The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture
Author: Rebecca L Spang
Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating to be an enjoyable leisure activity or even a serious pastime? To find the answer to these questions, we must accompany Rebecca Spang back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a thing to eat: a quasi-medicinal bouillon that formed an essential element of prerevolutionary France's nouvelle cuisine. This is a book about the French Revolution in taste and of the table—a book about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, thereby changing their own social life and that of the world.
During the 1760s and 1770s, those who were sensitive and supposedly suffering made public show of their delicacy by going to the new establishments known as "restaurateurs' rooms" and there sipping their bouillons. By the 1790s, though, the table was variously seen as a place of decadent corruption or democratic solidarity. The Revolution's tables were sites for extending frugal, politically correct hospitality, and a delicate appetite was a sign of counter-revolutionary tendencies. The restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, however, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic police state to transform the notion of restaurants and to confer star status upon oysters and champagne. Thus, the stage was set for the arrival of British and American tourists keen on discovering the mysteries of Frenchness in the capital's restaurants. From restoratives to Restoration, Spang establishes the restaurant at the very intersection of public and privatein French culture—the first public place where people went to be private.
New York Times - Edward Rothstein
[A] pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant...
New Yorker - Adam Gopnik
Spang has written an ambitious, thought-changing book.
Los Angeles Times - Merle Rubin
[Spang's] book is well...argued, dryly witty and full of fascinating details.
Boston Sunday Globe - Michael Gora
Almost every page of this decidedly scholarly though highly readable book gave me something to think about...
The Times [UK]
This prize-winning academic historical study is a lively, engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it developed...
Table of Contents:
| Introduction: To Make a Restaurant | 1 |
| 1 | The Friend of All the World | 12 |
| 2 | The Nouvelle Cuisine of Rousseauian Sensibility | 34 |
| 3 | Private Appetites in a Public Space | 64 |
| 4 | Morality, Equality, Hospitality! | 88 |
| 5 | Fixed Prices: Gluttony and the French Revolution | 119 |
| 6 | From Gastromania to Gastronomy | 146 |
| 7 | Putting Paris on the Menu | 170 |
| 8 | Hiding in Restaurants | 207 |
| Epilogue: Restaurants and Reverie | 234 |
| Notes | 247 |
| Acknowledgments | 317 |
| Index | 319 |
Go to: The Fifth Discipline or Leading with the Heart
Twenty Four Little French Dinners and how to Cook and Serve Them
Author: Cora Moor
Called a "masterpiece," this 1919 volume by Cora Moore introduces simplified French cooking to Americans. By concentrating on sauces, she allows the average American cook to add a French flair to their ordinary meals.
