Putting Paris on the Menu

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. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and the Modern Gastronomic Culture is 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.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the restaurant’s trope was “copia” — cornucopia, to be precise. The restaurant, everyone said, was full to overflowing: full of people, full of stories, full of food. Bedazzled tourists and calm gourmets, philandering husbands and proud wedding parties, Mardi Gras revelers and reform-minded banqueters, silverware thieves and stock-exchange gamblers — all filled restaurateurs’ opulent rooms. There were well-mannered old gentlemen, dandies with long black curls and champagne, parents with their children, and “deputies, and proprietors, and gentlemen of fashion, and ladies and young people, and Germans and Italians; throngs promiscuous, differing in ten thousand points, and resembling in two; — they are all hungry and they are all conversational.”

To satisfy that hunger, painted horns of plenty spilled their contents past the gilt frames of ornate mirrors and along the margins of four-column menus; truffled turkeys, capered turbots, roast partridges, stewed carp, and stuffed pigs’ feet all hurried from seemingly inexhaustible pantries, bringing in their wake sugared peas, smothered artichokes, layered pastries, and brandied apricots; festive parties began their dinners with four dozen raw oysters, per person, and ended with innumerable bottles of champagne. As the English traveler and letter writer Francis Blagdon gasped in 1803, “Good heaven! . . . — Beef, dressed in eleven different ways. — Pastry, containing fish, flesh and fowl, in eleven shapes. Poultry and game, under thirty-two various forms. — Veal, amplified into twenty-two distinct articles. Mutton, confined to seventeen only. Fish, twenty-three varieties.” Recognizable substances such as veal, mutton, and fish proliferated in unfamiliar but enticing forms: à l’espagnol, à la poulette, à la maître-d’hôtel. To the Philadelphian John Sanderson, who traveled to the Continent because of his ill health, it was clear that in the restaurants of Paris, “Ceres has unlocked her richest treasures . . . and has poured them out with a prodigality that is unknown elsewhere. Fish of fresh, and of salt water; rare wines of home and foreign production; and as for the confectioneries, sucreries, fruiteries and charcuteries, the senses are bewildered by the infinite variety.” The restaurant was a space of permanent carnival, an island possession of the Land of Cockaigne, the “gourmet’s Garden of Eden.”

Such, at least, have been the commonplace impressions shared by generations of Anglo-American tourists and legions of foreign Francophiles, as well as the great majority of culinary historians. Throughout the nineteenth century, plenitude governed the Paris restaurant, defining what real restaurants offered and shaping what accounts of them could describe. For all the efforts to number that variety, the restaurant’s fullness consistently surpassed enumeration, such that John Sanderson was hardly the only author to suggest that restaurants approached infinity; others wrote of “infinite choices” and “infinite nuances,” or noted that “the superior Restaurateurs specify nothing.” Already in February 1792, Jacques Venua, restaurateur at the Grand Hôtel des Etats Généraux, had made so bold as to promise “an infinite number of choice entrées, side-dishes, and all that should follow.” Decades later, the Physiologie du goût asserted that restaurants made it possible for anyone and everyone “to procure, infallibly and immediately, without any more bother than that of desiring, all the delights to which taste is susceptible,” and the pleasures of paraphrasing Brillat-Savarin spread that claim across volumes throughout the century.

Historians have generally accepted this picture, waxing eloquent over the pleasures of nineteenth-century restaurant going. Basing their accounts on guidebooks, travelers’ descriptions, and the Almanach des gourmands, writers as ideologically dissimilar as René Héron de Villefosse, Jean-Paul Aron, and the brothers Goncourt have compiled addresses and referrals as if they were all planning holiday excursions to the gastronomic capital of the past. While the recommendations from which they pieced together their histories had never exactly been secret — recall that the first volume of the Almanach sold at least twelve thousand copies, and note that these authors have nothing to say about eating in Lyons, Reims, or Dijon — their chatty collages nonetheless read as inside scoops and gossipy tabloids. Composing a phantasmatic meal from earlier authors’ leftovers, gleefully recommending restaurants and pastry-shops that have long since disappeared, these walking-tour histories pick their way along a trail of textual crumbs left in the musings of spectral gourmets.

All such accounts might easily lead us to the conclusion that Paris truly was the culinary capital of the nineteenth century, that restaurants like those of Balaine, Beauvilliers, and the three frères provençaux occupied every street corner and satisfied the cravings of every idle gourmet. Commercial statistics, too, marked Paris as the preeminent city for restaurants: in 1815, a nationwide business register noted only a handful outside Paris (four in Bordeaux, to be exact), even though nearly every city had a listing for “principal hotels and cafés.” Thirty-five years later, when the Minister of the Interior called for a census of food and drink sellers, he found similar results. Prefects throughout the country counted hundreds of café-keepers and thousands of barmen: the Dordogne, east of Bordeaux, was home to 828 inns, 2661 taverns, and 404 cafés, while in the north of France, the prefect of the Somme reported 411 inns, 7089 cabarets, and 188 cafés. Their colleague in the Hérault (the region around Montpellier) counted 580 inns, 1289 taverns, and 881 cafés. Thus these departments were well provided with spaces for consumption, popular sociability, and weekend rowdiness, but, like fifty other departments across France, they had no restaurants. Certain respondents to the Ministry’s survey even made a point of crossing out the category “restaurateurs” — the local official in the Charente Inférieure, for example, who slashed through that heading in broad ink strokes, clearly had no doubt that this classification did not apply to his region (now the Charente Maritime, on the Atlantic coast near La Rochelle). For even by the middle of the nineteenth century, restaurants were still an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon, inventions of the capital and icons of its pleasures. To be conversant with the protocols, rituals, and vocabulary of restaurant going was to be quintessentially Parisian and supremely sophisticated. As late as 1875, an encyclopedic dictionary could confidently assert that “restaurants” were “for many years specific to Paris alone,” and append that “even today one finds them only in large cities.” Clearly distinct from the many eateries and taverns that dotted the provincial landscape, restaurants became — for memoirists, travel writers, novelists, and playwrights — veritable emblems of modern Paris life.

As the restaurants of the capital became famous for their “infinite” bounty, so did the same rhetoric identify the city as home to “a thousand” restaurants. What the Rocher de Cancale was to oysters, Paris was to restaurants. When Louis Prudhomme wrote a guidebook in 1804, the former editor of the radical Révolutions de Paris (now turned author of less overtly polemical texts) boldly stated that Paris was home to over two thousand restaurants — an indication, no matter how wildly wrong or surprisingly accurate his arithmetic, that restaurants had already by this time become a fixture of life in the capital. Yet for all that many authors readily concurred with Prudhomme’s claim, the most significant change of the revolutionary decade had not really been the much-touted “birth of the restaurant,” nor even its exponential growth. For restaurants had, of course, first appeared in the 1760s, and the Tableau du nouveau Palais Royal told its readers in 1788 that “people attach singular importance to the word ‘restaurateur.’” Rather than witnessing the invention of the restaurant, the late 1790s saw the death of the term’s earlier, more particular, definition: set loose from its moorings in the culture of medicalized sensibility, “restaurant” became the fashionable word used for any Paris eatery. Already in the 1780s, enterprising cook-caterers and anxious innkeepers had begun to add the word “restaurateur” to their street signs and hence to confuse nomenclature, but most nonetheless persisted in claiming that they thereby offered two discrete services: a table d’hôte and individual table settings. In the years that followed, however, as political and social turmoil made shuffling names and altering titles all the more easy and advisable, eatinghouse-keepers blurred distinctions that had once seemed crucial. Some added billiard tables and dance halls to their establishments; others promised Lyonnais sausages or moved to premises with private dining rooms.16 As the attributes separating a restaurant from an inn or a cookshop became harder and harder to identify, categorization became fluid and uncertain. Honoré Boué, though classed in the records of the Committee of General Security as a “traiteur,” presented himself to that committee as “Boué, gargotier [keeper of a cheap eating-house]” and was described by the investigating administrators as “Boué, innkeeper” (tellingly, however, no one in the period of Jacobin rigor used the word “restaurateur”). The Hamille family in the Palais Royal obviously hesitated over the name of their trade as well, for they eventually called their business, with both vivid physicality and some professional uncertainty, a “maison de commerce de bouche” (literally, “a house of mouth business”).18 Members of the retail food trades had a wide variety of possible titles available to them, and often combined several; La Tynna’s commercial directory for 1799 reflected this trend by listing them all under the none-too-specific hyphenated category, “traiteurs-restaurateurs.” (A decade later the editors relabeled the grouping as “restaurateurs- traiteurs.”)

Neighborhood cook-caterers in this period would have had any number of reasons to settle on the appellation “restaurateur.” Some, certainly, made drastic changes to their style of service, introducing the private rooms, separate tables, and printed menus that had once so clearly distinguished restaurants from other eatinghouses: in March 1796, Jean-Baptiste Haudebourt, formerly a traiteur near the Tuileries, announced the opening of his new Champs-Elysées “maison de restaurateur” and advertised the advantages offered by its intimate individual dining rooms. Haudebourt’s strategy was hardly unique: in the late 1790s and early 1800s, the restaurant took over from the table d’hôte as the standard point of reference, as the term in comparison to which other eateries had to be categorized. One self-proclaimed “restaurateur” advertised green gardens, silver tableware, and a choice of three dishes from the menu, even as he announced that customers desiring more regular meals could simply pay forty francs each month; another promised that “notwithstanding his à-la-carte restaurant” he still offered six-course dinners for two francs twenty centimes per person in the large salon or for three francs a head in a private dining room. Still providing a variety of services at many different prices — much as they had in the final years of the Old Regime — the eatinghouse-keepers of Paris all assumed the title that had once referred to purveyors of restorative bouillons alone. As surely as Jean François Véry had told the revolutionary police that he was a simple artisan traiteur, now his rivals told Paris that they were newfangled restaurateurs. In 1804, the Gazette de France seconded Prudhomme’s claim that Paris was currently home to 2000 restaurants — a marvelous figure indeed, until one notes that the newspaper also reported that there had been 1500 “restaurants” in the city in 1789.

Though the men (and, to a much less obvious extent, the women) of the retail food trades certainly played a part in transforming Paris into a city of restaurants, their patrons performed an equally important function. From a foreign traveler’s perspective in particular, it was the table d’hôte that proved increasingly rare, the restaurant that seemed strangely ubiquitous. Already in 1792, an English voyager asserted that the French capital’s tables d’hôte had all but disappeared, and that the genre was only to be found in roadside inns; a decade later, the author of A Practical Guide During a Journey from London to Paris was only one of several Britons to append a footnote saying that the “modern appellation” restaurateur had completely replaced the now obsolete traiteur. While such travelers’ impressions and guidebook accounts may or may not transcribe reality accurately, they speak volumes about changing perceptions and expectations.

Even if Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century still was home to dozens of midday tables d’hôte and hundreds of nuptial-hosting caterers, visitors evidently thought they were seeing “restaurants,” and by that meant that they were seeing something new, strange, and distinctive.

Though they said that the tables d’hôte had vanished and the innkeepers had gone bankrupt, travelogue and guidebook authors did not therefore treat restaurants as familiar or unremarkable institutions. Rather, they described them as strange by-products of political upheaval, as further evidence of the irreversible changes wrought by an epoch-making Revolution. For decades into the nineteenth century, Anglophone authors and publishers continued to italicize the words restaurant and restaurateur, marking them and their referents not only as foreign, but as untranslatably so, evidence that something had happened in France that had occurred nowhere else on the planet. Francis Blagdon, who enthusiastically counted the items on Beauvilliers’s menu (“Poultry and game, under thirty-two various forms. — Veal, amplified into twenty-two distinct articles,” etc.), did so in order to demonstrate the recent growth of public luxuriousness, and included his description of restaurant menus in a book tellingly entitled Paris as it Was and as it Is, Illustrative of the Effects of the Revolution. Like many of his compatriots, Blagdon went to Paris during the brief peace of 1802–1803 to see the results of ten years of war and revolution (“traces of havock” was his phrase) — and what did he see? “Restaurants.”

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, American and especially British visitors identified restaurants as particularly “French” (even if there were none to be found in most of France, and many more in the rich and heavily-touristed center of Paris than in the city’s outlying districts). If these observers were to penetrate the mysteries of “Frenchness” — a task made much more imperative by the apparently never-ending and largely unfathomable changes of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras — restaurants offered as good a starting point as anywhere else. Both a strange and confusing world, wrapped opaquely in gastronomy’s rules and vocabulary, and a publicly open and available space, a bit of “daily” French life to which travelers had easy access, restaurants were the perfect mixture of the familiar and the exotic, the intimate and the extraneous. In 1814, the Englishman Stephen Weston advised his compatriots that even if they were not very interested in the French capital’s artistic, scientific, or industrial accomplishments, they might still derive pleasure and benefit from a visit to its restaurants; some decades later, an American woman counseled that the restaurants of Paris “deserve[d] to be seen as a matter of curiosity, [even] by those who would not otherwise frequent them.” Guidebook writers, well aware that a grand restaurant’s appeal was not limited to its cuisine, emphasized the uniquely national character traits to be observed there: Edward Planta’s A New Picture of Paris (the twenty-odd editions of which guided an entire generation of Britons through the capital) urged all travelers to eat at least one meal chez Véry, not because the sole was particularly well cooked or the lobster soup exquisite, but because it afforded the opportunity to “witness and experience the very acme of French epicurism.” For the inquiring tourist, “epicurism” was as much something to be espied as to be enjoyed, as much a part of peculiarly French culture as well-dressed women or sober working men, Monday holidays or the Hôtel des Invalides. Tourists also flocked to the Jardin des Plantes and Père Lachaise cemetery, but the pleasures of watching the elephants eat or seeing the tomb where Heloise lay, though great, did not seem to be so very revealing of French “manners and customs.”

Though several guidebooks noted that it was considerably more practical for long-term visitors to contract with local cook-caterers, the capital’s restaurateurs were an attraction not to be missed.30 Filling the rooms of the city’s restaurants (or, at the very least, filling the pages of their memoirs with cribbed descriptions of those restaurants), these visitors spread the rumor of gastronomic marvels to many who would never taste them. In faraway London, where no one could even smell the delicious aromas billowing from Paris’s basement kitchen grates, readers inundated with what the London Magazine termed “these innumerable volumes of travel writing” still had time to devour four editions of Lady Morgan’s hastily assembled France and five editions of Thomas Raffles’s Letters During a Tour of Some Parts of France . . . in the Summer of 1817, learning from the latter of the French “fondness for publicity” and the “immensity” of Véry’s menu in a single chapter.31 From the United States there came far fewer visitors (on average, one thousand to Paris each year between 1815 and 1848, as opposed to the twelve thousand Britons who passed through the port of Calais in 1820 alone), but they too reacted to the French capital with stunned amazement and volumes of meandering, copious prose. Known beyond France via travelers’ accounts, and portrayed locally by the popular theater and the newspaper press, the restaurants of Paris moved to the center of nineteenth-century descriptions of that city, as- suming mythic proportions in the process. The Englishman John Barnes,

who traveled throughout France in 1815, brashly claimed that in the Palais Royal alone there were “an innumerable number of restaurateurs” — but how could that well-delimited city-center park really have been home to “innumerable” restaurants?33 Yet no matter how many (or how few) restaurants catered to Paris diners, their domain in novels, plays, press accounts, and travelers’ descriptions expanded to become nearly infinite.34 The capital’s most famous restaurants were within the financial reach of only a tiny fraction of the population, but they were in the view and imagination of all.