Lecture 28: First Restaurants, Chefs, and Gastronomy
of dishes, especially exotic dishes. Their specialty was still the
restorative medicinal soup, but they also had impeccably dressed
waiters and a wine cellar. Beauvilliers charged a fortune at his
restaurant, and he set the tone for restaurants to come. In 1789, at the time of the French Revolution, scores of aristocrats
fl ed the nation or had their heads removed with a guillotine,
including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Suddenly, all of
the professional chefs working for aristocrats were out of work.
While this is not the origin of the restaurant, it certainly added to
the number of restaurants. The French Revolution abolished the guild system, meaning that
anyone could practice in any trade he or she wanted—which is very
nearly free trade. People could now open an establishment serving
whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, and that’s exactly
what chefs did. In the very late 18th century and early 19th century, the restaurant as
we know it was invented in Paris. Why the restaurants succeeded
has a lot to do with the affl uent bourgeois class, the people who
now have political enfranchisement and are doing very well in
business. These factory owners, merchants, and bankers suddenly
have a lot of money to spend. They are the perfect customers for
this new establishment because they’re busy, and just as in Japan a
century or so earlier, there’s a thriving, inventive restaurant culture
that springs up to serve them. These establishments also serve food in distinct courses. Traditional
aristocratic dining (called service à la Française), which involved
bringing everything out at once, isn’t really possible in a restaurant,
where people come in and are seated at different times and order
different things. Instead, the pattern of service that emerges (called
service à la Russe) is that the variety of dishes comes out in a
strict order.