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By Root 1062 0

known restaurants emerged in the Middle East during the late tenth century. At roughly the same time, in Kaifeng, China, then its northern capital, a thriving arts culture led the way to theaters that served food, and soon after, stand-alone restaurants became a common place to eat. According to Marco Polo, restaurants specializing in many different types of food were abundant in 1260 in Hangchow, China. “There are noodle shops ... fish houses, restaurants serving vegetarian ‘temple’ food prepared in the style of Buddhist temples, places specializing in iced foods,” wrote James Trager of Polo’s culinary discoveries in The Food Chronology. “The restaurants have menus, and waiters carry orders in their heads, repeating them when they get to the kitchen and remembering who ordered what with absolute precision (mistakes are severely punished).” As with the arts the popularity of restaurants may typically indicate a society’s prosperity. But in some cases, restaurants may have sprung from postdisaster situations. When fire swept through Edo, Japan, in 1657, market stands and prepared-food shops that previously sold food under takeout conditions were rebuilt as shops where patrons could sit down to eat.

The restaurant emerged in the Western world sometime around 1766, in Paris. At this time, a restaurant was not a place to eat, but a nourishing consomme or broth served to those in poor health, or to those who wanted to boost their well-being (hence the root word restore). French law stated that these broths or tonics could be served only by businesses that specialized in them, following similar laws at the time that restricted bakers from selling anything other than breads and pastries, butchers from selling anything but meats—essentially, to each artisan his own trade.

Most credit the development of the restaurant in Europe to a restaurateur in Paris at this time named Boulanger, who, according to legend, was sued by a guild of cook-caterers for serving mutton with white sauce to customers instead of a traditional restaurant. The case is said to have gone to the French high court; some say that he won it, others that he lost. Either way, history was made in its course. However, according to Rebecca L. Spang in her book The Invention of the Restaurant, historical evidence of such a case is unfounded. Rather, the first restaurant was the brainchild of an intellectual and sometimes banker named Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau.

The portrait of Roze de Chantoiseau that Spang paints is of a defiant, youthfully zealous, “lesser genius” of the eighteenth century. Driven by a desire shared by most intellectuals of his era to bolster Paris’s economy and reputation, he tried and failed at several schemes to improve the city’s banking infrastructure. But the two concepts that he did manage to establish were truly lasting. The first, in an effort to welcome and inform commercial travelers in Paris, was the earliest predecessor of what we might now call the Michelin Guide, which Roze de Chantoiseau published. His Almanac Royale listed the names and current addresses of all the most desirable wholesalers, merchants, bankers, courtiers, artists, and artisans in the country. (It was updated in numerous later editions.) The second was the restaurant as we know it.

When Roze de Chantoiseau opened his own salle du restaurant in 1766, he stretched the definition of the eponymous menu item by expanding his offerings to “exclusively those foods that either maintain or reestablish health.” At a time when science, particularly that concerning the health of the body, was in vogue, his enterprise straddled two elite concerns: the pursuit of optimum physical health and a burgeoning fascination with cuisine. The idea behind his salle du restaurant, according to Roze de Chantoiseau, was to “improve Paris life by freeing the fastidious traveler of the need to depend on an unknown, and potentially unreliable, innkeeper or cook-caterer.” In other words, the first restaurant served only medicinal foods to ward off sicknesses garnered from what we might refer