The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, 2nd edition

Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today.



This is a book about the French revolution in taste-about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing the social life of the world in the proc...