Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
The Invention of the Restaurant (2nd Edition)  By  cover art

The Invention of the Restaurant (2nd Edition)

By: Rebecca L. Spang, Adam Gopnik - foreword
Narrated by: Elisabeth Lagelee
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $16.99

Buy for $16.99

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today.

This is a book about the French revolution in taste—bout how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing the social life of the world in the process. We see how over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic state to transform restaurants yet again, this time conferring star status upon oysters and champagne.

©2000 the President and Fellows of Harvard College; Foreword and Preface copyright 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2023 Tantor

What listeners say about The Invention of the Restaurant (2nd Edition)

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.