The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, 2nd edition

by Rebecca L. Spang, Adam Gopnik Narrated by Elisabeth Lagelee

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

June 2023 - AudioFile

Elisabeth Lagelee's narration of this audiobook is just right. Raised in Paris, she brings the sound and sensibility that this very Paris-influenced text needs. Her lovely voice and musical delivery of French words and phrases elevate this detailed and meticulously researched dive into the eighteenth century, when the first eating places were established. Spang used travel journals, medical treatises, and plays to create this cultural history. She says restaurants were defined by waiters, mirrors, and menus. She expertly traces how restaurants came to have an outsized influence on French life. Adam Gopnik's foreword provides a fine contemporary frame to see how these private dining experiences (some very private indeed) became public reflections of French gastronomy. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

June 2023 - AudioFile

Elisabeth Lagelee's narration of this audiobook is just right. Raised in Paris, she brings the sound and sensibility that this very Paris-influenced text needs. Her lovely voice and musical delivery of French words and phrases elevate this detailed and meticulously researched dive into the eighteenth century, when the first eating places were established. Spang used travel journals, medical treatises, and plays to create this cultural history. She says restaurants were defined by waiters, mirrors, and menus. She expertly traces how restaurants came to have an outsized influence on French life. Adam Gopnik's foreword provides a fine contemporary frame to see how these private dining experiences (some very private indeed) became public reflections of French gastronomy. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176731965
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	04/11/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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