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 private in
Frenchculture--the first public place where people went to be
private.
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