List: $19.99
| Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99
The Invention of the Restaurant
Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, 2nd edition
Author: Rebecca L. Spang, Adam Gopnik
Narrator: Elisabeth Lagelee
Unabridged: 12 hr 20 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: 04/11/2023
Categories: Nonfiction, Travel, Restaurants, History, Historiography
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.
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.
