Rebecca L. Spang is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard).
Spang has written an ambitious, thought-changing book. Until now,
most restaurant history was pop history, filled with canned
‘Eureka!’ moments and arch legend-making… Spang’s book is an
example of the new ‘niche’ history, and, like the best of such
books, it is rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true
stories about the making of familiar things.
*New Yorker*
[A] pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant… How has [the]
restaurant ritual come to be? And why does it have this form? Such
questions are now familiar in works of cultural and social
history…[but] Spang adds to the genre without falling prey to its
jargon.
*New York Times*
This prize-winning academic historical study is a lively,
engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know
it developed… Rebecca Spang is consistently perceptive about the
semiotics of her theme, and as generous in her helpings of
historical detail as any glutton could wish.
*The Times*
No more fables about ancien régime chefs, whose aristo patrons had
been guillotined or exiled in the French Revolution…an end to those
anecdotes about their invention of dishes broiled on a breastplate
on some Napoleonic battlefield. Because Spang reveals the
restaurant’s first true author: Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau,
‘friend of all the world,’ an entrepreneur who edited an annual
business directory in which he recommended himself as the ‘king’s
restauranteur’ and founder of the first ‘house of health.’
*The Guardian*
Rebecca Spang explodes a culinary myth that has lasted nearly two
hundred years.
*London Review of Books*
Almost every page of this decidedly scholarly though highly
readable book gave me something to think about: the origins of
restaurant reviewing in the early years of the 19th century, the
way in which other Europeans came to identify the restaurant with
the essence of French-ness itself, or the fact that in French one
word—carte—does double duty for both menu and map.
*Boston Sunday Globe*
The perfect book for a time of year that celebrates, among other
things, food. Historian Rebecca Spang begins with an inspired
question: Why are there restaurants? To answer this, she takes the
reader back a couple of centuries to France, when a restaurant was
actually a thing to eat and not a place to go. Her well-researched,
compelling book deservedly won several awards.
*Globe and Mail*
Readers hungry for mouth-watering accounts of sumptuous meals or
paeans to the glories of French cuisine will not find them here.
Spang’s focus is on the restaurant as an institution, and her
history pretty much ends in the mid-19th century. Spang is far more
interested in viewing restaurants in a wider social, political, and
historical context. Her book is well…argued, dryly witty, and full
of fascinating details.
*Los Angeles Times*
Spang writes entertainingly, with a keen sense of humor and with no
great reverence for her subject. It is a refreshing contrast to
much of the overwritten adulation of restaurants that passes for
criticism today.
*Newark Star-Ledger*
The title of Rebecca L. Spang’s scholarly yet highly accessible
social history, The Invention of the Restaurant, causes a small
jolt of surprise. For people who eat out so often that boiling a
pot of spaghetti at home is a special occasion, a world without
restaurants is hard to imagine. We realize, at some level, that
they have not always been here, but few of us could say who
invented them, or when… Much of this information is ignored in the
standard food histories, and Spang’s excavation of it makes for
interesting reading, particularly because the French Revolution and
its aftermath would change restaurants almost beyond recognition,
into something very like the places where we go out to eat
today.
*Salon*
Spang presents her story as an excursive and discursive feast,
seasons it with wit and gentle irony, lards it with cameos,
quotations, and illustrations. Her appetizing message is served
with a deft touch.
*American Historical Review*
Why do restaurants exist? Why do we go to restaurants? Reading
Rebecca Spang’s Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern
Gastronomic Culture does not directly answer these questions on a
personal level, but it does, with many insights, help illuminate
the history and sociology of eating out… Spang’s book, while
thoroughly researched, is highly readable and enjoyable. This
French Revolution of the table will obviously interest amateurs and
professionals of culinary topics. I would argue, though, that the
book should intrigue even more many readers with no knowledge or
particular love of the kitchen. Because every chapter is well
introduced and focuses on a particular aspect of the restaurant,
such varied fields of study as sociology, history, economy,
science, literature, and law find their place. As a result, the
book will appeal to many types of readers including undergraduates
and graduates. Of special interest is the way Spang considers the
public-and-private-sphere debate as well as her unique approach of
the French Revolution. Her analysis is accomplished in great
detail—starting with the various definitions of the evolution of
the word ‘restaurant’—and includes many frontspieces, caricatures,
and copious notes. Finally, Spang’s book is an engaging portrait
and a serious but accessible tool for understanding the
metamorphosis of the emerging modern French society. The Invention
of the Restaurant deserves to be read by all.
*Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews Online*
By focusing on the development of gastronomy as a discourse, and by
analyzing that discourse’s constitutive claims to autonomy, Spang
offers a more nuanced understanding of what makes her study
important and new, if not revolutionary… With its engaging prose
style and its judicious use of both scholarly apparatus and
illustrations, the book is reminiscent of the work of John Brewer
and Simon Schama (not coincidentally, since the latter was Spang’s
thesis director). Offering both a detailed history of the emergence
of the restaurant and an introduction to the major cultural and
political movements of the revolutionary era, The Invention of the
Restaurant spans the period from 1770 to about 1840.
*Eighteenth-Century Studies*
It is by now hardly necessary to point out that this is an
excellent book. Rebecca Spang’s Invention of the Restaurant well
deserves the prizes and enthusiastic reviews it has garnered from
both academic and non-academic sources since its appearance in
2000. The reasons for these successes are easy to discern. Spang’s
book is delightful to read, beautifully constructed and concerned
with a topic of immediate appeal: how and why was the restaurant
invented? …A splendid work showing considerable erudition and great
narrative talent. I look forward to reading Spang’s next
publication.
*French History*
This is a book that works on a number of different levels. There is
meat and drink here for those interested in the metaphysical and
metaphorical aspects of eating; a wealth of erudition on some
relatively little studied aspects of Enlightenment culture and the
French Revolution; and those scholars of the period who follow
convention in regarding the rise of the French restaurant as
epiphenomenon of the French Revolution, a well presented challenge
to their account.
*Radical Philosophy*
Spang chronicles these developments [in the history of restaurants]
in a tasty work, which is about far more than food.
*Harvard Magazine*
Spang traces [the] history [of restaurants] and challenges the
traditional gastronomic narrative of dining out in the French
capital… Spang’s work should appeal to readers seriously interested
in the social and intellectual history of dining out.
*Booklist*
A deeply gratifying social history of the Parisian public food
world, as multilayered and earthy as pot-au-feu, for all its
scholarship, as agreeably informal as a bistro.
*Kirkus Reviews*
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