Synopses & Reviews
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 French culture--the first public place where people went to be private.
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"[Spang's] book is well...argued, dryly witty and full of fascinating details.
Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times"
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Spang writes entertainingly, with a keen sense of humor and with no great reverence for her subject. It is a refreshing contrast to much of the overwritten adulation of restaurants that passes for criticism today. Boston Sunday Globe
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Spang has written an ambitious, thought-changing book. Until now, most restaurant history was pop history, filled with canned "Eureka!" moments and arch legend-making...Spang's book is an example of the new "niche" history, and, like the best of such books, it is rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories about the making of familiar things. Roger Harris - Newark Star-Ledger
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"Almost every page of this decidedly scholarly though highly readable book gave me something to think about...
Michael Gora, Boston Sunday Globe"
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/I> causes a small jolt of surprise. For people who eat out so often that boiling a pot of spaghetti at home is a special occasion, a world without restaurants is hard to imagine. We realize, at some level, that they have not always been here, but few of us could say who invented them, or when...Much of this information is ignored in the standard food histories, and Spang
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Spang chronicles these developments [in the history of restaurants] in a tasty work, which is about far more than food. -- Harvard Magazine
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Readers hungry for mouth-watering accounts of sumptuous meals or paeans to the glories of French cuisine will not find them here. Spang's focus is on the restaurant as an institution, and her history pretty much ends in the mid-19th century. Spang is far more interested in viewing restaurants in a wider social, political and historical context. Her book is well...argued, dryly witty and full of fascinating details. Pete Wells - Salon.com
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Almost every page of this decidedly scholarly though highly readable book gave me something to think about: the origins of restaurant reviewing in the early years of the 19th century, the way in which other Europeans came to identify the restaurant with the essence of French-ness itself, or the fact that in French one word--carte--does double duty for both menu and map. Michael Gora
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No more fables about ancien régime chefs, whose aristo patrons had been guillotined or exiled in the French Revolution...an end to those anecdotes about their invention of dishes broiled on a breastplate on some Napoleonic battlefield. Because Spang reveals the restaurant's first true Author - Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, "friend of all the world," an entrepreneur who edited an annual business directory in which he recommended himself as the "king's restauranteur" and founder of the first "house of health." Adam Gopnik - New Yorker
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[A] pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant...How has [the] restaurant ritual come to be? And why does it have this form? Such questions are now familiar in works of cultural and social history...[but] Spang adds to the genre without falling prey to its jargon. Vera Rule - The Guardian
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This prize-winning academic historical study is a lively, engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it developed...Rebecca Spang is consistently perceptive about the semiotics of her theme, and as generous in her helpings of historical detail as any glutton could wish. Edward Rothstein - New York Times
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Rebecca Spang explodes a culinary myth that has lasted nearly two hundred years. The Times
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This is a book that works on a number of different levels. There is meat and drink here for those interested in the metaphysical and metaphorical aspects of eating; a wealth of erudition on some relatively little studied aspects of Enlightenment culture and the French Revolution; and those scholars of the period who follow convention in regarding the rise of the French restaurant as epiphenomenon of the French Revolution, a well presented challenge to their account. Margaret Visser - London Review of Books
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The title of Rebecca L. Spang's scholarly yet highly accessible social history, The Invention of the Restaurant causes a small jolt of surprise. For people who eat out so often that boiling a pot of spaghetti at home is a special occasion, a world without restaurants is hard to imagine. We realize, at some level, that they have not always been here, but few of us could say who invented them, or when...Much of this information is ignored in the standard food histories, and Spang's excavation of it makes for interesting reading, particularly because the French Revolution and its aftermath would change restaurants almost beyond recognition, into something very like the places where we go out to eat today. Kate Soper - Radical Philosophy
Synopsis
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 sipping their bouillons there. However, the restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food soon became sites for extending frugal, politically correct hospitality and later became symbols of aristocratic greed. From restoratives to Restoration, Spang establishes the restaurant at the very intersection of public and private in French culture--the first public place where people went to be private.
Synopsis
2000-2001 Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Synopsis
1992 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize, Harvard University Press
About the Author
Rebecca L. Spang is Lecturer in Modern European History at University College London. She is the author of Gothic Gastronomics.
Table of Contents
Introduction: To Make a Restaurant
1. The Friend of All the World
2. The Nouvelle Cuisine of Rousseauian Sensibility
3. Private Appetites in a Public Space
4. Morality, Equality, Hospitality!
5. Fixed Prices: Gluttony and the French Revolution
6. From Gastromania to Gastronomy
7. Putting Paris on the Menu
8. Hiding in Restaurants
Epilogue: Restaurants and Reverie
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index