Dining out: how the French revolutionised the restaurant industry.

Inspired by the Supersizers Eat...the French Revolution, Sonya Lipczynska looks at the origins of the restaurant.

Last week on The Supersizers Eat... (BBC2 for anyone who's interested), Sue Perkins and Giles Coren lived for a week in eighteenth century France, sampling the food on offer from Louis XVI's gargantuan 'snacks', to peasant fare which seems mostly to have been bread so hard I'm sure some of it was used as a weapon during the attack on the Bastille prison. One of the interesting tidbits of information was that the modern restaurant was born during this period. Intrigued I fired up Google to find out more...

As it turns out, the Western world seems to have been rather slow on the uptake when it came to eating out. 11th century China was serving up dishes in communal eating houses long before anyone in the UK thought this might be a good idea. The Song Dynasty Chinese seem to have been discerning and demanding customers. Jacques Gernet, author of Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion 1250-1276, noted that, ‘As soon as the customers have chosen where they will sit, they are asked what they want to have. The people of Hangchow are very difficult to please. Hundreds of orders are given on all sides: this person wants something hot, another something cold, a third something tepid, a fourth something chilled; one wants cooked food, another raw, another chooses roast, another grill.…’ Elsewhere Islamic Spain had restaurants regularly serving up three course dinners. Although over here, food and lodgings were always available for travellers, people in Britain didn’t tend to stroll down to the Frog and Gallows for a bite to eat before going to see a hanging, or pelting the unfortunates languishing in the stocks.

The revolution of 1789 was a catalyst for the boom in the restaurant industry in France; although as Nicholas Kiefer points out in his 2002 article in Cornell Restaurant and Hotel Administration Quarterly, there were eateries of various shapes and sizes almost a hundred years before the revolution took place: The first cafes were established in Marseille during the seventeenth century which may have been as a result of its trading links with the old North African French colonies. After this, café society both in France and Britain flourished during the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment as intellectuals and literary types flocked to the coffee houses to rub shoulders and engage in discussion. As well as coffee and chocolate, these establishments also served fruit, jams, sorbets and liqueurs.

The revolution galvanised this café culture into something more formal, not least because the chefs of the Ancient Regime who had spent their time in service to a single master suddenly found themselves out of work. Opening restaurants and cooking for a new kind of customer seemed the logical thing to do. Early restaurants were not allowed to sell anything more challenging that restorative broths (hence the evolution of the word ‘restaurant’), but soon it became clear that providing individual table service and a choice of dishes would be far more profitable.

Things were not easy during this turbulent time: several chefs from former aristocratic houses were persecuted for their perceived traitorous beliefs and a couple were guillotined. With the denunciation and death of Robespierre however, restaurants were more popular than ever as the people of France lost themselves in an orgy of frivolity and freedom after the restrictions of the previous regime. Restaurants themselves were ornately decorated, menus contained a plethora of dishes presented in several different ways. By the beginning of the nineteenth century there were over 2,000 restaurants in Paris alone.

Despite the shockingly revolutionary activities over the channel, London society was wild for all things Parisian, so it is not surprising that restaurant culture in the UK also expanded at this time. In 1810, an entrepreneur named Sake Dean Mahomed established the first Indian take-away, the Hindoostanee Coffee House in George Street., although this proved unsuccessful. There was also Rules, London’s oldest restaurant which was founded in 1798 as an oyster bar and still serves authentic British food today including game, puddings and pies. Anxious to get in on the act, in the United States Jullien's Restarator opened in Boston in 1794.

The French Revolution is one of the bloodiest and furthest reaching periods in history, yet was a political and cultural turning point in European history. So whether dining al fresco, popping out for a pre-theatre steak, or tucking into a KFC turkey twizzler, we have Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety to thank for unwittingly causing the start of the restaurant and hospitality industry as we know it today.


Kiefer, N.M. (2002) 'Economics and the Origin of the Restaurant', Cornell Restaurant and Hotel Administration Quarterly http://www.arts.cornell.edu/econ/kiefer/Restaurant.PDF