At Nobelhart & Schmutzig, in Berlin, I dined alone and without my mobile phone. Not because I had left it at home or lost it, but because in this restaurant, its use is prohibited. That night, seeing me sitting alone, a member of the front-of-house team brought me several books. "See if any of them seem interesting to you," he told me. He didn't try to fill the silence or turn the solitude into an uncomfortable scene. He let me read.
One of those books was Drunk, by Edward Slingerland. Despite the title, it is not so much an apology for alcohol as an investigation into an ancient question: why have human beings repeatedly sought intoxication, despite knowing its risks? Slingerland argues that, at certain moments in history, drinking has served to loosen hierarchies, build trust, allow unexpected ideas to enter, and make a less rigid coexistence possible.
Lawrence Osborne formulates it in a much more uncomfortable way in To Drink or Not to Drink: "Is alcohol the creator of the mask or, precisely, that which tears it off us?" We all know that alcohol can turn someone into a caricature of themselves, bring out violence, euphoria, or cruelty. But it has also been, for centuries, a crack: a place to let down one's guard, reduce distances with others, and even find solutions.
Lawrence Osborne: "Is alcohol the creator of the mask or, precisely, that which tears it off us?"
And it is precisely this social role that makes the question more evident: why do we seem to reject alcohol more and more? One only has to talk to some wineries to confirm that sales fall year after year and that, especially among young people, there is less interest in drinking. Some, like Sumarroca, have opted to produce lower-alcohol wines, while others have returned to looking at varieties like trepat, capable of yielding lighter wines. In the world of beer, alcohol-free options are gaining more and more ground.
High gastronomy is also learning to listen to this change. For a long time, not drinking wine in a great restaurant made you a kind of incomplete diner. Now there are alcohol-free pairings that try to build their own language. Aleia and Mont Bar, for example, work with fermentations, teas, and their own preparations that do not aim to imitate wine, but to build acidity, texture, and the ability to accompany a dish. At Disfrutar, on the other hand, they have worked on the dealcoholization of wines to preserve, even without alcohol, a part of the territory and culture that each bottle contains.
But this transformation is not limited to the table: it also reaches leisure. In Barcelona, Caffeine Raves are booming. These are daytime parties, often with house music, specialty coffee, and a club aesthetic that swaps drinks for caffeine. They are increasingly visible in the city, with sessions in spaces like Time Out Market. The Dionysus of Barcelona no longer appears with a glass of wine, but with a flat white in hand at eleven in the morning.
Without turning this change into a nostalgic reading, perhaps we should ask ourselves what this new disinterest in alcohol says about us. Beyond its harmful effects, the issue is not just that we want to drink less. Perhaps there is also an urge not to lose control in a world where everything can slip out of our hands: to avoid what can be recorded, not to appear weak before others and, above all, before their cameras.
That is why the metaphor posed by the video game Ghost of Yōtei is so eloquent. When combat gets complicated, sake allows you to recover "spirit," the energy used to heal or activate techniques, which inevitably refers to the very origin of spirits. But drinking too much has a price: vision blurs and combat becomes more difficult. It is not an innocent elixir or an automatic door to any truth. It can help you regain strength and, at the same time, make you stumble.
The prohibition of mobile phones at Nobelhart & Schmutzig is also, in a way, a response to this need to keep everything under control. It is a restrictive rule that, paradoxically, opens up a less supervised space. Perhaps what hypervigilance makes more difficult for us is not only excess, but also that margin of unpredictability represented by the maenads: the possibility of loosening identity, stepping out for a while from the most managed version of ourselves and feeling, even for an instant, that "pure light of late summer" that Pindar associated with Dionysus.