The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastron...
Spang, Rebecca L. / Gopnik, Adam / Lagelee, Elisabeth 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 to these questions, 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 mode...