The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, 2nd edition
Rebecca L. Spang
Apr 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Elisabeth Lagelee
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12 hr 20 min
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About this audiobook
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 process. We see how over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic state to transform restaurants yet again, this time conferring star status upon oysters and champagne.
About the author
Rebecca L. Spang is professor of history and director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution.
Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1986. He has published many books including Paris to the Moon. He lives in New York City.
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