Chronicle No. 15 · History

The Restaurant Was a Bowl of Broth Before It Was a Room

The famous Monsieur Boulanger appears in no archive. What really created the restaurant was soup, a private table and a printed price.

Every hospitality student learns the story. In 1765 a Parisian named Boulanger hung a sign over his soup shop, sold sheep's feet in sauce, was taken to court by the caterers' guild, and won. The first restaurant.

The historian Rebecca Spang went looking for him in the police reports, the guild records and the notarial documents of eighteenth-century Paris. She found no Boulanger, and no trace of the famous lawsuit.

What she found instead is better. The word restaurant first meant a thing you consumed, not a place you went: a restorative broth, sold to people of delicate constitution. The rooms that served it were credited in their own day to Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, an Enlightenment projector who from the late 1760s promoted them alongside his business directory of Paris.

The revolution was in the terms of trade. Before this, eating out meant the table d'hôte: a communal board, one menu, one sitting, at the host's hour. The restaurant offered:

Grandeur arrived with Antoine Beauvilliers, whose establishment dates from around 1782. Brillat-Savarin, writing in Physiologie du goût in 1825, judged him the first to combine an elegant room, well-trained waiters, a fine cellar and a superior kitchen. The French Revolution then emptied aristocratic households and sent their chefs into the city to trade for themselves.

One survivor makes the point. The Café de Chartres, opened in the Palais-Royal arcades in 1784, is still serving dinner as Le Grand Véfour.

The restaurant was not invented by a cook. It was invented by a change in how a stranger was allowed to buy a meal.

“He was the first to have an elegant dining room, handsome well-trained waiters, a fine cellar, and a superior kitchen”

Lesson: The innovation that changes an industry is rarely the food; it is usually the terms on which the guest is allowed to buy it.

The Palais-Royal, its galleries and garden, in a late eighteenth-century engraving. The arcades became the cradle of Parisian restaurant culture.
The Palais-Royal, its galleries and garden, in a late eighteenth-century engraving. The arcades became the cradle of Parisian restaurant culture. — Wikimedia Commons · Joseph Varin, after Louis-Nicolas de Lespinasse · CC0
Inside Le Grand Véfour, which opened in the Palais-Royal as the Café de Chartres in 1784.
Inside Le Grand Véfour, which opened in the Palais-Royal as the Café de Chartres in 1784. — Wikimedia Commons · Zairon · CC BY-SA 4.0
The title page and portrait of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose Physiologie du goût devoted a chapter to restaurants.
The title page and portrait of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose Physiologie du goût devoted a chapter to restaurants. — Wikimedia Commons · Unknown author · Public domain