Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
|
by Reay Tannahill
|
Food: The History of Taste (California Studies in Food and Culture) by Paul Freedman |
All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present by Stephen Mennell |
Food Is Culture (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History) by Professor Massimo Montanari |
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
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, a lecturer in modern European history at University College^-London, 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. Mary Carroll --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
Almost every page of this decidedly scholarly though highly readable book gave me something to think about: the origins of restaurant reviewing in the early years of the 19th century, the way in which other Europeans came to identify the restaurant with the essence of French-ness itself, or the fact that in French one word--carte--does double duty for both menu and map.
--Michael Gora (Boston Sunday Globe 20021201)
Spang writes entertainingly, with a keen sense of humor and with no great reverence for her subject. It is a refreshing contrast to much of the overwritten adulation of restaurants that passes for criticism today.
--Roger Harris (Newark Star-Ledger )
Spang has written an ambitious, thought-changing book. Until now, most restaurant history was pop history, filled with canned "Eureka!" moments and arch legend-making...Spang's book is an example of the new "niche" history, and, like the best of such books, it is rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories about the making of familiar things.
--Adam Gopnik (New Yorker )
No more fables about ancien régime chefs, whose aristo patrons had been guillotined or exiled in the French Revolution...an end to those anecdotes about their invention of dishes broiled on a breastplate on some Napoleonic battlefield. Because Spang reveals the restaurant's first true author: Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, "friend of all the world," an entrepreneur who edited an annual business directory in which he recommended himself as the "king's restauranteur" and founder of the first "house of health."
--Vera Rule (The Guardian )
[A] pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant...How has [the] restaurant ritual come to be? And why does it have this form? Such questions are now familiar in works of cultural and social history...[but] Spang adds to the genre without falling prey to its jargon.
--Edward Rothstein (New York Times )
This prize-winning academic historical study is a lively, engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it developed...Rebecca Spang is consistently perceptive about the semiotics of her theme, and as generous in her helpings of historical detail as any glutton could wish. (The Times )
Rebecca Spang explodes a culinary myth that has lasted nearly two hundred years.
--Margaret Visser (London Review of Books )
This is a book that works on a number of different levels. There is meat and drink here for those interested in the metaphysical and metaphorical aspects of eating; a wealth of erudition on some relatively little studied aspects of Enlightenment culture and the French Revolution; and those scholars of the period who follow convention in regarding the rise of the French restaurant as epiphenomenon of the French Revolution, a well presented challenge to their account.
--Kate Soper (Radical Philosophy )
The title of Rebecca L. Spang's scholarly yet highly accessible social history, The Invention of the Restaurant causes a small jolt of surprise. For people who eat out so often that boiling a pot of spaghetti at home is a special occasion, a world without restaurants is hard to imagine. We realize, at some level, that they have not always been here, but few of us could say who invented them, or when...Much of this information is ignored in the standard food histories, and Spang's excavation of it makes for interesting reading, particularly because the French Revolution and its aftermath would change restaurants almost beyond recognition, into something very like the places where we go out to eat today.
--Pete Wells (Salon.com )
Readers hungry for mouth-watering accounts of sumptuous meals or paeans to the glories of French cuisine will not find them here. Spang's focus is on the restaurant as an institution, and her history pretty much ends in the mid-19th century. Spang is far more interested in viewing restaurants in a wider social, political and historical context. Her book is well...argued, dryly witty and full of fascinating details.
--Merle Rubin (Los Angeles Times )
Spang chronicles these developments [in the history of restaurants] in a tasty work, which is about far more than food. (Harvard Magazine )
Spang traces [the] history [of restaurants] and challenges the traditional gastronomic narrative of dining out in the French capital...Spang's work should appeal to readers seriously interested in the social and intellectual history of dining out.
--Mary Carroll (Booklist )
A deeply gratifying social history of the Parisian public food world, as multilayered and earthy as pot-au-feu, for all its scholarship, as agreeably informal as a bistro. (Kirkus Reviews )
Spang presents her story as an excursive and discursive feast, seasons it with wit and gentle irony, lards it with cameos, quotations, and illustrations. Her appetizing message is served wtih a deft touch.
--Eugen Weber (American Historical Review )
The perfect book for a time of year that celebrates, among other things, food. Historian Rebecca Spang begins with an inspired question: Why are there restaurants? To answer this, she takes the reader back a couple of centuries to France, when a restaurant was actually a thing to eat and not a place to go. Her well-researched, compelling book deservedly won several awards. (Globe and Mail )
It is by now hardly necessary to point out that this is an excellent book. Rebecca Spang's Invention of the Restaurant well deserves the prizes and enthusiastic reviews it has garnered from both academic and non-academic sources since its appearance in 2000. The reasons for these successes are easy to discern. Spang's book is delightful to read, beautifully constructed and concerned with a topic of immediate appeal: how and why was the restaurant invented?...A splendid work showing considerable erudition and great narrative talent. I look forward to reading Spang's next publication.
--Rebecca Earle (French History )
By focusing on the development of gastronomy as a discourse, and by analyzing that discourse's constitutive claims to autonomy, Spang offers a more nuanced understanding of what makes her study important and new, if not revolutionary…With its engaging prose style and its judicious use of both scholarly apparatus and illustrations, the book is reminiscent of the work of John Brewer and Simon Schama (not coincidentally, since the latter was Spang's thesis director). Offering both a detailed history of the emergence of the restaurant and an introduction to the major cultural and political movements of the revolutionary era, The Invention of the Restaurant spans the period from 1770 to about 1840.
--Jody Greene (Eighteenth-Century Studies )
Why do restaurants exist? Why do we go to restaurants? Reading Rebecca Spang's Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture does not directly answer these questions on a personal level, but it does, with many insights, help illuminate the history and sociology of eating out...Spang's book, while thoroughly researched, is highly readable and enjoyable. This French Revolution of the table will obviously interest amateurs and professionals of culinary topics. I would argue, though, that the book should intrigue even more many readers with no knowledge or particular love of the kitchen. Because every chapter is well introduced and focuses on a particular aspect of the restaurant, such varied fields of study as sociology, history, economy, science, literature, and law find their place. As a result, the book will appeal to many types of readers including undergraduates and graduates. Of special interest is the way Spang considers the public-and-private-sphere debate as well as her unique approach of the French Revolution. Her analysis is accomplished in great detail--starting with the various definitions of the evolution of the word "restaurant"--and includes many frontspieces, caricatures, and copious notes. Finally, Spang's book is an engaging portrait and a serious but accessible tool for understanding the metamorphosis of the emerging modern French society. The Invention of the Restaurant deserves to be read by all.
--Veronique Olivier-Wallis (Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews Online )
See all Editorial Reviews
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, a lecturer in modern European history at University College^-London, 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. Mary Carroll --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
Almost every page of this decidedly scholarly though highly readable book gave me something to think about: the origins of restaurant reviewing in the early years of the 19th century, the way in which other Europeans came to identify the restaurant with the essence of French-ness itself, or the fact that in French one word--carte--does double duty for both menu and map.
--Michael Gora (Boston Sunday Globe 20021201)
Spang writes entertainingly, with a keen sense of humor and with no great reverence for her subject. It is a refreshing contrast to much of the overwritten adulation of restaurants that passes for criticism today.
--Roger Harris (Newark Star-Ledger )
Spang has written an ambitious, thought-changing book. Until now, most restaurant history was pop history, filled with canned "Eureka!" moments and arch legend-making...Spang's book is an example of the new "niche" history, and, like the best of such books, it is rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories about the making of familiar things.
--Adam Gopnik (New Yorker )
No more fables about ancien régime chefs, whose aristo patrons had been guillotined or exiled in the French Revolution...an end to those anecdotes about their invention of dishes broiled on a breastplate on some Napoleonic battlefield. Because Spang reveals the restaurant's first true author: Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, "friend of all the world," an entrepreneur who edited an annual business directory in which he recommended himself as the "king's restauranteur" and founder of the first "house of health."
--Vera Rule (The Guardian )
[A] pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant...How has [the] restaurant ritual come to be? And why does it have this form? Such questions are now familiar in works of cultural and social history...[but] Spang adds to the genre without falling prey to its jargon.
--Edward Rothstein (New York Times )
This prize-winning academic historical study is a lively, engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it developed...Rebecca Spang is consistently perceptive about the semiotics of her theme, and as generous in her helpings of historical detail as any glutton could wish. (The Times )
Rebecca Spang explodes a culinary myth that has lasted nearly two hundred years.
--Margaret Visser (London Review of Books )
This is a book that works on a number of different levels. There is meat and drink here for those interested in the metaphysical and metaphorical aspects of eating; a wealth of erudition on some relatively little studied aspects of Enlightenment culture and the French Revolution; and those scholars of the period who follow convention in regarding the rise of the French restaurant as epiphenomenon of the French Revolution, a well presented challenge to their account.
--Kate Soper (Radical Philosophy )
The title of Rebecca L. Spang's scholarly yet highly accessible social history, The Invention of the Restaurant causes a small jolt of surprise. For people who eat out so often that boiling a pot of spaghetti at home is a special occasion, a world without restaurants is hard to imagine. We realize, at some level, that they have not always been here, but few of us could say who invented them, or when...Much of this information is ignored in the standard food histories, and Spang's excavation of it makes for interesting reading, particularly because the French Revolution and its aftermath would change restaurants almost beyond recognition, into something very like the places where we go out to eat today.
--Pete Wells (Salon.com )
Readers hungry for mouth-watering accounts of sumptuous meals or paeans to the glories of French cuisine will not find them here. Spang's focus is on the restaurant as an institution, and her history pretty much ends in the mid-19th century. Spang is far more interested in viewing restaurants in a wider social, political and historical context. Her book is well...argued, dryly witty and full of fascinating details.
--Merle Rubin (Los Angeles Times )
Spang chronicles these developments [in the history of restaurants] in a tasty work, which is about far more than food. (Harvard Magazine )
Spang traces [the] history [of restaurants] and challenges the traditional gastronomic narrative of dining out in the French capital...Spang's work should appeal to readers seriously interested in the social and intellectual history of dining out.
--Mary Carroll (Booklist )
A deeply gratifying social history of the Parisian public food world, as multilayered and earthy as pot-au-feu, for all its scholarship, as agreeably informal as a bistro. (Kirkus Reviews )
Spang presents her story as an excursive and discursive feast, seasons it with wit and gentle irony, lards it with cameos, quotations, and illustrations. Her appetizing message is served wtih a deft touch.
--Eugen Weber (American Historical Review )
The perfect book for a time of year that celebrates, among other things, food. Historian Rebecca Spang begins with an inspired question: Why are there restaurants? To answer this, she takes the reader back a couple of centuries to France, when a restaurant was actually a thing to eat and not a place to go. Her well-researched, compelling book deservedly won several awards. (Globe and Mail )
It is by now hardly necessary to point out that this is an excellent book. Rebecca Spang's Invention of the Restaurant well deserves the prizes and enthusiastic reviews it has garnered from both academic and non-academic sources since its appearance in 2000. The reasons for these successes are easy to discern. Spang's book is delightful to read, beautifully constructed and concerned with a topic of immediate appeal: how and why was the restaurant invented?...A splendid work showing considerable erudition and great narrative talent. I look forward to reading Spang's next publication.
--Rebecca Earle (French History )
By focusing on the development of gastronomy as a discourse, and by analyzing that discourse's constitutive claims to autonomy, Spang offers a more nuanced understanding of what makes her study important and new, if not revolutionary…With its engaging prose style and its judicious use of both scholarly apparatus and illustrations, the book is reminiscent of the work of John Brewer and Simon Schama (not coincidentally, since the latter was Spang's thesis director). Offering both a detailed history of the emergence of the restaurant and an introduction to the major cultural and political movements of the revolutionary era, The Invention of the Restaurant spans the period from 1770 to about 1840.
--Jody Greene (Eighteenth-Century Studies )
Why do restaurants exist? Why do we go to restaurants? Reading Rebecca Spang's Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture does not directly answer these questions on a personal level, but it does, with many insights, help illuminate the history and sociology of eating out...Spang's book, while thoroughly researched, is highly readable and enjoyable. This French Revolution of the table will obviously interest amateurs and professionals of culinary topics. I would argue, though, that the book should intrigue even more many readers with no knowledge or particular love of the kitchen. Because every chapter is well introduced and focuses on a particular aspect of the restaurant, such varied fields of study as sociology, history, economy, science, literature, and law find their place. As a result, the book will appeal to many types of readers including undergraduates and graduates. Of special interest is the way Spang considers the public-and-private-sphere debate as well as her unique approach of the French Revolution. Her analysis is accomplished in great detail--starting with the various definitions of the evolution of the word "restaurant"--and includes many frontspieces, caricatures, and copious notes. Finally, Spang's book is an engaging portrait and a serious but accessible tool for understanding the metamorphosis of the emerging modern French society. The Invention of the Restaurant deserves to be read by all.
--Veronique Olivier-Wallis (Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews Online )
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):
(learn more)
guide des dîneurs, restorative bouillons, first restaurateurs, almanach des gourmands, grand couvert, gastronomic literature, fraternal meals, public cooks, new cookery, restaurant life, cabinets particuliers, restaurant culture, des tribunaux, nouvelle cuisine, guidebook writers, des estampes Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Roze de Chantoiseau, Palais Royal, Grimod de la Reynière, French Revolution, Putting Paris, Old Regime, July Monarchy, First Empire, Festival of Federation, National Convention, Rocher de Cancale, The Nouvelle Cuisine of Rousseauian Sensibility, Committee of Public Safety, Private Appetites, Trois Frères Provençaux, Champs de Mars, Grimod de la Rcynière, Henriette Sophie, Land of Cockaigne, Louis Philippe, Louis Sébastien Mercier, Paris Parlement, Sainte Ménéhould, Café de Paris, Constituent Assembly New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
guide des dîneurs, restorative bouillons, first restaurateurs, almanach des gourmands, grand couvert, gastronomic literature, fraternal meals, public cooks, new cookery, restaurant life, cabinets particuliers, restaurant culture, des tribunaux, nouvelle cuisine, guidebook writers, des estampes Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Roze de Chantoiseau, Palais Royal, Grimod de la Reynière, French Revolution, Putting Paris, Old Regime, July Monarchy, First Empire, Festival of Federation, National Convention, Rocher de Cancale, The Nouvelle Cuisine of Rousseauian Sensibility, Committee of Public Safety, Private Appetites, Trois Frères Provençaux, Champs de Mars, Grimod de la Rcynière, Henriette Sophie, Land of Cockaigne, Louis Philippe, Louis Sébastien Mercier, Paris Parlement, Sainte Ménéhould, Café de Paris, Constituent Assembly New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 67
books:
See all 67 books this book cites
14
books
cite this book:
See all 14 books citing this book
- Paris As It Was And As It Is by Francis W. Blagdon on 6 pages
- The French Revolution (London Historical Studies) by Richard Benjamin Jones on 6 pages
- The French Revolution (Questions and Analysis in History Series) by Jocelyn Hunt on 6 pages
- The French Revolution (Opus) by J. M. Roberts on 4 pages
- Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, 1) by Lynn Hunt in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
See all 67 books this book cites
- Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Food Culture in Russia and Central Asia (Food Culture around the World) by Glenn Randall Mack in Front Matter, and Back Matter
- French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age by Susanne Freidberg in Back Matter
- Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy by Denise Gigante in Front Matter
- Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did it Go? by Michael Bywater in Back Matter
See all 14 books citing this book
Books on Related Topics
(learn more)
|
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
 |
85% buy the item featured on this page: The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Harvard Historical Studies) $15.25 |
 |
6% buy Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession $17.05 |
 |
5% buy All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present $21.60 |
 |
4% buy Food: The History of Taste (California Studies in Food and Culture) $26.37 |
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Help others find this product — tag it for Amazon search
No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
 |
Customer Discussions
Beta (What's this?)
New! See all customer communities, and bookmark your communities to keep track of them.
|
This product's forum
(0 discussions)
Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Active discussions in related forums
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Information from the Amapedia Community
Beta (What's this?)Be the first person to add an article about this item at Amapedia.com.
› See featured Amapedia.com articles
Listmania!
|
|
So You'd Like to...
![have a Complete Commodity Biography Reference List? [9/11]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41J96ZDPHXL._AA60_.jpg)
Look for Similar Items by Category
$15 Off Olay, Pantene, and More |
Best Books of 2008 |
Dive into Summer Reading |
Generate Power |
|||||||
|
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
You have no recently viewed items or searches.
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session. |
Continue shopping: Top Sellers
| ||||
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
