The History of Restaurants

[RonPrice]

THE RESTAURANT and ME

In a review1 of Rebecca L. Spang’s The Invention of the Restaurant:
Paris and Modern Gastronomy, I discovered that the restaurant's first
true author was Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau. The winter solstice had
just passed here in Australia and I was one month short of the age of 68
when I came across this review in the online journal Other Voices.

This first restaurant opened its premises in 1766 in the rue Saint
Honoré. It was utterly unlike any previous eating places in Paris. It
was not classifiable with cookshops, caterers, cafés, cabarets, inns or
the public "host's table." In this latter location, and for a fixed fee
at fixed hours, travellers and hungry mouths of all types fought over
communal dishes of pot-au-feu, pté and veg. But they were not
restaurants. Mathurin Roze was "friend of all the world" and an
entrepreneur who edited an annual business directory. In that directory
he recommended himself as the "king's restaurateur" and founder of the
first "house of health.”

Roze borrowed the concept of sensibility from Jean-Jacques
Rousseau(1712-1778), a political philosopher of the time and the era's
creative consultant, This was the idea that the highest human ideals
were found in persons of feeling and sensitivity of soul. Such people
had "visceral responses to any and all stimuli." They had nervous
physical reactions to "beautiful sunsets, resolute orphans, Roman
ruins," or a lump of roast duck plonked on the common table at the
second sitting for dinner.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Vera Rule in The
Guardian, 23 September 2000.

My first memory of such a place
was at the Dundas Restaurant in
1964 where my parents and I ate
just before my father died in ‘65.

The first meal I remember was fish-
fingers before going home, around
the corner where we lived, my last
months before leaving the parental
nest at the age of 20: two-hundred
years after the invention of popular
& common places to eat in the five
epochs that will have been my life.1

1 I was born in 1944 and the Baha’i Faith will have gone through five
epochs from 1944 to 2021---as I anticipate if I live to the year 2021.

Ron Price
23/6/’12




--
RonPrice