According to contemporary dictionaries, a restaurant is simply an eating place, an establishment where meals are served to customers. By this definition, restaurants—by whatever name they have been given—are almost as old as civilization. The ruins of Pompeii contain the remnants of a tavern which provided foods and wines to passers-by. For as long as there have been travellers there have been institutions offering food and accommodation (and the traditions of hospitality ensured that they were also welcomed into private dwellings). Indeed, the prime function of these early ‘eating places’ was to cater to the needs of people away from home who, unless they had brought their own food and cooks with them, were obliged to take whatever was available—or go hungry. However, it would also be fair to accord these places a similar role in urban life to that occupied by a modern restaurant. Archaeologists have been struck by the lack of cooking places and facilities in Roman insulae. Presumably their inhabitants gratified their appetites in eating houses. Similarly, a geographical survey of medieval London cookshops shows them to have been located in the most densely populated districts and not on the routes of access where they would have been most useful to travellers.
In Europe, from the second half of the 17th century there were coffee shops or cafés, public places where people could meet and talk, eat and drink. Serving only coffee, to begin with, they soon became established as meeting places for men of letters; some also provided newspapers for their clientele to read, or facilities for playing chess or billiards. In England there were also taverns which, catering to a socially superior clientele, employed well-known cooks and offered an extensive choice of dishes. Reading James Boswell's journal of his life in London in the middle of the 18th century reveals his constant use of tavern and chophouse dining rooms in identical manner to the man-about-town of the Victorian era.
The restaurant, as it was conceived in Paris towards the end of the 18th century, had a very specific vocation. It came to be seen that its principal advantage was that it offered diners a choice rather than the fixed table d'hôte of taverns or single-commodity fare of chophouses or pie shops: according to Brillat-Savarin, restaurants allowed people to eat when they wanted, what they wanted, and how much they wanted, knowing in advance how much this would cost. The top restaurants of the day boasted a vast menu, with a choice of 12 soups, 65 entrées of beef, mutton, chicken, or game, 15 roasts, and 50 dessert dishes.
The early history of Paris restaurants has lately been closely studied by Rebecca Spang (2000). In this she refutes the traditional account of restaurateurs invading the corporate provinces of traiteurs, rôtisseurs, pâtissiers, aubergistes, and taverniers/cabaretiers. Nor could she find documentary evidence of the reputed lawsuit brought against Boulanger in 1765 by the traiteurs for selling a ragout, namely a dish of sheep's feet—Pieds de mouton à la sauce poulette (a kind of white sauce enriched with egg yolks). Rather, she proposes that the inventor of the restaurant was Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau in 1766 who, as part of a broad hand of money-making schemes, opened his doors for the sale of restorative broth or bouillon. Concentration on this one dish, although evidently suited to the refined sophisticates for whom it was warmed (healthily, be it said, in porcelain, not in dangerously worn copper vessels), soon yielded to offering more imaginative cookery, all of which remained delicate, ‘nouvelle’, ‘restorative’ in the literal as well as figurative sense. From these small beginnings that harnessed commercially the great changes in cooking then in train in France, as well as servicing a more complex urban lifestyle than did the table d'hôte of traiteurs-rôtisseurs, sprang the restaurants of the Revolutionary period.
By 1771 the word ‘restaurateur’ was defined (in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux) as ‘someone who has the art of preparing true broths, known as “restaurants”, and the right to sell all kinds of custards, dishes of rice, vermicelli and macaroni, egg dishes, boiled capons, preserved and stewed fruit and other delicious and health-giving foods’. The restaurateur had total control of the wine and food service and was able to present one bill for all the foods eaten and wines drunk, whereas previously the aubergiste had been obliged to collect payment on behalf of the rôtisseur for roast meats, on behalf of the pâtissier for pies, and so on. The word ‘restaurant’, used to describe an eating house, first appeared in a decree of 1786.
While some restaurants were established in Paris before 1789 (the Grande Taverne de Londres opened about 1782 under the celebrated Antoine Beauvilliers, and at least three other famous restaurants appeared in the next few years), the abolition of guilds and their privileges in the wake of the French Revolution, together with an influx of deputies into the capital and a surplus of unemployed chefs no longer in charge of aristocratic kitchens, laid the scene for an enormous expansion of the restaurant industry in the 19th century. Restaurants were thus an important consequence of the Revolution and concurred with its aims in contributing towards social equality and promoting egality around the table. Eating well was no longer the privilege of the wealthy who could afford to maintain a cook and a well-supplied kitchen.
While the new restaurants flourished in 19th-century Paris, it was evident that some of their customers were not necessarily eating at a restaurant simply because they were hungry but were choosing the restaurant as a place to meet (literary groups in Paris), to be seen, or because the restaurant offered something different. This was an urban phenomenon. Throughout the 19th century restaurants seem to have been very much associated with cities; the first (red) Michelin Guide of 1900 recommended hotels in the country with good accommodation and good food, but no restaurants as such.
To follow the history of restaurants round the world during the 20th century would require another book, rather than another page. However, it may be noted here in conclusion that the USA would necessarily loom very large in any such extended account of the evolution of the restaurant. At first restaurants in America seemed to follow the French model, offering French cuisine and often employing French chefs. The transplant of the restaurant concept from Paris to America (indeed from Paris to many other European countries, for example Germany and England) was speedy. By the 1790s there were places answering the description in both Boston and Philadelphia. Thereafter, they flourished as in other metropolitan districts.
The introduction of Prohibition in 1920, however, caused many of them to close their doors, at the same time opening the way for an expansion of quick-service, alcohol-free, female-friendly cafeterias, luncheonettes, and tearooms serving a different class of cuisine to a different clientele. These in turn led to the proliferation of fast-food chains whose stereotyped outlets, while fulfilling all of Brillat-Savarin's criteria, are a long way from the restaurants he knew and praised. It would also be true to say that for many people the word ‘restaurant’ now signifies something rather more pretentious than the inexpensive quick eateries which Americans have bestowed upon the world. However, the word continues to retain its wider meaning and there seems to be no reason to encourage a narrowing of its use to the more expensive end of the restaurant spectrum.
China has a quite independent tradition of restaurants, older indeed than France's or Europe's. The flowering of urban life during the Song dynasty (960–1279) saw the establishment of restaurants offering particular dishes or regional specialities (Anderson, 1988). Chinese cooking, therefore, was already equipped with the means of dissemination and public presentation before it embarked on its global expansion. It did not have to borrow from any indigenous or French-inspired commercial form save in mere incidentals.
See also: Asian restaurants; café; fast food; hotels and inns.
Barbara Santich is responsible for the Graduate Program in Gastronomy at the University of Adelaide and the author of six books, including The Original Mediterranean Cuisine. Her research interests focus on France and Australia.
Bowden, Gregory Houston (1975), British Gastronomy: The Rise of Great Restaurants, London: Chatto & Windus.
Burnett, John (2004), England Eats Out 1830–Present, London: Pearson Longman.
Lottman, Herbert (1998), Michelin: 100 ans d'aventure, Paris: Flammarion.
Spang, Rebecca L. (2000), The Invention of the Restaurant, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.
