Public eateries are so ubiquitous it may not occur to most of us that the restaurant has a unique history, intimately tied to debates about aristocracy and democracy, public affairs, and private life in the era surrounding the French Revolution. Spang traces this history and challenges the traditional gastronomic narrative of dining out in the French capital. Before the Revolution, a restaurant was a restorative bouillon; those who went to restaurateurs' rooms were flaunting their delicacy. During the Revolution, fraternal banquets that ignored social distinctions were an ideal, which the hospitality of restaurateurs sometimes seemed to approximate. By Napoleon's rise to power, the regime separated pleasure from policing, fashion from ideology, and individual taste from communitarian truth. In this era, gastronomy ruled; restaurants remained public places but were no longer political arenas. Spang's work should appeal to readers seriously interested in the social and intellectual history of dining out. 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.

Introduction: to Make a Restaurant -- The Friend of All the World -- The Nouvelle Cuisine of Rousseauian sensibility -- Private Appetites in a Public Space -- Morality Equality Hospitality! -- Fixed prices: Gluttony and the French Revolution -- From Gastromania to Gastronomy -- Putting Paris on the Menu -- Hiding in Restaurants -- Epilogue: Restaurants and Reverie.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-315) and index.