– Boulevard Saint-Michel are still borders delimiting Paris into four zones, including the northwest which dominates.” [ORT 90, p. 23, author’s translation]
2.2.2. Social diffusion
The geographical diffusion of restaurants came to be combined with a social one. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin evokes the development of restaurants at fixed prices: “Some restaurateurs proposed to join good food with the economy, and by getting closer to the mediocre fortunes, which were necessarily the most numerous, to ensure that the crowd of consumers could be satisfied” [BRI 82, p. 281, author’s translation]. Brillat-Savarin provides information on the profiles of diners who frequented them:
“Restaurateurs – considered under this last point of view – rendered a service to this interesting part of the population of any large city which consisted of foreigners, soldiers and employees. They were led, by their interest, to the solution of a problem which seemed contrary to it, namely: to make good food, and yet at a moderate price, and even at a low price.” [BRI 82, p. 282]
Eugène Briffault presents cheap restaurants:
“In the Latin Quarter (next to the ‘fixed price’, but above it) was the cheap restaurant; the ‘maximum’ [price] was 30 cents a dish for the use of ‘gentlemen-scholars’. The solemn moment of the day, which the kitchens and restaurant departments called all hands on deck, acted with unparalleled violence; young appetites rushed towards substantial dishes with fury. There was a cry of general distress, when the ‘chef’ proclaimed in a resounding voice this terrible sentence: ‘There is no more beef!’ Two or three restaurants on rue de la Harpe and rue Saint-Jacques, at the head of which we will place Rousseau and Flicoteau, the immortal Flicoteau, whose dynasty founded its fiefdom near Place de la Sorbonne, stood out among all the others. On these tables the carafes were gigantic; the wine only a prejudice.” [BRI 03, p. 116, author’s translation]
He specifies:
“Near the Palais-Royal, something similar to the restaurants of the Latin Quarter was created for the artistic world. There too, at dinner time, we saw the flocks of voracious locusts flocking to Rouget et al., from the small café and the workshop, to fall on all combinations of roasted or boiled beef, veal and mutton under all circumstances. In these areas, wine was known, but only in small doses, by decanter or quarter bottle.” [BRI 03, p. 116, author’s translation]
Similarly, Antoine de Baecque underlines:
“Undoubtedly because, in the same space, the most contrasting restaurants coexisted – either by their specialities, their menu, their personality, their appearance, their location, or, quite simply, by their price. The density of the boulevard actually attracted the ‘popular restaurant’, which was, half a century earlier, an antinomy. The first generation restaurateur sought to seduce the elites; his table was an obvious sign of social and cultural success. In the middle of the 19th Century, on the contrary, some institutions sought to feed the less fortunate, the working classes, students and bohemian artists. Yet they also call themselves restaurateurs.” [BAE 19, p. 183, author’s translation]
The social diffusion of restaurants was particularly sensitive on the left bank of the Seine. In the Latin Quarter, in the 1830s, the restaurant Flicoteaux was famous:
“In Paris, poor students, like Horace Bianchon who appears in several Balzac novels, went to Flicoteaux, a very famous and modest restaurant located on Place de la Sorbonne or in the other two or three restaurants on Rue de la Harpe, Viot or Rue Saint-Jacques. In these restaurants, bread was served at will, not wine or spirits, but well-cooked beef, well-baked chops. The service was done by boys. Dinners were à la carte.” [BON 13, pp. 285–286, author’s translation]
This accelerated with the birth of bouillon restaurants:
“In the mid-19th Century, the popular restoration of Paris was at the dawn of a small palace revolution. A certain Baptiste-Adolphe Duval, a butcher of his condition, had been thinking for some time about a way to feed the small population of Les Halles, composed of workers, employees and craftsmen who lived further and further from their workplace, and needed to be able to eat outside their homes without spending too much money. One day, he came up with this brilliant idea: to bring ‘restaurant’ bouillons up to date, those restorative consommés made from meat and vegetables that were at the origin of the invention of the restaurant in the mid-18th Century[…]. Duval opened his first bouillon restaurant in 1854, rue de la Monnaie, where he mainly offered cheap boiled beef. He certainly did not suspect that success would push him to open new establishments at a frenetic pace (boulevard Saint-Denis, Madeleine, place du Havre, boulevard des Italiens, rue de Rome, rue de Clichy, boulevard Poissonnière, rue du Quatre-septembre, rue de Rivoli, boulevard Saint-Germain…), thus constituting the first commercial empire in the history of the restaurant industry. Half a century later, his wife and son Alexandre took over and headed some 40 branches… Duval had his own butcher shops, his own purchasing centers, his own industrial bakery, his own milk company, his own Seltz water factory, cellars in Bordeaux and Bercy and laundry.” [GAU 06, p. 92 and p. 95, author’s translation]
At the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, the number of bouillon restaurants increased: Chartier, Boulant, etc. Louis Isidore Chartier, also known as Camille Chartier, a butcher in Orgeval, opened his first bouillon restaurant at 7, rue du Faubourg-Montmartre in 1896 and then branches at 142, boulevard Saint-Germain in 1904 (now Brasserie Vagenende), at 3, rue Racine in 1906 (now Bouillon Racine) (see Figure 2.5) and at 59, boulevard du Montparnasse in 1906 (today Bouillon Chartier Montparnasse, an establishment created in 1858, bought by Chartier in 1903 and renovated in 1906).
Figure 2.5. Inside the Bouillon Racine, located at 3, rue Racine (source: Olivier Etcheverria)
Social diffusion was reinforced with the appearance of creamery restaurants in the mid-19th Century. The rural exodus led to new arrivals in Paris who appreciated and consumed dairy products on a daily basis. They frequented Turkish and Georgian creameries where they bought milk, yoghurts and cheeses, and soon tasted them standing up. The creamers progressively set up tables and served hot milk bowls and “cuts” of brie8.
During the second half of the 19th Century, brasseries also developed. Michel Bonneau explains:
“In the second half of the 19th century – following the Universal Exhibitions of 1855 and 1867, and the war of 1870 which led to the loss of Alsace and Lorraine – the freedom given to the beer trade led to the appearance of the brewery restaurant, which competed with coffee shops and ultimately proved to be more popular. The freedom to sell beer, whose consumption was increasing due to urbanization, and the possibility of eating simple dishes to accompany beer (sausages, ham, cheese, cabbage) encouraged the development of brasseries in a niche market between the restaurant and the luxury restaurant.” [BON 13, p. 292, author’s translation]
These were establishments serving beer brewed in Alsace and Germany, and transported to Paris by the Eastern Railways:
“The first establishment of this new type appeared in Paris in 1847 on the ground floor of a building at 26, rue Hautefeuille. We owe it to a French naturalized German, Louis Andler, who had only the means of basic decoration – whitewashed walls, barrels, cheese wheels, rustic oak chairs and benches – but compensated with his good humor and his sense of conviviality.” [GAU 06, p. 123, author’s translation]
