Restaurant

• 1. Introduction

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  Somewhere in what is now southern Iraq, around 2700 BCE, people sat on benches and ate prepared meals from standardized bowls while drinking beer from large jars. Archaeologists excavating the ancient Sumerian city of Lagash in 2023 found the remains of this public food establishment, and what struck researchers was not who ate there, but who did not: the absence of elite markers. This was a place for ordinary people. It had an oven, food preparation areas, and conical cups by the hundreds. That is, by most measures, a restaurant. The word itself would not arrive for another four thousand years, borrowed from French, meaning literally to restore. But the impulse it names, to go somewhere outside your home and have someone prepare your meal, turns out to be among the oldest social instincts in urban life. How did that ancient impulse become the modern restaurant? What forces shaped the menus, the waiters, the wine lists, and the dress codes? And what does the sheer scale of the industry today tell us about the way human beings choose to eat?

• 2. Ancient Tables

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  A 512 BCE record from Ancient Egypt describes a public eating establishment that served a single dish: a plate of cereal, wildfowl, and onions. No choices, no menu, no alternatives. That rigidity reflects how most early public eating worked. The option to choose what you ate would take centuries to arrive. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the thermopolium offered the closest equivalent to modern fast food. These were establishments with service counters where ready-to-eat food and beverages could be purchased. Pompeii alone yielded 158 thermopolia, concentrated along its main roads and near public spaces. The people who used them most were those without private kitchens, the residents of Rome's crowded insulae apartment buildings. Alongside the thermopolium stood the popina, a Roman wine bar that served olives, bread, cheese, stews, sausage, and porridge. It was a place explicitly for the plebeians, the lower classes. Some popinae were standing-room only. Others had tables, stools, or even couches. The inn offered a different tradition: food and lodging combined, a common table, no options, and a captive audience of travellers on the road. What none of these establishments offered was the thing that would come to define the restaurant: a written list of choices that belonged to the customer.

• 3. China's Restaurant Revolution

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  Kaifeng's restaurants in the 11th and 12th centuries did something that Rome and Egypt had not managed: they gave customers a choice. Song dynasty China produced eating establishments that catered not just to local residents but to travelling merchants who arrived unfamiliar with local food. Growing out of tea houses and taverns, these businesses learned to serve dishes from other regions of China, placing themselves in the entertainment districts of major cities alongside hotels, bars, and brothels. A Chinese manuscript from 1126 describes one such establishment in detail. Patrons were greeted by pre-plated demonstration dishes representing available options. A team of waiters took orders, then sang those orders to the kitchen, and delivered the dishes in the exact sequence in which they had been placed. That choreography is recognizable to anyone who has eaten in a restaurant today. An account from 1275 captures the demanding clientele of Hangzhou, the dynasty's capital for its later years. The account quotes the variety of contradictory requests arriving simultaneously: hot, cold, tepid, chilled, cooked, raw, roasted, grilled. The restaurants of Hangzhou also served a wave of northern Chinese refugees who had fled Kaifeng during the Jurchen invasion of the 1120s, many of them running or patronizing establishments that preserved the cuisine of a city they had left behind.

• 4. The French Invention

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  In Paris in 1765 or 1766, a man named Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau opened a shop on the rue des Poulies, the street that is now part of the Rue de Louvre. He served bouillon, a broth of meat and egg said to restore health and vigor. The establishment was elegantly decorated, a deliberate contrast to the common tables of taverns. Besides the broth, his menu included several other restorative dishes, among them macaroni. He and others who followed him called themselves traiteurs-restaurateurs, and the word for what they served, restaurant, eventually transferred to the places where it was served. The word had been used as early as 1507 to describe a restorative beverage, and in 1521 to mean a fortifying food or remedy. Chantoiseau's shop is considered the first establishment to offer a written menu of available choices, even if it was not the first place where one could order food. The first luxury restaurant in Paris followed shortly after. Antoine Beauvilliers, formerly the chef of the Count of Provence, opened La Grande Taverne de Londres at the Palais-Royal at the beginning of 1786. It had mahogany tables, linen tablecloths, chandeliers, well-dressed waiters, a long wine list, and dishes such as partridge with cabbage, veal chops grilled in buttered paper, and duck with turnips. The writer Brillat-Savarin later described it as the first to combine four essentials: an elegant room, smart waiters, a choice cellar, and superior cooking. In June 1786, the Provost of Paris issued a decree formally authorising restaurateurs to receive clients and offer meals until eleven at night in winter, and until midnight in summer. That decree gave legal shape to a new kind of public life.

• 5. Revolution and Proliferation

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  The French Revolution disrupted the aristocratic households that had employed France's most skilled cooks. As nobles fled the country in large numbers, their former chefs faced unemployment, and many of them responded by opening restaurants. One was founded in 1791 by a cook named Méot, previously employed by the Duke of Orleans. His wine list ran to twenty-two choices of red and twenty-seven of white. By the end of the 18th century, a cluster of luxury restaurants occupied the Grand-Palais: Huré, the Couvert espagnol, Février, the Grotte flamande, Véry, Masse, and the Café de Chartres, which remained open into the modern era as Le Grand Véfour. The guide that helped diners navigate this new landscape arrived in 1804, when Grimod de La Reyniére published the first restaurant guide, the Almanach des Gourmands. The Café Anglais hosted the Three Emperors Dinner in 1867, arranged by Napoleon III for Tsar Alexander II, Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Otto von Bismarck during the Exposition Universelle. The restaurant of the Hotel Ritz Paris opened in 1898 with Auguste Escoffier in the kitchen. Across the Atlantic, the transformation came later and under different pressures. In the United States, Prohibition took effect in 1920 and cut off the alcohol revenues that fine dining establishments depended on. Cafeterias, roadside restaurants, and diners filled the gap. When Prohibition ended in the 1930s, luxury restaurants began to return as the economy recovered from the Great Depression. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial segregation in all public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce, including restaurants, a change upheld the same year by the Supreme Court in Katzenbach v. McClung.

• 6. Scale and Labor

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  In 1970s America, there was roughly one restaurant for every 7,500 people. By 2016, that ratio had dropped to one restaurant for every 310 people, with a total of one million restaurants in the country. Starting in 2016, Americans spent more money in restaurants than on groceries. The proportion of meals eaten outside the home rose from 25% in 1950 to 46% in 1990, driven by longer working hours, growing numbers of single-parent households, rising incomes, and an aging population less willing or able to cook at home. The industry employed 10 million workers, with one in every 12 U.S. residents working in the sector at some point. During the recession of 2008, the restaurant industry was unusual in that it continued to grow. But the scale of that workforce comes with a labor profile researchers have consistently flagged. Restaurants report profit margins of 4-5%, and cite those margins to explain wages that leave restaurant employees suffering from poverty rates three times higher than other U.S. workers, and using food stamps at twice the rate. The industry is the largest employer of people of color in the United States and ranks as the second largest employer of immigrants, with those workers statistically concentrated in the lowest-paying positions. Thirty-nine percent of restaurant workers earn minimum wage or below. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Restaurant Association projected 2020 restaurant sales at $899 billion. The pandemic reduced that estimate to $675 billion, a drop of $274 billion. A study of new restaurants in Cleveland, Ohio found that one in four changed ownership or closed within a year, and six in ten did so within three years.

• 7. Guides, Stars, and Judgment

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  The Michelin guide awards one to three stars to restaurants of high culinary merit, with more stars corresponding to higher prices and greater formality. Its main competitor in Europe is the Gault Millau guide, which rates restaurants on a scale of 1 to 20. In the United States, the Forbes Travel Guide and the AAA use a 1-to-5 star or diamond scale, where three, four, and five ratings roughly match the Michelin one, two, and three star tiers. Michelin released its first U.S. guide, covering New York City, in 2005. The Zagat Survey takes a different approach, compiling comments from individuals rather than issuing an official critical judgment. The French guide tradition has its own origin point: the Almanach des Gourmands, published in 1804. The most celebrated restaurant of the French Restoration period was the Rocher de Cancale, which appeared repeatedly in the novels of Balzac. The economics of the chef's table, a table in the restaurant kitchen reserved for VIPs and special guests, represent one end of the pricing spectrum: a themed tasting menu prepared by the head chef, a minimum party requirement, and a flat fee charged at the higher end of the restaurant's range. At the other end sit the ghost restaurants, the food trucks, and the pop-up concepts that emerged from the industry's expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, driven in part by entrepreneurs including Terence Conran, Alan Yau, and Oliver Peyton. The food truck route has become common enough in the UK and the US that operators increasingly use it as a path to building a customer following before committing to a permanent site.