The Invention of the Restaurant

Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture

Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today.

This is a book about the French revolution in taste—bout how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing the social life of the world in the process. We see how over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic state to transform restaurants yet again, this time conferring star status upon oysters and champagne.

©2000 the President and Fellows of Harvard College; Foreword and Preface copyright 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2023 Tantor

Such multi-layered detail still it does not plod! Unfailingly interesting…

If you have any interest in the history behind our modern concepts of restaurants and how the initially became part of everyday life, then I heartily recommend this book!