Alcohol Regulations, Restaurants, and the Life of a City

March 8th, 2018

Massachusetts has always had an uneasy relationship with alcohol, dating back to its origins as a Puritan colony.  It's only been in the past twenty years or so that you could buy alcohol on Sunday, and the locations that can sell alcohol are still quite limited.  Several years ago, Cambridge, Massachusetts decided to relax its open container laws a little bit, essentially allowing restaurants to serve alcohol at outdoor seating that was not surrounded by a permanent enclosure.  The change in the street life of Cambridge was sudden and dramatic:  outdoor cafes popped up everywhere, and every restaurant that could carve out a bit of sidewalk in front of it put out a few tables encircled by some planters as soon as the weather started warming in the spring.  (To be clear, outdoor cafes had always been legal.  It was just that patrons were not interested in eating at outdoor tables if they couldn't take a beer or a glass of wine out there.  So loosening of that law changed everything.)  

I was excited, because there's nothing that I love more than eating outside when the weather is nice, but what really struck me was how the vitality and friendliness and liveliness of the city changed almost overnight.  It went from being a largely indoor city, even on a beautiful spring or summer evening, to one where laughter and conversation and conviviality were spilling out into the streets, and just walking around and observing everyone felt like an engaging and social activity.

I am currently reading another one of Adam Gopnik's books, which touches a bit on some related issues.  This one is focused on food and eating and the restaurant, especially in France.  Many food historians have credited France, the Revolution in particular, with the invention of the modern restaurant.  The standard reasoning goes that the chopping off of so many royal heads left a lot of highly-trained chefs unemployed, so they decided to open restaurants to sell the fruits of their labors.  There may be some truth to this reasoning, but one of Gopnik's claims (based on the work of more recent historians) was that the modern restaurant was made possible in part by some legal changes that occurred in the wake of the French Revolution.  In particular, there had been laws prohibiting the same establishment from serving both caffeinated beverages and alcoholic beverages until 1789.  So you would have to choose whether to serve wine and beer or coffee and tea at your establishment, but could not do both.   Over the centuries, monopolies had also formed, limiting to professional guilds the right to produce and sell certain types of foods.  So, in other words, if only the butcher's guild could sell meat and only the baker's guild could sell bread, it would be hard to set up a restaurant that served both meat and bread (and fruit and vegetables and cheeses and ...).  These guilds' monopoly rights were eliminated post-revolution.  

It's amazing to realize that while humans have been eating since before they were even humans, it took many, many millenia for all of the factors necessary for something so seemingly obvious as a restaurant to fall into place.  (This is the kind of thing that an economist marvels at.)  In other words, instead of thinking of a restaurant as an obvious sort of business, perhaps we should think of it as a fragile coordination and confluence of physical infrastructure as well as the many people with different skills and possessions and motives necessary to pull it off, and the presence of the right kind of government intervention and the absence of the wrong kind.  And small changes in any of these factors can cause big changes in the characteristics of the restaurants.  Whatever the confluence of historic events and legal changes, things fell into place 230 years ago in Paris and have continued to operate in a way conducive to restaurants thriving.  And it is interesting to ponder how much of the Paris atmosphere could be reproduced in other cities with very modest legal changes. 

Of course restaurants are but one example, and perhaps could be thought of as a microcosm of a city.  So these thoughts drew me to more general issues of how seemingly small changes in laws and regulations and public policies can have dramatic effects on what a city feels like, how it is built, how it functions, and how its residents behave.  There is no secret of the power of zoning laws and building codes to shape cities, albeit with sometimes unintended effects---perhaps a topic for a later post---but even if we think of something much narrower, such as small changes to laws governing what kind of fence has to be around you when you're drinking a glass of wine, the effects the vitality of an entire city can be substantial.  

(Writer's note:  I should say that, in my quest for pictures to illustrate this post, I ended up with a bunch of photos of empty Paris cafes, not looking very lively at all.  Of course this is because I took the photos in February and March.  Even though the outdoor seating in many of the restaurants and cafes are set up year-round, people will opt for indoor seating unless it's warm or the sun is particularly bright that moment.  I will supplement with some livelier photos in the next couple of months.)

A quiet moment mid-morning, but tables are out in February to grab
a rare ray of sunshine