Could it be curtains for tablecloths?

There are few pleasures in life I enjoy more than what I’ve come to think of as “the dining experience.”

When I use that term, I don’t mean only a high-end, multistar meal; I mean any meal -- especially dinner -- where you eat well and leisurely, where the meal is the event and the restaurant is the destination, not just a quick pit stop en route to some other activity, and where the setting and noise level encourage rather than prohibit conversation.

Today I worry that this ever so delightful, ever so civilized ritual is being seriously threatened by societal and generational forces beyond the control of any chef or restaurateur.

I felt this way long before last week’s kitchen shake-up at Bastide prompted questions about whether our newest seriously grown-up restaurant is about to become another culinary fun zone, with incoming chef Ludovic Lefebvre talking about serving such “surprising food” as beef with chocolate candies.

Today’s young restaurant- goers -- people in their 20s and early 30s -- and, even more so, the generation that will follow them don’t seem to have the patience for (nor the interest in) the leisurely dining experience.

Raised by two-career parents who are always in a hurry, nurtured on MTV and the Internet, accustomed to using several media simultaneously -- instant-messaging while talking on the phone, watching television and listening to CD players -- today’s younger people seem to suffer from a collective, if nonclinical, form of attention deficit disorder.

To keep them engaged, everything has to be served up in small bites -- including food.

That’s one reason, I think, that tapas restaurants and wine bars are increasingly popular. Just try to get into AOC, Cobras & Matadors or Enoteca Drago during prime dining hours. I suspect that restaurants specializing in meze -- Middle Eastern appetizers -- will be the next wave.

In many of these establishments, you come, you eat several small portions and you leave -- usually without much dallying and in a room where Mach 2 noise levels make dinner-table conversation about as pleasant as brain surgery without anesthetic.

But some people accustomed to e-mail, instant messaging and the hermetic world of cyberspace not only don’t mind this, they seem to welcome it; they’ve come to see face-to-face conversation as unnecessary, even uncomfortable.

Communication gap

For adolescents -- the next generation of potential diners -- “communication isn’t the real purpose of hanging out with your friends” at restaurants or elsewhere, says Robert Kraut, a professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “It’s not so important that you’re actually talking with those people,” Kraut says his research has shown. “Just being around your peers legitimates you, ratifies and sustains your identity ... gives you acceptance.”

I’d like to think that as they mature, young people will rediscover the pleasure of leisurely conversation at table. But I’m not optimistic -- and I’m not alone.

“The population for fine dining as we know it is shrinking,” says Norman Van Aken, chef-owner of Norman’s restaurant in Coral Gables and, since April, on the Sunset Strip as well. “This generation isn’t going to sit still for a three- or four-hour dinner.

“That doesn’t mean they won’t like good food,” he says. “But the food will be tapas, grazing, sushi -- small and quick.”

Van Aken opened Mundo, a casual, small-portions restaurant about a mile from his Coral Gables flagship, for precisely that reason, and the new restaurant draws far more customers than the original.

I have nothing against small bites, and I like AOC. A lot. Most of my favorite dinners are tasting menus on which each course is even smaller than the traditional appetizer.

But those dinners usually include a dozen or more such courses and last three or four hours or longer, in comfortable settings, accompanied by leisurely conversation.

There should be room, though, for AOC and L’Orangerie, for Mundo and Valentino. And I worry that in another generation or two, that won’t be possible. Hence, Bastide’s plan for “shocking” food. Hence, Patina’s move from Melrose to the Disney Concert Hall, where it has at least a partially captive audience.

Even L’Orangerie, the city’s quintessential formal French restaurant, recently added a small-plates bar menu.

In New York, four serious French restaurants -- Lutece, La Cote Basque, La Caravelle and Lespinasse -- have closed in the last year or so amid what the New York Times recently characterized as “a contemporary restaurant scene that celebrates D.J.’s and T-shirts.”

But the threat to fine dining is especially strong in Los Angeles, for a variety of reasons.

One is that we have to drive, often for 30 or 45 minutes -- or more, with traffic getting worse by the day -- to get almost anywhere. That means dinner in a nice restaurant requires an even greater commitment of time in what, for most of us, is already an overcrowded schedule.

Driving also tends to inhibit drinking, and alcohol -- wine in particular -- is an integral part of the dining experience and a crucial contributor to a fine restaurant’s bottom line.

Folks in Los Angeles are generally more health- and image-conscious than are residents of most other big cities, and that, too, often mitigates against the leisurely, fine-dining experience. After all, how long can one sit nibbling salad and sipping iced tea?

Many longtime Los Angeles restaurants have stopped or severely curtailed their lunch service, and other, newer restaurants have never served lunch, because the diet obsessions, drive-time problems and limited-to-nonexistent consumption of alcohol have made the midday meal a losing business proposition.

These forces now threaten dinner as well.

As part of the shift away from dinner-as-theater, dinner-as-social-event, folks increasingly often come into even high-end restaurants here dressed more for the beach or the tennis court than for fine dining.

My wife and I and another couple went to the Norman’s here shortly after it opened to celebrate both couples’ wedding anniversaries, and we were all startled to see -- in this restaurant of walnut walls and golden terrazzo floors inlaid with Turkish onyx -- a man at a neighboring table wearing shorts and sneakers. I’ve seen young diners at similarly upscale local restaurants wearing scruffy sweatshirts, dirty Levis and sandals -- without socks.

I realize that Los Angeles is a casual city, and I’m grateful for that.

“But people have gone from casual to sloppy the last three or four years,” says Piero Selvaggio of Valentino. “I’ve started seating some people based on how they dress. When some guy comes in wearing a T-shirt, faded jeans and flip-flops and his girlfriend has a bare belly with a stud in her navel, I know that if I seat them next to someone who’s all dressed up, celebrating a special occasion, they’ll be offended. They’ll call me the next morning and tell me that putting those slobs next to them ruined their evening.”

I’m not suggesting that suits and ties are necessary. But there are restaurants in which a jacket, a decent shirt and slacks and dress shoes would be nice. I think one should show respect for one’s surroundings, for the fine china and the crystal and the silver, for the training and the effort of the chef and the wait staff. One way to do that is to dress (and behave) appropriately.

Taking formal too far

Some restaurants do go overboard to the point of stiff formality. Many restaurants long required ties, for example, and even with that silly rule gone, some fine restaurants remain overbearing and uncomfortable, with service that fluctuates from the obsequious to the oppressive. That’s why some high-end French restaurants have foundered in recent years, and frankly, I think that’s what’s kept Bastide from being as successful financially as it is gastronomically.

As much as I admire Alain Giraud’s cooking and as much as I personally like maitre d’ Donato Poto, Bastide represents much of what is wrong with fine French restaurants. It’s too stuffy, too solemn, too rigid.

Owner Joe Pytka’s formula has been the opposite of “the customer is always right.” In his restaurant, by God, he’s the boss, and things are done his way. In its current incarnation, there is no a la carte menu, only prix fixe tasting menus. The wine list is exclusively French. And no one can bring in his own bottle, not even a special bottle for a special occasion.

All that added to the sense that eating at Bastide is Serious Business, with rules as inflexible as the Ten Commandments -- which is why restaurants like Bastide are often called “temples of haute cuisine.”

When Pytka replaced Giraud with Lefebvre last week, many wondered if Bastide would be loosening up.

The answer is yes. And no. And maybe.

Lefebvre spent 12 years cooking at various Michelin three-star restaurants in France and six more years at L’Orangerie, and whatever changes he makes in the menu, he wasn’t hired to take the restaurant away from its fine-dining roots.

But Pytka says he wants to add another dimension to Bastide, to have two restaurants in one space: a serious restaurant (albeit with food that is “more eclectic, more provocative, even shocking”) and a restaurant that is, if not more casual, at least “more witty, more frivolous, with more energy -- more Stravinsky than Bach, more John Coltrane than Dave Brubeck, more like the madhouse of Balthazar in New York than L’Ambroisie in Paris.”

Pytka hopes this more informal atmosphere will appeal to the younger diner, and while I’m skeptical about his ability to do two very different restaurants in one space, Patina’s Joachim Splichal thinks the entire restaurant experience will follow these bifurcated lines in the future, especially in Los Angeles.

“The best traditional restaurants will survive to provide opportunities to experience gastronomy at the highest level, maybe mostly for special occasions,” says Splichal, “but the younger generation prefers restaurants with more of a club atmosphere, more bar business, and most restaurants will have to provide that.”

If we can really have both kinds of restaurants, that would be great. Something for everyone. But no restaurant can survive on special-occasion customers alone. If the pleasure and tradition of the dining experience isn’t passed on to and absorbed by the younger generation, we will lose something truly valuable to our culture.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.