The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Harvard Historical Studies) (Hardcover)

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Review
Why do restaurants exist? Why do we go to restaurants? Reading Rebecca Spang's "Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture" does not directly answer these questions on a personal level, but it does, with many insights, help illuminate the history and sociology of eating out...Spang's book, while thoroughly researched, is highly readable and enjoyable. This French Revolution of the table will obviously interest amateurs and professionals of culinary topics. I would argue, though, that the book should intrigue even more many readers with no knowledge or particular love of the kitchen. Because every chapter is well introduced and focuses on a particular aspect of the restaurant, such varied fields of study as sociology, history, economy, science, literature, and law find their place. As a result, the book will appeal to many types of readers including undergraduates and graduates. Of special interest is the way Spang considers the public-and-private-sphere debate as well as her unique approach of the French Revolution. Her analysis is accomplished in great detail--starting with the various definitions of the evolution of the word "restaurant"--and includes many frontspieces, caricatures, and copious notes. Finally, Spang's book is an engaging portrait and a serious but accessible tool for understanding the metamorphosis of the emerging modern French society. "The Invention of the Restaurant" deserves to be read by all. -- Veronique Olivier-Wallis "Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews Online"

Product Description
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 18th 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 pre-Revolutionary 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 19th 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 established the restaurant at the very intersection of public and private in French culture - the first public place where people went to be private.

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover

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