I was reviewing restaurants for a Toronto newspaper, in the midst of a veal chop, in fact, when I stopped eating. I was bored with food. I had so looked forward to dining out at someone else's expense, but how quickly it palled. This was in the late 1990s, when restaurants were matching the giddy excess of the stock market, and fresh foie gras was de rigueur on the menus of even modest establishments. It wasn't that the food and cooking were bad. No, there was something missing, something I couldn't put my finger on. Not until I went backstage at another restaurantand as a former theater critic, a restaurant was always theater to medid I realize what it was. It wasn't the no-frills French restaurant itself but the chef, a tight-lipped Breton, who I knew right away had sorcerer genes.

His food wasn't generic the way so many restaurants' food was, menus put together by opinion polls, or consultants. It was just the food he personally knew: fish soup, panfried red snapper laid on a bed of saffron fennel, a little apple tart that sprang to life in the oven and melted in the mouth. This wasn't critics' food; it wasn't trying to make a splash; it wasn't imaginative or exotic, as so much restaurant food was; but it tasted so good that it touched the emotions. It was in its way soul food. As I left the restaurant, I looked through the glass storefront at the few customers left with their wine in the candlelight. I wondered what they were talking about because I realized that that, too, had been missing from my usual restaurant experience. Conversation. Then came the first prick of memory.

Around my parents' dinner table, talking about food was at the top of the menu. And the talk wasn't so much about how a dish had been cooked, or the food itself; rather, it came out of the experience of enjoying food with others, a sense of companionship that prompted confidences. I must have been about twelve when Piper, my father's bibulous cousin, advised me gravely that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach, "not, as so often thought, through sex." As I walked home, I felt exhilarated by the memory. But the problem of restaurants remained. They all served the same food. The menus were short and always included a veal chop, a steak, rack of lamb, pasta. But why did that matter? It doesn't matter that all over France, bistros still serve steak frites, escargots, onion soup, skate and black butter sauce, lemon tart.

It doesn't matter that a sushi bar serves tuna and yellowtail over and over again. In fact, it's reassuring to keep running into old friends. I thought at first the difference lay in the cooks' commitment. In North America, and also in some of the most praised and expensive restaurants in France and Britain, the cooking may be good, but it is presented in a summary way. That's that. When I read about Escoffier, the chef who made the Edwardian age a pinnacle of over-the-top food, I felt so hungry. Eating out at the turn of the century had been an unabashed binge: Escoffier's a la carte menus could include as many as a hundred dishes. The customer had to be wooed and won.

Perhaps thefroideurof the modern restaurant arises because no restaurant can afford to be prodigal on the Escoffier scale, or because cooking is not so much a vocation as a career choice for the middle class, and this leads to a certain detachment from the consumer. Then the real answer came into focus. The art of cooking is dying. Once, it was the heart of home and evoked a dense web of feeling. But now the communal family meal has dissolved into individual eating units. More and more, cooking has been marginalized as an ad.