Nostalgia against confinement: this is what the best restaurants in London, Paris and New York looked like just half a century ago

• El Gastronómada.Read all his articles here

When did we first see the expression

proliferate in the press

?

With the displeasure of his children to the Queen of

?

In any case, those memories sound like a light joke next to the year that is already ending and that will mark our lives.

In addition, the new rumors of confinements continue to trouble the gastronomic who is immobilized ... When things get like this, we get nostalgia for a year much less

, and that is why we propose a trip back in time.

or to places where half a century ago, just in 1970, people ate well, and what we diners appreciated.

It was a year with its sad moments - there was a war in

, the Beatles' farewell album appeared - but 600,000 people also gathered on the Isle of Wight to listen to

already

... Restaurants were only just beginning to spread the

of

the

Y

(who would soon deny her, stating that he was only interested in

, seasonal cuisine).

In

we continued with popular kitchens and some Frenchization in luxurious places.

The products were excellent but still not very exotic, and good things were done with the national genre.

the

illustrated bars

, yesterday as today, they convinced the common people and the

.

With the most powerful gas fire in town and one unerring hand in the pan,

, preceded by some Sanlúcar prawns with unforgettable homemade mayonnaise.

And next to the street of the Montera,

, of

- handsome gallant in the cinema of two decades before - served the best Avilanian suckling veal chops that we have ever tasted.Of the great restaurants of that time, the main absent today is

whose brilliant cook

, culminated his work by devising the San Clemencio potato one day: "I roasted a potato, emptied it and mixed the pulp with marrow, adding truffle and foie gras. On top I put some slices of marrow and cream."

then stood out

, with as much culinary movement as Madrid, and its

, with modernized baroque Catalan cuisine from

s: salad

and seafood with truffle vinaigrette, for example.

In 1974 the Michelin guide dared to award Lee Ho Fook the first star to a Chinese restaurant in Europe

For the young people of the time the great restaurants

multi-starred

from abroad were - more or less like now - a dream.

So we were focusing on good affordable houses to find unaffordable things in developmental but still quite isolated Spain.

our London friends warned us not to miss Lee Ho Fook's Cantonese cuisine

, an establishment in that famous Chinese area of ​​Soho,

Chinatown

, on Gerrard Street.

And they were right: in 1974 the Michelin guide would commit the audacity to award the first star to a Chinese restaurant in Europe.

And it wasn't expensive, like the other international Cantonese of the time, they didn't even think of offering those

dim sum

what in

Canton

or

Shanghai

they were just bites for midmorning, nothing serious.

But it was excellent cuisine, though certainly Westernized.

The New York Times

highlighted its sweet and sour pork, its

wok

of beef with peppers and onion and its chicken soup with drops of egg.

Paris

, top of the kitchen - although still without much influence from the

nouvelle

- Half a century ago we were going to enjoy in regional-style dining houses, such as the Ambassade d'Auvergne -which still survives today- with its rustic cuisine from central France, which was sometimes surprisingly fine, as in its famous lentil salad greens from the Puy de Dôme. If we had collected an extraordinary or something like that, we could dream of the

three stars

of

Claude Terrail,

La Tour d'Argent -since 2006, only a Michelin rosette- and its famous roast duck that was cut and pressed in front of the customer, served since 1890. Each duck was and, we believe, continues to be numbered: in 2003 they reached one million Some years before, when he was a boy, this chronicler had lived in

New York

, but it was precisely in 1970 when he met the legendary Gage & Tollner from

Brooklyn

, which since 1884 was the great table of that New York district that, in the 19th century, was a separate city, with its own City Hall.A place like Gage & Tollner would be almost unimaginable today, because,

Although owned by whites and dedicated to a rich white clientele, all their waiters were black

, and they also had little stars on their sleeves that certified how many years of service they had been in the house ... Strong enough for the demands of 2020, right? The fact is that the seafood from the western Atlantic was excellent there: it started with a few truly lavish steamed soft shell clams and followed by scallops,

scallops

in those parts, and perhaps with a boiled Maine lobster. Yes, on that first visit we were invited by a more affluent person.

But those experiences, from London Cantonese to Brooklyn seafood restaurant, are the ones that end up defining a life and a hobby.

Better times...

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