When did the restaurant become a thing?

Factual Questions
1

Obviously, people have cooked and sold food since time immemorial, but I am curious as to how far back I could go in my time machine and be served in a restaurant as we currently define one. By this I mean

  1. A business that charges for the service,
  2. Which has a physically fixed place of business,
  3. Serving food, prepared onsite specifically for the customer, brought to the customers by servers,
  4. Who are seated at tables (or in some traditions, mats or such in a fixed place on the floor)
  5. Who choose their dishes from a pre-existing list.

So here I am excluding street food vendors, for instance.

2

They recently unearthed another one in Pompeii, so at least 79AD.

3

Thermopilia are pretty close. They generally did not serve food to order, though.

4

ETA: Partly ninja’ed. Oh well …

There have been at least a few threads on this. Here’s a fun one from 2011:

Wiki has some useful citations going back to BC, but suggests mid 1700s France would be the start of something you or I would immediately recognize:

5

I quote from page 660 of Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food.

“… The restaurant , as it was conceived in Paris towards the end of the eighteenth century, had a very specific vocation. It came to be seen that its principle advantage was that it offered diners a choice rather than the table d’hôte (sic) of taverns or single-commodity fare of chophouses or pie shops; according to Brillat-Savarin, restaurants allowed people to eat when the wanted, what they wanted and how much they wanted, knowing advance how much this would cost. The top restaurants of the day boasted a vast menu with a choice of 12 soups, 65 entrees of beef, mutton, chicken, or game, 15 roasts, and 50 dessert dishes.”

Davidson goes on to cite the work of Rebecca Spang who proposes that the inventor of the restaurant was Mathurin de Chantoiseau in 1766.

6

I’ve eaten at the St. Peter Stiftskulinarium in Salzburg, Austria; they have been in existence since 803 CE (and possibly before), and claim to be the oldest existing restaurant in Europe, if not the world. That said, I’m not sure how it operated in 803, or if it would have been recognizable as a restaurant to a modern person.

7

This is my understanding, that the idea of a restaurant as a fashionable venue for the upper classes was invented in the 1700-1800s in Northern Europe (France, England, etc.). The earlier restaurants cited in ancient rome were not for the elites, but for the working classes who did not have kitchens in their dwellings, and there is no way the elites would entertain anywhere other than at home.

In particular the Regency era restaurants were notorious as a venue for rich men to entertain the mistresses (something that could not obviously be done at home :slight_smile: ) and in London included things like Indian restaurants centuries before the post-war rise of “Ethnic” cuisine in the west.

8

When I visited Pompeii four years ago, I knew about the thermopolia and went looking for any that were restored and/or open. I found one with a partially original, partially reconstructed counter, showing how the heat was contained and where the cooking vessels would be inserted. It was amazing to stand behind the counter, easily imagining a worker or three tending the pots and scooping stew or whatever into bowls or dishes for any passing plebian who’d paused for a bite. Just a remarkable, tactile reality of history.

Don’t know if I’d call it a “restaurant” as requested, though. Nevertheless, intensely cool.

9

I would venture a guess that restaurants were somewhat “travel-related” … as this is a situation where you cannot easily cook yet you need to ingest food.

So probably along the first commercial routes, would be my vote …

10

Perhaps following pilgrimage routes?

11

Here’s a list of restaurants a lot older then the 18th century

The oldest, in Austria, was mentioned in print in 803 and is still open.

12

Seems like there’d be some gray areas here. For instance, taverns and inns during the middle ages makes me think of establishments that served ale made on premises, but also made and sold soups, stews, bread, or other fare to travellers/patrons. Might these be considered proto-restaurants?

13

Yup, that’s the one in Salzburg I mentioned upthread. :slight_smile:

14

I think a “restaurant” has to have a menu you can select from. Which probably puts the first one where the word was coined; 18th Century France

15

As I understand it, at least in the United States, the first such establishment was Delmonico’s in New York, which first opened in the 1820s.

16

There is a book of significant restaurants in the US, which begins with Delmonico’s, and includes a menu, which I didn’t see at the linked site. (Though I didn’t look hard.) Most of the items are no longer available to us.

17

Which I did specify in the OP.

Figures the French invented this.

I am kinda blown away New York City didn’t have an actual restaurant until 1837; NYC has been the largest city in the USA since the Constitution was being written, and by 1837 had well over a hundred thousand people. I am just a little bit skeptical that the “cafes and inns where diners had little control over what they were served” didn’t include at least a few places that had menus.

18

I didn’t exactly know before this thread, but it’s really not surprising.

19

You did - but I’m curious about a couple because I’m not sure that they are necessarily part of the current definition. For example, a barbeque “place”, even one that has tables and servers doesn’t prepare food specifically for a particular customer and a Brazilian BBQ or buffet often doesn’t involve people choosing from a list but we still mostly consider them restaurants.

20

Well, in the case of a churrascaria, they might be preparing meat like crazy, but you are, after all, choosing which of those meats are served to you. Even at other restaurtants a lot of the things you’re eating were pre-prepared in the assumption someone would order it.