The Invention of The Restaurant Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture by Rebecca Spang, Foreword by Adam Gopnik

The Invention of The

Restaurant Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture by Rebecca Spang, Foreword by Adam Gopnik is an impressive and curious book about a birth no one think too much, I guess. The habit of going to a restaurant is so typical and eradicated in our culture that no one think at the origins of these structures.

At first restaurants were places born for all that frails people who needed good meals in grade of restoring their health system passing through the mind as well. People with the most diversified illnesses were accepted in these places, where it was possible, if health temporarily lost, passing through good and regenerating food, to re-become stronger everyday.

For this reason food was cooked, mainly broths using scientific notions (books in the past kept secrets and just for doctors, appeared cheaply for everyone and it was a big success.)

Slowly restaurant added more meal, more fruits, veggies, and if during the French Revolution restaurants were the symbol of frugality, once captured and killed Robespierre, the perspective of restaurants changed radically. If years before this event, restaurant-owners tried to open their structures also to other kind of people, not just the sick ones, after that moment Parisienne Restaurants became the symbol of food passion and love, and one of the main voices of attraction once a tourist is in La Ville Lumiere. 

I was thinking at the big change adopted by owners of restaurants: maybe it was not a case that, once the period of Terror was over, people rejected any kind of frugality, searching for food; a compensation for the horror they saw during that years.

Although there are different reasons for the evolution of restaurants, I want to think that maybe one of the main hidden causes was also this one.

People wanted to live, passing also through food. 

Beautiful book, written with competence, love.

Highly recommended to everyone.

I thank Harvard University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori