The Restaurant and Its Origins

The restaurant as the French understand it belongs to Paris in the second half of the eighteenth century. The word first named a restorative broth, a bouillon of strong meats, and only later the room in which such things were sold. Larousse Gastronomique treats the Revolution and the years that followed as the period in which the establishment took the form that the nineteenth century would carry across Europe.

Before the restaurant, the traveller and the townsman ate at the table d'hôte of an inn, at a fixed hour, at a common table and at a single price, or he bought from the traiteur, who sold dishes to be carried home. The cabaret and the auberge offered wine and plain food, but not the choice of a dish at the hour one wished. The restaurateur differed in three ways: he served at individual tables, he offered a written list of dishes, and he allowed the guest to eat when he pleased. These three conditions, rather than any one dish, mark the beginning of the institution. The name came from the restoring bouillons offered to the weak of stomach, and the early houses presented themselves almost as places of refreshment for the delicate. Their dishes were light: consommés, fowl, eggs, and creams. Larousse Gastronomique records that the list widened rapidly, and that the restaurateur came to rival the traiteur and the innkeeper by offering a fuller cuisine in a more civil setting. The Revolution is usually given a part in the spread of the restaurant. The great households, which had kept large kitchens and many cooks, were broken up, and cooks trained in them sought a living in the city. Their skill passed into public rooms, and a cuisine once confined to the noble table became available to anyone able to pay. The Palais-Royal and its neighbourhood became the centre of this trade, and the houses there set the pattern of a long list, a cellar and an attentive service. The nineteenth century gave the restaurant its settled forms. The carte, with each dish priced separately, stood beside the fixed-price menu, and the dining room acquired its ordering of maître d'hôtel, waiters and sommelier. In the kitchen the work was divided among stations under a chef, a method later codified in the brigade that Auguste Escoffier set out in Le Guide Culinaire. The service à la russe, in which dishes arrive one after another and are served to the guest, suited the individual table and replaced the old display of all dishes at once. From Paris the model passed to the provinces and abroad, and the French word and the French manner of the list, the courses and the service went with it. The classification of establishments, the guides that judged them and the idea of the restaurant as a place of craft all grew from the same eighteenth-century root. What began as a room for a restorative broth became the public stage of French cooking.

The earliest restaurant dishes were chosen for gentleness: clear bouillons, boiled fowl and soft creams, intended to restore rather than to impress. As the list widened, the table acquired the full range of the French kitchen, from the sauce-built dishes of the grande cuisine to the plainer cooking of the regions, and the guest could for the first time choose among them.