The Invention of the Restaurant

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Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating to be an enjoyable leisure activity or even a serious pastime? To find the answer to these questions, we must accompany Rebecca Spang back to France in the 18th century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a thing to eat: a quasi-medicinal bouillon that formed an essential element of pre-Revolutionary France's nouvelle cuisine. This is a book, about the French revolution in taste and of the table - a book about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, thereby changing their own social life and that of the world.