the late Middle Ages, the word ‘restaurant’ has meant these rich bouillons consisting of poultry, beef, various roots, onions, herbs and, depending on the recipe, spices, candy sugar, toasted bread or barley, butter, as well as products as unusual in appearance as dried rose petals, Damascus grapes, amber, etc.” [PIT 96, p. 771, author’s translation]
1.2. … to the establishment
Gradually, the name of the dish came to designate the place where it was tasted:
“The worldwide success of the word ‘restaurant’ gives the French a just cause for pride. First used to designate a rich and invigorating bouillon, then various small, robust dishes designed to restore weak health or, quite simply, energy reduced by fatigue and hunger, it was only applied at the end of the 18th Century to the establishment where they were served. The founding event of this institution took place in 1765, rue des Poulies, near the Louvre, where a certain Boulanger, known as Champ d’Oiseaux, served ‘restaurants’, i.e. bouillons, but also sheep’s feet in white sauce with a portion under the sign written in Latin…: ‘ Venite ad me, omnes qui stomacho laboratis, et ego vos restaurabo’.”1 [PIT 91, p. 157, author’s translation]
The situation reflected Boulanger’s business sense and restaurants grew rapidly. In his Histoire du restaurant en France, Pierre Andrieu quotes, on this subject, P. de la Mésangère:
“Besides the fact that Boulanger sold bouillons, there was food at home, but since he was not a caterer, he could not serve stew. Instead, he served poultry with coarse salt, fresh eggs, etc., and this was served without a tablecloth on small marble tables. Other restaurateurs followed his example, including Wauxhall, at the Colosseum and all the assembly and public celebration venues. Novelty, fashion and above all, high prices accredited them, because a person who would not have dared to sit at a guesthouse’s table would easily pay for the same expensive dinner at the restaurant!” [AND 55, p. 26, author’s translation]
Although the restaurant’s geographical origin is Parisian, Jean-Robert Pitte nevertheless points out that it shares common characteristics with London’s taverns:
“As with many cultural changes, the French restaurant does not have a simple genealogy. It also has English ancestry. The taverns on the other side of the Channel, i.e. the establishments where wine is served and which are pitted against brasseries, are often elegant and famous. One of the most famous and refined London taverns of the 18th Century was owned in the 1670s by a son of a president in the Bordeaux Parliament, Mr. de Pontac. The wine produced by his father on his estate in Haut-Brion was consumed there.” [PIT 91, p. 158, author’s translation]
The name given to one of the first famous Parisian restaurants, La Grande Taverne de Londres, opened by Antoine Beauvilliers in 1782, and sometimes considered as the first “grand restaurant”, illustrates this influence:
“Antoine Beauvilliers brought the profession to its pinnacle. He was also an essential link in the historical geography of French gastronomy, as he was one of the first officier de bouche (chef) of a prince – the Count of Provence, the future Louis XVIII – to establish his own business […] Beauvilliers […] opened a chic restaurant where everybody who was anybody was running around and enabled the high court cuisine to take to the streets. He first established himself at 26 rue de Richelieu, under the name of La Grande Taverne de Londres, then a stone’s throw away, but in the heart of fashionable Paris, in the Valois gallery at the Palais-Royal.” [PIT 91, p. 160, author’s translation]
In Paris à table, Eugène Briffault highlights Antoine Beauvilliers’ reputation at the Palais-Royal:
“Beauvilliers was the one that first attracted the most people. He never made his mark as a chef, but he had a quality that is nowadays considered extinct: he was entirely focused on the people who came to his house for dinner, and constantly went through his rooms, to make sure that his diners were happy. At the slightest doubt, he would have one dish replaced by another, head down to his kitchens, and loudly scold the careless worker.” [BRI 03, p. 91, author’s translation]
For Rebecca L. Spang, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau was the first restaurateur. She places the invention of the restaurant at the heart of an original socioeconomic strategy:
“The ‘invention’ of the restaurant, the creation of a new market sphere of hospitality and taste, was but one component of Roze’s plan to fix the economy, repair trade, and restore the health to the body politic […]. Nevertheless, Roze’s role in the invention of the restaurant is particularly significant, for it epitomizes (if only by the variety of its projects) the restaurant’s place in intricate networks of market expansion and commercial growth. Like others of his era, the first restaurateur saw the long-stigmatized mechanisms of trade (the circulation of goods and the stimulation of desires) as potential conduits of social benefit and national improvement. Roze de Chantoiseau, who invented the restaurant while running an information office, attempting to abolish the national debt, and editing a commercial directory, was hardly unique in the range of his interests. In 1766, when this first restaurateur opened his doors, culinary issues were often incorporated into a wide range of discussions.” [SPA 00, pp. 13–14]
She thus insists on the complementary professional activity of communication and publications of Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, who published in 1769 Almanach général d’indication d’adresse personnelle et domicile fixe de Six Corps, Arts et Métiers2. François-Régis Gaudry specifies:
“This directory listed, in alphabetical order, several thousand merchants, traders, craftsmen and entrepreneurs who each demonstrated talent and initiative in their own field […] Similarly, a supplement to the almanac listing the new caterers indicated ‘Roze, the First Restaurateur’. Smart and intuitive, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau was actually intelligent enough to play on two sides to support his business: he was Chantoiseau the author-publisher on the one hand, and Roze the restaurateur, on the other. Since 1766, the restaurant was located in the Hôtel d’Aligre, rue Saint-Honoré, at the same address as its publishing house.” [GAU 06, pp. 21–22]
In addition, Rebecca L. Spang points out that: “Like any number of these enterprising authors and would-be reformers, Roze de Chantoiseau frequented the aristocratic and administrative circles in Paris.” [SPA 00, p. 15]
But who was the first restaurateur then? Boulanger or Roze de Chantoiseau? An answer is provided by François-Régis Gaudry:
“The famous Boulanger consigned to the dungeons of history and Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau suddenly presented as the undisputed inventor of the restaurant? Not so sure, because it may be that the two people are actually only one. Indeed, in several texts of the time, Boulanger was also called ‘Champ d’Oiseau’, a nickname strangely close to ‘Chantoiseau’.” [GAU 06, p. 21, author’s translation]
Eugène Briffault, for his part, attributes Lamy as the first creator of the restaurant: “The first restaurateur in Paris was a man named Lamy. He opened his private rooms in one of the dark and narrow passages that surrounded the Palais-Royal at the time.” [BRI 03, p. 91, author’s translation]. In Le mangeur du XIXe siècle, Jean-Paul Aron confirms: “The first authentic restaurateur, Lamy, served very ordinary dishes around 1773.” [ARO 89, p. 19, author’s translation]
Rebecca L. Spang also mentions the opening of an establishment run by the restaurateur Minet:
“In March 1767, L’Avantcoureur (The Forerunner), a journal dedicated to innovation in the arts, the sciences, and ‘any other
