered the word “restaurant” is French. It means food that restores and it comes from the Latin – restaurare – to repair, rebuild, renew. So to eat good food in company of friends is to restore or rebuild oneself in a very deep way. It doesn’t seems so strange now that a thoughtful, introspective person longing for human connections might choose to open a restaurant. And the idea of food as a restorative deeply appeals to me.
But then the image of the “modern” restaurant rears its ugly head. The so-called “Family Restaurants” that serve “fast food” or an “all you can eat” menu. Food is not the restoration of the human being but a utilitarian refuelling.
I am as guilty of refuelling as any other inhabitant of this gruelling existence of ours. But watching Gay knead bread in her kitchen, or gather herbs from her garden, I sense a good life is not characterised by “refuelling”, or by any of the “conveniences” at our fingertips.
‘We make bread so that it shall be possible to have more than bread.’
Gay quotes a 70s author, John Stewart Collis, and shares her disappointment that even the current obsession with food, with celebrity chefs and cooking shows, do not look beyond the food. The food as it is written about and reported on is seen as an end in itself. For Gay there is something beyond food. Good food leads to an appreciation of life in music, in conversation, in all sorts of areas that make life “good”. It would seem “good” food can never be purely a reflection of the food itself, but also what it leads to, what is beyond it.
Restaurants – places that restore – are not simply refuelling stations that address an immediate physical hunger. Our eating places must restore the whole human being. And it seems that any good eating place, especially the home, must be a place that restores. How tragic if our homes should come to resemble “family restaurants” – refuelling stations as we rush through life “outside”. Again, I am as guilty of treating home in this way as anyone else. But I am also happy that “restoration” can come in the most unexpected ways – eating pizza around the kitchen counter sharing the day’s events with those you love, and listening to their adventures, whether great or small. If modern restaurants miss their primary function, it is still to be found in homes scattered across towns and cities.
From her private castle, Gay cooks for and shares with those who live within her community. I love the tension this presents to her, a tension I am so familiar with. She describes herself in “Plenty” as “ever utopian, but disconnected and immobilised by a solitary nature.”
She says in the interview -
“I’ve always much preferred small gatherings than large. So I’ve never liked parties, they scare me. I don’t know how to approach a group or leave a group. I don’t know how to trust whether I’m going to have a good time or not. Whether I might be stuck in a corner with someone boring or meet someone scintillating. But at a table I feel some sort of energy which is easy.”
Gay hosts small gatherings and reminds herself to be hospitable. She serves food and sometimes others cook for her. But she particularly likes the washing up after guests have left, as a way to regain privacy. I smiled as I heard this. I am convinced the best part of any gathering is closing the door behind the last guest and returning to myself in my own space.
So that concludes tonight’s post. The ideas grew in the writing, and it is now after midnight and I need to find my bed for some “restorative” sleep. I am at least feeling a little more optimistic about the upcoming house move.
