Adam Gopnik - The Table Comes First

A clutch of scholars, many of them, interestingly, women, have in the past decade or so proved the expelled-from-Eden myth all wrong. (Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Rebecca Spang, and Rosemary Trubek have all figured in this work, and so has the British historian Giles Macdonogh.) The invention of the restaurant, it turns out, predates the revolution by at least twenty years, and chefs being out of work had nothing to do with it. (The nobles’ cooks were more like head butlers than like chefs in any case, and most stayed loyal to their old bosses after the fighting started.) The old story goes that the essential ways of cooking and practice already existed behind château doors but were democratized when chefs entered the ungilded world. But in truth the cooking they did wasn’t anything like the new cooking of the restaurants. Carême, though a great figure in his way, as a writer and provider, belongs more truly to the history of catering.

So then why did it happen? The birth was philosophical, before it was circumstantial; men’s minds changed before their palates. It was a threefold affair. There were intellectual causes for the spread of the restaurant (reasons of the mind), commercial causes (reasons of merchandising), and sentimental causes (reasons of morality). All of them, of course, were, as real reasons must be, intertwined and interlarded. The reasons of the mind have to do with a new cult of health and simplicity; the reasons of merchandising have to do with a new site of commerce, the Palais Royal, and the birth of the modern street store there; the reasons of morality have to do with a breakdown of a neat caste hierarchy already long under way before the revolution—the neat thing about the restaurant was that anyone with a sou to pay can buy his meal. Along with the new social model came a new belief that appetite, the animal part of man, could be refined and civilized but need not in the end be remade. Brillat-Savarin thought that the purpose of dining well was to turn mere needs into desires, animal appetite into educated taste. But he didn’t think that appetites ought to be “purified” or “reformed.” There is no Year Zero at the table. The pig persists in spite of every effort to give him wings.

The restaurant, it turns out, was a thing to eat before it was a place to go. “Restaurant,” appearing around 1750, was the new name for bouillon, a chicken or beef broth. At that time, if you wanted to eat out in Paris you had to go to a table d’hôte. This was a big public table where you took what was being served, a little like a tavern or an eating house in London. As you ate, you were expected to talk and joke and kid around with the other people at the table, including the host. (You can still eat in a modernized, à la carte version of this style at a few places in Paris: Polidor, the crémerie on the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, has a menu, but it has large common tables, one or two daily plats, and individual napkin drawers.) This could be fun, but if the guy next to you at the table d’hôte was drunk and beery you were stuck, and if you were in the mood for chicken and only veal roast was being served you were stuck, too. If you were a woman, you couldn’t go at all.

People who didn’t like the tables d’hôte because of the company started to say that they didn’t like them because they made you sick when you ate there. This was doubtless not true, or not true often, but it didn’t matter. Health scares usually are haloed by habit. Every panic has its profit-seeker, though, and someone was around to exploit this one; in the same spirit in which egg-white omelets and frozen-yogurt stands appeared in New York a couple of decades ago, places appeared in Paris offering healthy broth cooked in clean kettles—restaurants.

The soup gave its name to the shop. The restaurant started offering a whole range of health food, in an entirely new type of place. The hero of this invention, if not quite singular enough to deserve the name of inventor, was an amazing character named Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau. Chantoiseau was a philosophical entrepreneur of the kind who seem to have filled Paris right before the revolution, and might even have prevented it had they been given enough room to act. He started off as a financier, with a hard-to-follow but interesting scheme to float the calamitous French national debt, essentially by letting merchants of luxury goods print their own money. When nobody went for it, he put together the first almanac of artisans, inventors, and luxury merchants—the first real guidebook to the good life—and shrewdly listed himself as the first “restaurateur.”

It was Chantoiseau’s establishment, on the Rue Saint-Honoré, that turned the restaurant from a place where you went to get well into a place where you went to have a good time. Chantoiseau’s restaurant and the others like it that soon clustered around the Palais Royal became places where you could go when you wanted to and eat what you wanted to eat, choosing from a limited but reasonably long list of dishes, sit at your own table with your own friends, and tell yourself you were doing it for your health. Doctors even let women go to restaurants. This was, perhaps, the single greatest revolution the restaurant wrought: under the pretext of health, women could come alone to an open social theater.

One by one, all the other things we associate with restaurants—menus, uniformed waiters, mirrored walls—were established, all with an eye to creating a public place that felt like home, and if not your home then the home of somebody richer, with better servants. “Some twenty years after they were first established, restaurants no longer specialized in providing delicately healthful soups to a genteelly weak-chested clientele but in catering to individual tastes. While the traiteur fed large groups, the restaurateur offered single servings and small, intimate tables,” the historian Rebecca Spang writes. As Diderot noted, writing of Roze’s restaurant, ‘Everybody eats alone there….’ ” The restaurateur invited his guest to sit at his or her own table, to consult his or her own needs and desires, to concentrate on that most fleeting sense: taste.

The restaurant soon sprouted a larger halo of virtue. New restaurants were made under the influence of or, at least, alert to the talk of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s cult of nature, of sincerity and simplicity, which, ironically, affected aristocrats as much as radicals—so that its greatest monuments are the Petit Trianon for Marie Antoinette (who was handed her head) and the Cult of the Supreme Being, the religion invented by Robespierre (who handed it to her). In his New Heloise , Rousseau sentimentally imagines a peasant harvest of the wine grapes. “You cannot conceive with what zeal, with what gaiety, it all is done; we sing, we laugh all day, and work has never gone better. All live in the greatest familiarity, everyone equal and no one overlooked…. One eats with appetite the peasant soup, a little raw and rude, but good, healthy and filled with fine vegetables!”

So it was that on a smaller, edible scale, the new cooking of the restaurant, far from offering fancy dishes you couldn’t have at home, offered plain food that you couldn’t forage for yourself, raw and rude but good and healthy. Jean François Vacossin, the second restaurateur in France, promised “Breton porridge, orange-flower-flavored rice creams, semolina, fresh eggs… fruits in season, preserves from the most famous manufacturers, fresh butter and cream cheese.” This nouvelle cuisine, as it was called, was hard to define, but everybody agreed that the food was simpler than the old food, was good for you, and was eaten only by the best people—as nouvelle cuisine always is. In a document dated to 1739, the “Letter of an English Pastry maker to a new French cook”—the Englishman(!) already summons the French cook back to primal simplicity. We greedy eaters are always being summoned back to primal simplicity, as women in vogue are always being called back to classic fashion. (No one recalls that five years ago the shorter skirt was classic, too.)