QUOTE : While contemporary restaurants pay lip service to the notion of companionability, they provide us with only its most inadequate simulacrum. The number of people who nightly patronize restaurants implies that these places must be refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanisms by which to introduce patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which people chronically segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. The focus is on the food and the decor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections. In a restaurant no less than in a home, when the meal itself – the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes – has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry.<br /><br />Patrons will tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city, restaurants are adept at gathering people into the same space and yet lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.