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Digital Audiobook
The Invention of the Restaurant by Rebecca L. Spang

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The Invention of the Restaurant

Publisher
Tantor Media, Inc
Publish Date
11 April 2023
Run Time
12 hours 20 minutes
Format
Audiobook
$13.95

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What to expect

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.

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Details

Author
Rebecca L. Spang
Narrator
Elisabeth Lagelee
Duration
12 hours 20 minutes
Release Date
11 April 2023
ISBN
9798765067123
Format
Audiobook
Publisher
Tantor Media, Inc
Genre
Travel guides: restaurants and cafes, Historiography, National and regional cuisine, TV / celebrity chef cookbooks

Synopsis

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.

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