The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, With a New Preface

By Rebecca L. Spang and Adam Gopnik

Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize
Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize

“Witty and full of fascinating details.”
—Los Angeles Times

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—about 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.

“An ambitious, thought-changing book…Rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories.”
—Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

“[A] pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant.”
—New York Times

“A lively, engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it developed…Spang is…as generous in her helpings of historical detail as any glutton could wish.”
—The Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780674244016

Book preview

Harvard Historical Studies • 135

Published under the auspices

of the Department of History

from the income of the

Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest

Robert Louis Stroock Fund

Henry Warren Torrey Fund

The Board of Syndics of Harvard University Press

has awarded this book the twenty-third annual

Thomas J. Wilson Prize, honoring the late director

of the Press. The prize is awarded to the book

chosen by the Syndics as the best first book

accepted by the Press during the calendar year.

The Invention of the Restaurant

Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture

With a New Preface

Rebecca L. Spang

Foreword by Adam Gopnik

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Foreword and Preface to the 2020 Paperback Edition copyright © 2020 by the Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

First Harvard University Press edition, 2000

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2001

Cover photograph: Warchi | iStock | Getty Images Plus

Cover design: Lisa Roberts

978-0-674-24177-0 (pbk.)

978-0-674-24401-6 (EPUB)

978-0-674-24404-7 (MOBI)

978-0-674-24399-6 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Spang, Rebecca L., 1961–

    The invention of the restaurant : Paris and modern gastronomic culture / Rebecca L. Spang.

        p. cm. — (Harvard historical studies ; 135)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 0-674-00064-1 (cloth)

    ISBN 0-674-00685-2 (pbk.)

1. Restaurants—France—Paris—History—18th century.

2. Restaurants—France—Paris—History—19th century.

3. Food habits—France—Paris—History—18th century.

4. Food habits—France—Paris—History—19th century.

5. Paris (France)—Social life and customs.

I. Title.   II. Harvard historical studies ; v. 135.

TX910.F8 S667 2000

647.95443′61′09033—dc21                99-053378

RESTAURANT: Food or remedy that has the property of restoring lost strength to a sickly or tired individual. Consommé and extract of partridge are excellent restaurants. Wine, brandy, and cordials are all good restaurants for those whose spirits are drained. Some restaurants are distilled from the juices of light, flavorful meats combined with soft white bread, stimulating waters and powders, conserves, electuaries, and other good and sweet-smelling ingredients. Aspic is a sort of restaurant, but it is more nourishing and of a firmer consistency than a restaurant, which is liquid.

FURETIÈRE, DICTIONNAIRE UNIVERSEL (1708)

Recipe for Quintessence or Restaurant: Place several slices of onion, a little beef marrow, and some nice, white veal in a well-tinned and very clean casserole; on top of the veal place several clean and defatted ham rinds and then some slices of carrot and parsnip. Take a healthy chicken, very recently killed, and clean it thoroughly inside and out; cut it into pieces and then crush them; place them, still warm, in your kettle, and then put a few more strips of veal and ham rind. Note that for two pintes [approximately two quarts] of this quintessence, you will need only about four or five pounds of veal and perhaps four ounces of ham, in addition to the chicken. All being well arranged in your casserole, add a glass of bouillon; seal the kettle tightly, and put it on a high flame. If you place it first over low heat the meat yields its juices but does not brown, so then the liquid sticks and clots to the meat such that it hardens during the cooking process and does not fall to the bottom of the pan to form the restaurant.

When the meat has browned, place it over a moderate flame to sweat for three-quarters of an hour. Be careful that nothing sticks to the pan, and occasionally moisten it with a bit of bouillon, just enough so that the restaurant is neither too bitter nor too strong, but sweet, creamy, and proper for a variety of sauces, which ordinarily are made with ingredients that have their own taste and scent. Many cooks might put strongly flavored items in this quintessence, such as garlic, cloves, basil, mushrooms, etcetera, but I prefer the simpler fashion as I believe it to be the best both for taste and for health.

MARIN, LES DONS DE COMUS (1739)

RESTAURATEURS: Restaurateurs are those who have the skill of making true consommés, called restaurants or the prince’s bouillons, and who have the right to sell all sorts of creams, rice and vermicelli soups, fresh eggs, macaroni, stewed capons, confitures, compotes, and other delicate and salutary dishes.

These new establishments, which from the beginning have been called Restaurants or Houses of Health, owe their 1766 institution in this capital to Messieurs Roze and Pontaillé.

The first of these Restaurants, which in no way cedes anything to the most beautiful cafés, was opened on the rue des Poulies; but not being in a favorable enough locale, it was transferred to the rue Saint Honoré, hôtel d’Aligre, where it is run with the same success, and on the same principles of cleanliness, decency, and honesty that must always form the base of this type of business.

The price of each item is specific and fixed; one may be served at any hour. Ladies are admitted and may have their catered dinners prepared for a set and moderate price. This establishment has for its slogan this charming couplet:

Hic sapidè titillant juscula blanda palatum,

Hic datur effaetis pectoribusque salus.

[Here are tasty sauces to titillate your bland palate,

Here the effete find healthy chests.]

[MATHURIN ROZE DE CHANTOISEAU], TABLETTES DE RENOMMÉE OU ALMANACH GÉNÉRAL D’INDICATION (1773)

RESTAURANT, adj., that which restores or repairs strength. restorative remedy. restorative potion. restorative food.

It is more generally used as a substantive. Wine and bouillon are good restaurants.

It is particularly said of a very tasty consommé, or a meat extract.

By extension, the establishment of a restaurateur. A new restaurant just opened on this street. He runs a restaurant.

RESTAURATEUR, noun, he or she who repairs or re-establishes. It is rarely used, except for cities and public monuments. This city had been ruined, and the prince rebuilt it. He is its restaurateur.

It is more often used in the moral sense. This prince is the restaurateur of literature and the arts. That abbé was the restaurateur of the prior discipline to his order. Restaurateur of liberty, commerce, of law and order, etc.…

Restaurateur is also used for a cook-caterer who provides foods at all hours, the type and price of which are indicated on a sort of placard, and which are served by the portion. to have dinner at a restaurateur’s; the menu of a restaurateur.

DICTIONNAIRE DE L’ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE (SIXTH EDITION, 1835)

Contents

Illustrations

Foreword

Preface to the 2020 Paperback Edition

Introduction: To Make a Restaurant

1

The Friend of All the World

2

The Nouvelle Cuisine of Rousseauian Sensibility

3

Private Appetites in a Public Space

4

Morality, Equality, Hospitality!

5

Fixed Prices: Gluttony and the French Revolution

6

From Gastromania to Gastronomy

7

Putting Paris on the Menu

8

Hiding in Restaurants

Epilogue: Restaurants and Reverie

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Illustrations

1. Louis Berthet, the beautiful restauratrice, illustration for Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Contemporaines (1780–1788), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

2. Nicolas Lavreince, "the restaurant" (1782), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

3. A fraternal meal in honor of liberty (c. 1794), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

4. That’s right … separate checks (1789), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

5. Louis XVI arrested while eating pigs’ feet (1791), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

6. The Glutton or, Big Birds Fly Slowly, photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

7. The King arrested in Varennes, photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

8. Brion, Assassination of Le Peletier (1793), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

9. Swebach-Desfontaines, Assassination of Le Peletier, photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

10. The Gastronomic Map of France (detail), frontispiece of Charles Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, A Course in Gastronomy (1809), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

11. An Englishman suffering from spleen … arrives in France (c. 1815), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

12. Cured of spleen by French cooking (c. 1815), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

13. Supreme good taste. The Restaurant Véry, photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

14. Bourdet, "Waiter, bring us some racahout" (1835), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

15. A private room … dinner in an hour, photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

16. Charles-Joseph Traviès, The Jests of Monsieur Mayeux (c. 1831), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

17. Gavarni, "A Woman’s Ruses: a restaurant’s cabinet particulier," photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

18. How Young People in Paris Study Law (1833), lithograph from Le Charivari. Photograph courtesy of the British Library.

19. Charles-Joseph Traviès, The Check, photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

20. I must pay, lithograph from Le Charivari. Photograph courtesy of the British Library.

21. Too much and too little, photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

22. The Belly (1819), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

23. The Rights of the Belly, photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

24. Boilly, The Oyster Eaters (1825), photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

25. A provincial’s first experience of restaurant duplicity, photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

26. A Tidbit, lithograph from Le Charivari. Photograph courtesy of the British Library.

27. Honoré Daumier, I have three sous, lithograph from Le Charivari. Photograph courtesy of the British Library.

Foreword

Adam Gopnik

When Rebecca Spang’s The Invention of the Restaurant appeared some twenty years ago, it set off explosions, ranging from firecracker to incendiary dimensions, in the admittedly smallish world of those who cared passionately about gastronomic history. I recall my friend, the now-much-missed Hungarian American restaurateur George Lang (of Café des Artistes fame), calling me from Budapest—where he had gone to reopen the once legendary but by then dilapidated restaurant Gundel—in genuine lamentation after reading the review I had written about Spang’s book for the New Yorker. It seems as if I have gotten everything wrong! he said; he kept a library of books on gastronomic history in his office at the Hotel des Artistes, including many on the history of the restaurant, and they were, in a New York publisher’s minute, outdated.

Certainly, Spang’s new history quickly replaced an old myth, one in which the great chefs of Paris—with the aristocratic mouths that they had long fed having lost their heads—had begun to feed a more democratic crowd, made up of anyone who could pay. Spang overthrew this story with a more compelling one, which had the virtue of being true. A restaurant, it turns out, was a thing to eat before it was a place to go. The restaurant, appearing around 1750, was the new name for bouillon, or broth. In the same spirit in which egg-white omelets and frozen-yogurt stands appeared in New York a couple of decades ago, places appeared in Paris offering healthy broth cooked in clean kettles—these were our first restaurants. They met a semi-medicinal need in a busy urban setting, Spang writes, just like a juice bar.

In that long familiar story, the restaurant had been an instrument of forced or accidental democratization, like the paperback book or the railroad. Now, in Spang’s explanation—and in a way that seemed instantly more plausible in terms of what we knew already about the way that social institutions begin and flourish—restaurants were the social intersection of many forces appearing at once, a reflection of new ideas and desires, rather than the unplanned consequences of sudden social upheaval. We met for the first time M. Roze de Chantoiseau (Mr. Birdsong), the improbably named inventor of the bouillon that gave the restaurant its restorative name and provided the first of the countless health-food manias that still shape so many of our eating habits. (Including, most recently, with a fearful ironic symmetry, a return to bone broth itself.) We learned how the health-food stall—a pop-up, as we might say now—of the restaurant evolved quickly into a place where, improbably, men and women might dine together, in something approaching the kind of uneasy collusive truce we still know now, and where the kitchen, instead of being exposed as a collective hearth, was hidden as a place of mysterious alchemy. One ordered from a list of possibilities, rather than a set table d’hôte, and chose what one wanted. The menu was a new map of possible desires. (I can confess here what no one noted at the time, which is that my own review-essay was written almost entirely in words of one or two syllables, a slimming diet I had decided to give my own prose in honor of Chantoiseau’s reduced broth. These are things writers do, and no one notices, as chefs wake at five A.M. to make rolls that no one eats.)

All of this seemed not only fascinating in itself, as a story of what had happened in history, but also more deeply resonant with what we knew already of modernity and its institutions. The creation of new social spaces supposedly designed to sell one product, while intuitively promoting or permitting some new kind of social behavior, is one of the richest veins in writing the history of the Enlightenment. Spang’s book made the restaurant modern and continuously present, serving much the same function then as now. It also folded neatly into the broader story of the Palais Royal, and of Philippe Egalité’s efforts to use shopping in its arcades as a means to social enlightenment. Shopping is a form of social conversation—it helps develop the habits of exchange and is also an anti-aristocratic activity: the shopper engages with goods, instead of merely ordering them. People shopping are not people deferring to their superiors. The desire to, in effect, mask courtship with hygiene, sex with health, is still ever-present in our lives—that’s why they call places where men and women can appear half-dressed and in the closest proximity, in erotic-seeming motion, a health club.

The restaurant also came to seem, in Spang’s revelatory writing, one of the key institutions of modern life, in its very semi-private, half-public nature—not a truly democratic open-to-all institution like the library, perhaps, but not at all a closed one, like the aristocratic hotel where some later Balzacian hero could only restlessly stand outside and await an invitation. It was open to everyone who could pay, and while those last two words carried much freight, very few middle-class or even working-class people in modern times have been untouched by the experience of dining out. Chantoiseau’s invention had overthrown the table d’hôte, the common table of tavern dining, but it had made an institution in which every table is a world, as Ruth Rogers, another restaurateur of social vision, once said. Courtship, family occasions, even a summons to divorce, could all take place within Chantoiseau’s invention.

This specific history of the restaurant in turn wrapped around a still larger historical research project in which all the secondary institutions of city life—parks and cafés and clubhouses—could come to seem as potent as the primary institutions of legislatures and laws. The theory, associated with the eminent German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, is that the coffeehouses and salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped provide the foundation of the liberal Enlightenment—a caffeinated pathway out of clan society into cosmopolitan society. Democracy was not made in the streets but among the saucers. It wasn’t that the conversations in the café were necessarily intellectually productive; it was that the practice of free exchange itself—the ability to interact on equal terms with someone not of your clan or club—generated social habits of self-expression that abetted the appetite for self-government. This kind of social capital, often made in frankly entrepreneurial spaces, was as important for liberal democracy as constitutions and elections. Indeed, the elections and constitutions could only take if the social capital of cafés was already in place. When commercial spaces were created outside the direct control of the state, civil society could start to flourish in unexpected ways.

Two decades later, as Spang herself remarks, that vision of building a better world on pleasure-seeking practices seems less rosy than it did. Spang, with admirable self-awareness, sees her book now as a study of the 1780s—but one written in the decade of the 1990s, and bearing that time’s imprint, too. It was a happier or more obviously optimistic moment, when social institutions alone seemed likely to penetrate long-standing walls and break down barriers, and when it was possible to say that two countries, each with a McDonald’s, would never war with each other. (Perhaps the menu at McDonald’s was the problem.)

Now, we live in the wake of economic crisis, at a time in which the rebuilding of civil society seems complex, in places catastrophic, in ways that make the institutions of food culture that accompany high (not late) capitalism seem, as an academic would say, more problematic than before. George Lang’s revived Gundel in Budapest, which he dreamt of as a demonstration piece for the larger renewal of Budapest bourgeois café culture, the lost culture associated with writers as gifted as Molnar and Krudy, has since been sold to less enterprising owners, and is now existing uneasily in an autocratic and often frankly anti-Semitic Hungary. It is too sad a symptom of a common disillusion.

Indeed, the restaurant itself, in its classic Parisian form, has begun to die in the twenty years since Spang’s book appeared. Even if one takes a less apocalyptic view of our larger circumstances, the classic three-act French meal, with all its rituals, has vanished even from the Paris scene, replaced more and more by pop-ups and takeouts and grazing stations, by Pret A Mangers where the food is healthy but the eating places are designed for five-minute visits. Nosebag culture has replaced the birdsong kind. And meanwhile, the birth of the celebrity chef—with the idea, which would have seemed an improbable paradox to Chesterton, of people becoming famous for making food that cannot be tasted, swallowed, or smelled—has, as with its companion kind, the celebrity architect, produced a showy, look-at-me style, very different from the look-at-each-other imperative of the classic restaurant. I have myself written a musical comedy, Our Table (with music by David Shire), about the death of such restaurants in New York City; the subject seemed large enough to sing.

Yet—and a yet was coming here, as readily as sugar for coffee—we should not, surely, let our doubts swing our mood too wildly. One of the repeated cycles of modern life has been to see a decade of pleasure immediately followed by a decade, or more, of repentance, with the pleasures and optimism of the 1890s followed by the dread deaths of the early 1900s, and the high spirits of the 1920s followed by the suspicious, Depression-provoked, proletarian 1930s. And one of the perverse principles found within that cycle is that the preceding pleasures are always seen as not only tainted by time, but morally inferior to the austerities and puritanism that follows, with the call to militancy—even when it involves violence—seen as a superior kind. The Great War was wished on Europe, or helped along, in part by those convinced that only a renewed spirit of self-sacrifice and regimented morality could cure the curse of the decadent aesthetes’ decade gone by, with results we know. (Swimmers into cleanness leaping was, with unbearable irony, one poetic formula praising the onset of the war.) And we recall instantly, despite many efforts at imposed amnesia, the insistent call, in the wake of 9/11, away from irony and mere bourgeois amenities towards renewed regimentation. This call was astonishingly widespread even in supposedly humane circles; we know the results there, too.

It is always a bad idea to bet against pleasure. Brillat-Savarin’s discovery, in the wake of the invention of the restaurant, was not that his time needed some fussy encyclopedia of gastronomy. No, his great discovery was that the soft power of French civilization could be as persuasive and potent a force in the world as the hard power of bullets and bayonets. France had lost the Napoleonic wars, but French culture was the dominant civilizing force in Europe despite it. (As indeed it would remain through the vagaries of wars lost and won, until the 1960s.)

Soft power remains power even in hard times. In retrospect, the decadents of the 1890s look far wiser and wittier than the rigorous poets of the war, and the balladeers of 1920s still shine brighter, and their wisdoms run deeper, than that of their more strenuously engaged Depression-era followers. Scott Fitzgerald is a far larger figure, and a keener analyst of America, than Clifford Odets. It doesn’t take too much willful optimism to believe that the new rituals of restaurant going, and their new institutions of eating, can offer their customers something more than slavery to a commodity. Even television may play a broadening role—the instinct for cosmopolitanism that Anthony Bourdain championed is part of a healthy response to resurgent nationalism. By making Vietnamese stalls in Hanoi as central to our idea of cuisine as any three-star restaurant, he broadened our consciousness. Even the new pattern of dining out while dining in, the Seamless revolution in New York, has its own pleasures and, to be sure, its own proletariat: the immigrant bicycle messengers delivering in the rain. Meanwhile, the cult of the home cook, particularly the male home cook, with his endlessly culled magazine recipes, flourishes. It even has a literary high mark in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, where the hero, rather than walking or strolling, virtuously prepares a painstaking dinner for his family, emphasizing a retreat from obvious patterns of masculinity into more supple and selfless ones. The bad man may merely order; the woke wok.

And, at a still more pointed political end, the idea of the café and its overgrown sibling, the restaurant, as essential liberal institutions is one that, far from seeming remote or antiquarian now, has actually never seemed more urgent among people genuinely suffering the oppressions of autocracy. As daily reports of struggle remind us, in Kabul as in Tehran, café culture is vital to freedom, particularly women’s freedom—to lose these places would be to lose the hope of emancipation. The connection of freedom and the private-public noshing space is the least sentimental idea existing; for women in Kabul, for dissidents in Tehran, this connection is the very stuff of a free life. Even in Paris, on the morning after the horrific attacks of the Bataclan, which killed hundreds of Parisians, it was natural for one left-republican pundit to write that, As quickly as possible, we must smile and drink our glasses on the terraces of our bistros, to prove that there will be no submission. To prove that we love life and that we will defend it in staying stronger than the lunatics who dream only of death. The identification of being free to eat and drink where you like with whom you like, as one essential to republican ideals, is far from dated. (Nothing so frightens authoritarians around the globe so much as the simple words internet café.)

I ended my first happy entanglement with Spang’s history on what used to be called a note of hope. Home, I said, in words borrowed from Robert Frost, is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. A restaurant is a place where, when you go there, they not only have to take you in but have to act as though they were glad to see you. If we now are reminded of what Spang always knew, that the welcome comes at a price—well, which does not? A young man who had grown up in Paris once went back to an expensive café that his parents had frequented (semi-miraculously not far at all from the Palais Royal, where the restaurant story began). For the first time in my life, he said ruefully on his return, I looked first at the prices on the right side of the menu instead of the choices on the left side. The menu, the restaurant’s invention, always has both prices and choices. I wrote a lyric for that restaurant musical, based on this idea: You start out on the left side, only seeing choices/you end up on the right side/where all you see is prices/and somewhere in the middle is your life, the song began. The study of culinary history, of which this book is a continuing marvel, surely sings in that halfway space, too.

Preface to the 2020 Paperback Edition

Restaurants are not what they were. This book describes the creation and codification of a gastronomic culture that hid cooks, obscured cookery, and emphasized the theatrics of public dining with little thought for what happened in kitchens. Food has this in common with the law, pronounced the Almanach des gourmands in 1806, to find it good, you must not see it being made.¹

Just a few years after The Invention of the Restaurant was first published, celebrated chef Joël Robuchon subverted Grimod’s maxim by leaving retirement to open his Atelier: a self-styled workshop with the kitchen in full view.² Robuchon’s eventual empire of Ateliers (at the time of his death in 2018, there were twelve) fused the practices and ingredients of new-style French haute cuisine with the look and logic of a sushi or tapas bar. Lobster, squab, and aubergine were to be had—as were foie gras, caviar, and truffles—all rolled, crafted, carved, and skewered into unexpected shapes. Drops of complicated sauces dotted the plates, final garnishes were applied with tweezers, and everything happened before diners’ eyes. With patrons seated on red leather barstools and cooks dressed in black, these Ateliers bore little relationship to typical workshops, but they and the many similar restaurants that have since opened mark a significant departure from the institutions described in this book.

Small plates and sharing portions are now the vogue. In the early nineteenth century, visitors to Paris gasped in amazement at restaurants’ ample offerings (Soups, thirteen sorts.… Poultry and game, under thirty-two various forms.—Veal, amplified into twenty-two distinct articles) and imagined it would take them at least half an hour to read the menu.³ In contrast, many of the most celebrated restaurants today offer tasting menus that leave patrons no choice whatsoever: luxury and opulence no longer consist of promising to satisfy diners’ whims but of imposing a chef’s singular vision. More has changed than the cuisine. Because the restaurant sets the meal, it can also price it with absurd specificity ($362.21 per person plus tax, drinks not included) long before it has been served.⁴ Payment is often expected in advance—you are not so much reserving a table for dinner as buying a ticket for a show.⁵ Though intimate (some might say cramped) configurations and even tables set in restaurant kitchens are popular, the ambiance is less familial than theatrical. So-called chef’s tables vaunt not their hospitality, but their front-row seats; those at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants in London promise patrons a chance to absorb and participate in the theatrics.… see the magic unfold … peek behind the curtain … [from] the best seats in the house.⁶

Restaurants were always about display, but in the era of the Food Channel and superstar chefs, roles have been reassigned. Where visitors to Paris once fancied that they could dine like royalty at a restaurant, now the chef is king. So absolute is his or her domain that some Michelin-starred restaurants give no indication of dishes they serve: their online menus simply announce the approximate duration and minimum cost of an experience once known as dinner.⁷

Baffling menu French has also largely disappeared. In its stead, we find familiar words plucked from mundane contexts and repurposed, all the better to delight and confuse—peanut butter and jelly at Alinea (Chicago) refers to a single grape in peanut mousse, encased in a sliver of brioche. Some menus dispense with words entirely: for the last several years, the menu of the Best Restaurant in Asia (Restaurant Gaggan, Bangkok) has been printed exclusively in emojis.⁸ Astrance, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, has no menu whatsoever; the tiny, highly praised restaurant asks patrons to think not in terms of ordering lunch or dinner but of a meal that tells a story and invites them to take an unexpected voyage.

Changes in high-end dining and the growth of a new foodie culture reveal the far-reaching reconfiguration of public and private appetites that has taken place since this book was written. Some elements of this story feel more familiar today than they did twenty years ago. Take the original meaning of restaurant, the restorative bouillons that figured centrally on restaurateurs’ menus in the 1760s and 1770s and after which they named their establishments. Today, New Yorkers line up to get their own version of the same in takeaway cups from Barneys, Brodo, or Niu. Los Angeles has its cleverly named Brothecary, Soupure, and Osso Good; Portland’s Salt, Fire & Time recently closed, but Washington state’s Cauldron Broths—whose website proclaims Bone Broth is Culinary Liquid Gold!—is open in more than two dozen locations.⁹ Even London is home to Nincomsoup, Bone & Broth, and no doubt many others.

Marketed for sipping as part of a fasting-cleansing routine and as the base for a more substantial meal, bone broth is offered in some guises that would have been right at home on an early Paris restaurateur’s menu (supplemented with soft-boiled duck egg) and others that would have been completely incomprehensible (with roast sweet potato, or turned into a collagen cooler).¹⁰ That bone broth is now celebrated for being nutrient dense rather than simple and delicate and is often served not in a consommé cup but a Mason jar shows how the priorities of medicalized consumption have shifted with the emergence of exercise as a lifestyle statement.¹¹ But what eighteenth-century restaurant patrons would have understood as the distinction between restoring appetites and satiating hunger maps perfectly onto the claim that bone broth provides nourishment without feeling full.

Like the restaurateurs’ establishments of the 1760s and 1770s, bone broth restaurants and superfood juice bars allow individuals to follow a particular dietary regimen without sacrificing public sociability. Aficionados may even believe that bone broth can only be had away from home, since its sellers emphasize the extensive cooking time required—typically a minimum of 24 hours says one; slowly simmered over 48 hours, says another.¹²

In their promise to make an ancient (even paleo) form of nourishment available in a hip and highly palatable form, bone broth purveyors are following many of the strategies that made for the success of the first restaurants. Meanwhile, e-commerce platform Goldbelly, which invites demanding gastronomes to order meals from restaurants all across the country, seems like something Grimod de la Reynière could have concocted. Its name, resonant of a Bond villain, tempts one to read Goldbelly as a sly joke in the style of Grimod’s Almanach itself—though a few minutes with its website proves it to be anything but. Like gastronomic literature and nineteenth-century restaurant menus, Goldbelly and other such services redraw the map: lobster rolls in Iowa, barbecue in Rhode Island, bagels to Alaska (additional shipping costs may apply). Goldbelly’s founder, Joe Ariel, describes his goal as democratizing the food industry by giving small-town restaurateurs access to big-city markets. Here, too, there are clear echoes of two hundred years ago: the self-styled inventor of restaurants, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, edited a commercial almanac aimed at bringing superior craftmanship and creative innovation to consumers who would otherwise have missed out on the latest improvements. His faith in the benefits of circulation has simply been updated for our age of instant gratification.¹³ Yet at a time when some fifty million Americans are at risk of going hungry and between a third and a half of college students report being food insecure, Ariel’s vocabulary rings hollow—this is democracy understood in terms of consumer choice alone.

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Eighteenth-century restaurants were new kinds of public spaces. A creation of Enlightenment-era optimism, the first restaurants were born of the faith that expanding markets would allow private appetites to be satisfied in a doubly public way—one that was both generally accessible and beneficial to society as a whole. From personal foibles might come social advances. That hope (fantasy) looks very different now than it did twenty years ago.

Developed at the same time and in roughly the same place as the institutions that have defined modern political culture for the last 250 years, restaurants were never part of the republican (or even the bourgeois) public sphere that was so central to the functioning of democracy. If, during the French Revolution’s most radical period, Paris restaurateurs removed their signs announcing delicate dishes for people of distinction, they fooled no one—and were promptly jailed for their nonegalitarian sentiments. In the Revolution’s aftermath, the idea of the restaurant as a nonpolitical space of consumption and display fit well with Napoleon’s police state; that understanding of restaurants has more or less survived until today.

Since the eighteenth century, we have had multiple publics: some (like restaurants) defined by access, others (like public broadcasting) by state support. We might think of the last two hundred years as shaped by their shifting relations. The self-styled inventor of restaurants, Roze de Chantoiseau, like the philosopher-historian David Hume, assumed the two publics were mutually reinforcing—that free trade and political liberty would feed each other and devour nobody. Hume, in his 1752 essay On Refinement in the Arts (originally entitled On Luxury) explained the cycle thus:

The same age, which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers and ship-carpenters.… The spirit of the age affects all the arts; and the minds of men, being once roused from their lethargy … carry improvements into every art and science.… The more these refined arts advance, the more sociable men become.… Industry, knowledge, and humanity are not advantageous in private life alone: They diffuse their beneficial influence on the public and render the government as great and flourishing as they make individuals happy and prosperous.¹⁴

Roze de Chantoiseau embraced and embodied this vision. He opened and advertised restaurants; he edited a commercial almanac that announced new consumer products as well as advances in the arts and sciences; and he tirelessly circulated his pet plan for reducing or even abolishing government deficits. His was a truly universal vision: he promoted his finance scheme not just to various French governments but also to Benjamin Franklin.¹⁵

From the eighteenth century until about the time this book was first published, expanding markets—including the growth of restaurant culture—meant regularly being exposed to more goods and more people. Market publicness was not identical with the political public sphere: passing interactions in new social spaces did not lead in any obvious way to shared decision making and no one ever expected restaurant customers to reach a consensus (or even, necessarily, to speak to one another). Nonetheless, restaurant going was one of the experiences—like train travel and other forms of mass transit—through which people learned to coexist as strangers.¹⁶ As one American remarked in the 1840s, it really requires some practice … but these [Paris] restaurant dinners are very pleasant things when you are once used to them. Praising the cuisine and décor, it was the simple act of eating dinner in a room where others did the same that struck her most forcefully: and, withal, though there may be twenty other parties dining at as many tables within sight, yet nobody looks at you or seems to know that you are there.¹⁷

Different cultures developed distinct norms for acknowledging others in shared public places (the Messieurs, mesdames one said upon entering a French laundromat was not the muttered Oiright? of East London), but the existence of such spaces played a crucial social and political function all the same. Not by chance did the civil rights movement sit-ins begin at a lunch counter. While individualization of many kinds—separate tables, flexible mealtimes, a menu from which eaters could select their own dishes—distinguished restaurant meals from the more collective, communitarian experience of an innkeeper’s or caterer’s table d’hôte, restaurants made that personal attention available to anyone who could pay for a meal (or looked as if they could). Restaurant patrons were not introduced to their fellow diners, but they knew they existed. This was as true when this book was first published as it was when Mrs. Kirkland observed twenty other parties 150 years earlier. But it may not be so for much longer. As food writer and historian Bee Wilson observes, The buying and selling of food used to involve a series of daily encounters with other human beings. But now …. a few clicks on the computer …. the act of food buying has become steadily more anonymous and private.¹⁸ Table d’hôte style seating may be experiencing a tiny revival, but its niche positioning in trendy supper clubs and high-end chef’s counters suggests just how far it is from a shared cultural norm.

Any history book is the product of two eras. The Invention of the Restaurant explains the world in which restaurants were new, but it also inevitably owes something to a time when oat bran was everywhere and the euro still an anticipated improvement. When I was writing this book in the 1990s, the Cold War had ended more or less peacefully, and while genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans were shocking and horrible, they felt to many like aberrations—surely political manipulation of ethnic and national identities was more a vestige of the past than a premonition of the future? For whatever you called it (globalization, multiculturalism, the World Wide Web, etc.), the increased movement of people, goods, and information felt like the decade’s real themes—and they were widely marked as positive. Food figured centrally in this story: think of how many times freedom in Eastern Europe was depicted in terms of access to pineapples, bananas, or kiwi fruit. Suddenly even my East London Sainsbury’s had lacinato kale and butternut squash.

Since then, transformations of many kinds (smartphones and online everything; growing inequality; climate change) have made that era’s optimism—like that of the 1760s—look somewhat misplaced. In our age of digital reproduction and televised chefs’ battles, the reputation-creating structure of citation and reference I analyzed in this book still applies, but it has become further mediated. Like the poor devils and street urchins who clustered around the display windows and kitchen vents of past restaurants, millions of people today watch cooks’ staged competitions and culinary road shows. But where the onlookers of nineteenth-century restaurant culture shared a physical space with those who created it, the audiences for Iron Chef, The Great British Bake Off, or Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives exist chiefly on the other side of a screen and overwhelmingly in their own homes. Consumer culture was always about individuality, but it once necessitated spaces and places where individuals encountered each other. Visiting his favorite Paris restaurant in the 1830s, one New Englander sketched his fellow patrons with as much care as he did the cuisine. If the turbot and asperges aux petit pois merited several sentences each, so too did one ancient gentleman, … who salutes not only the Amphytrion, and the dame-du-comptoir, but likewise his garçon [and] … at a little distance from him… a Frenchman, his wife and three children, etc.¹⁹ Would he have noticed these and the half dozen other diners he described if his eyes had been fixed on some celebrity chef or on Instagram?

Roze de Chantoiseau often signed himself Friend of All the World and Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste described gourmandise as gradually spread[ing] that spirit of fellowship which daily brings all sorts together.²⁰ For two centuries, claims like these were never going to be fully realized, but they provided consumer culture with a plausible alibi and even, at times, noble aspirations. Today, however, when star chasers vie with each other months in advance to reserve Michelin-ranked tables and otherwise order from Deliveroo, Seamless, or Uber Eats, these claims ring rather hollow. Befriending the world is left to the daring few who try to run restaurants on a pay what you can basis.²¹ Grimod de la Reynière’s version of gastronomy—as mockery both of absolutist court culture and of its meritocratic critics—feels more true

Reviews for The Invention of the Restaurant

[dhmontgomery-265379 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating look at the very unusual origins of something we all take for granted: restaurants. Spang, in this fun (but occasionally dense) bit of popular history, goes back to original sources to identify the restaurant's beginnings in 18th Century France — not during the Revolution, as is sometimes reported, but decades prior. As it turns out, before a "restaurant" was a place to eat it was a thing to eat. Specifically, it was a type of broth or consommé that was, according to cutting-edge 18th Century science, believed to be the ideal treatment for a common catchall malady of the time, "weakness of chest."

As it happened, the broth, which could be prepared in advance and kept warm, enabled restauranteurs to be open for extensive hours instead of simply serving food at a specific hour as existing establishments did at the time. "If eighteenth-century models of physiology had singled out the soufflé for its restorative powers, the restaurant could not have taken the form it did," Spang writes. Once the restaurateurs were open serving their consommés, they gradually began to expand their menus (including inventing the concept of the menu) until they reached truly gargantuan proportions. Spang chronicles all of this and more, including the collision of the new restaurants with the fast-shifting sensibilities of Revolutionary France and how the rest of the world saw this peculiar innovation when it was discovered (especially after the end of the Napoleonic Wars).

For those with an interest in the topic and a general knowledge of the period, this is a superb read that will change your perception of something extremely ordinary. Spang doesn't write down to a popular audience, but neither is this a ponderous academic tome laden with jargon. If the book sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend it.

[mahallett · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

i really didn't enjoy this. it might have have made a good magazine article but i found it way too long. i compulsively feel i must finish what i start.

[esthercervantes-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Contradicts the myth that the restaurant is a product of the French Revolution and analyzes the political rhetoric surrounding the restaurant (and its roles in the development of nouvelle cuisine and gourmandism) from the opening of the first salon de restaurateur in the 1760s through the mid-1800s. Interesting story with plenty of food for thought on the social aspects of food. A bit repetitive at the line level, which is not a big problem in the early part of the book, when the author is delivering her main argument. It becomes an issue toward the end, once the restaurant is firmly established as an institution and the author seems to have little left to say about it, but can't figure out how to conclude.