Overview

"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 to these questions, 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--about 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."

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Reviews

"""Elisabeth Lagelee's narration of this audiobook is just right. Raised in Paris, she brings the sound and sensibility that this very Paris-influenced text needs...Adam Gopnik's foreword provides a fine contemporary frame to see how these private dining experiences (some very private indeed) became public reflections of French gastronomy."" -- ""AudioFile"" ""Witty and full of fascinating details."" -- ""Los Angeles Times"""

Author Information

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. Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1986. He has published many books including Paris to the Moon. He lives in New York City. Elisabeth Lagelée is an in-demand narrator with a background in film and stage acting.

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