Restaurants Come to AmericaĪs shown by the history of restaurants in both China and France, you can’t have restaurants without a large and hungry urban population. By the late 1780s, the health-conscious bouillon shops had evolved into the first grand Parisian restaurants like Trois Frères and La Grande Tavene de Londres that would serve as the archetype of fine restaurant dining for the next century. A little wine, perhaps, some stewed chicken. Once the bouillon restaurants caught on, it didn’t take long for other items to show up on the menu. They had a printed menu from which people ordered dishes as opposed to the tavern keeper saying, ‘this is what’s for lunch today.’ And they were more flexible in their meal hours-everybody didn’t have to get there at 1 p.m. “They sat customers at a small, cafe-size table. “The restaurateurs innovated by copying the service model that already existed in French café culture,” says Spang. But Spang credits the success and rapid growth of these early bouillon restaurants not just to what was being served, but how it was served. It was all-natural, bland, easy to digest, yet packed full of invigorating nutrients. “You might not have aristocratic forebears, but you can show that you’re something other than a peasant by not eating brown bread, not relishing onions and sausage, but wanting delicate dishes.”īouillon fit the bill perfectly. “They believed that knowledge was obtained by being sensitive to the world around you, and one way of showing sensitivity was by not eating the ‘coarse’ foods associated with common people,” says Spang. In her book, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Gastronomic Culture, Spang explains that the very first French restaurants arrived in the 1760s and 1770s, and they capitalized on a growing Enlightenment-era sensibility among the wealthy merchant class in Paris. Those who were in charge of the kitchen were called ‘pot masters’ or were called ‘controllers of the preparation tables.’ This came to an end in a matter of moments and the waiter-his left hand supporting three dishes and his right arm stacked from hand to shoulder with some twenty dishes, one on top of the other-distributed them in the exact order in which they had been ordered. “The waiter took their orders, then stood in line in front of the kitchen and, when his turn came, sang out his orders to those in the kitchen. Then came a well-trained and theatrical team of waiters. According to a Chinese manuscript from 1126 quoted in Dining Out, patrons of one popular restaurant were first greeted with a selection of pre-plated “demonstration” dishes representing hundreds of delectable options. The dining experiences at the larger and fancier restaurants were strikingly similar to today. “You could go to a noodle shop, a dim sum restaurant, a huge place that was fantastically and opulently put together or a little chop suey joint,” says Shore. According to Chinese documents from the era, the variety of restaurant options in the 1120s resembled a downtown tourist district in a 21st-century city. These prototypical restaurants were located in lively entertainment districts that catered to business travelers, complete with hotels, bars and brothels. “You could say the ‘ethnic restaurant’ was the first restaurant.” “The original restaurants in those two cities are essentially southern cooking for people coming up from the south or northern cooking for people coming down from the north,” says Shore.
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