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The Invention of the Restaurant : Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Harvard Historical Studies)
The Invention of the Restaurant Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture - Harvard Historical Studies Author:Rebecca L. Spang Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Prize of Harvard University Press At its heart, The Invention of the Restaurant is a book about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, thereby changing their own social life and that of the world. ... more » "As Spang points out, most books tell the same story of the restaurant's first steps: After the Revolution, the cooks of French aristocrats were out of work…With nowhere to go but the streets, they opened cafés and started selling in public what before you could get only in private. Willy-nilly, the modern restaurant came into existence … Spang proves that this is all wrong … A restaurant, it turns out, was a thing to eat before it was a place to go … Spang's book is an example of the new 'niche' history, and, like the best of such books, it is rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories about the making of familiar things." —Adam Gopnik, New Yorker "No more fables about ancien régime chefs, whose aristo patrons had been guillotined or exiled in the French Revolution … Spang reveals the restaurant's first true author … [and] revivifies [him] through her fab book's droll humor." —Vera Rule, Guardian« less