The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (review)

The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. By Rebecca L. Spang (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000) 325 pp. $35.00.

The word restaurant is derived from the French word, restaurer, and in this erudite and detailed study, Spang traces the history of restaurants from their emergence in Paris in the 1760s through the 1840s. Her analysis runs counter to that of standard accounts, which date the onset of restaurants from the time French Revolution, when the cooks of emigrating aristocrats found themselves in need of new forms of employment. But why would these new places be called restaurants? What did they have to do with restoring oneself? The answer lies in the culture of the Enlightenment and the social structure of the Old Regime. Spang returns to the decades before the Revolution, revealing that long before a restaurant was a place to eat, it was a restorative broth.

Restorative broths were a special form of bouillon, the product of a prolonged cooking process in which meat was broken down and served partially digested to people with weakened digestive systems. In the last twenty years of the Old Regime, restaurants were opened to serve foreign travelers and invalids who found the food, service, and atmosphere traditionally offered by inns, taverns, and eating houses intolerable. In contrast to the heavy fare of mutton cutlets, spiced sausage, and dense patés offered at these traditional establishments, restaurants offered their clientele a nouvelle cuisine consisting of orange-flavored rice creams, fresh eggs, fruits in season, as well as bouillons. Such fare appealed to an elite obsessed with health and infatuated by the contemporary ideal of a simpler life and purer food. Ironically, the nouvelle cuisine was neither simple nor inexpensive, based as it was on refined sugars imported from the Caribbean.

It was not just the food in restaurants which the elite found appealing; atmosphere and service were important, too. Restaurants catered to the individual. They introduced menus, which allowed individuals to select particular items and pay only for what they ate; they abandoned the idea of dining at a common table, or even in a common room; and they offered food at all hours. They were the first public place where people went to be private and this characteristic prevailed long after bouillons disappeared from the menu.

Spang uses restaurants as a prism through which a multitude of themes can be explored--including reality versus the theory of corporate society, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas, and the conflicting values of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. She traces shifts in politics through representations of food and draws ably on such diverse sources as almanacs, plays, novels, and engravings to demonstrate the centrality of restaurants and food to French culture. Teasing out all these themes is a remarkable tour de force, but readers hoping to exult in the sheer richness of French gastronomy will be disappointed; this book takes a surprisingly abstract and ascetic approach to food in an effort to demythologize previous hagiographic accounts of French cuisine. Focusing on the images and symbolism of restaurants, the book reveals more about what people imagined restaurants to be than about how they actually functioned.

Lindsay Wilson
Northern Arizona University

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