Introduction

In 1765 a mercurial Paris entrepreneur opened a shop offering ‘restaurants’, delicate ‘restorative’ consommes distilled from large quantities of vegetables and meat. In its emphasis on a private rather than collective setting within the public sphere the restaurant is an essentially modern invention. From the very beginning in the elegant salons of the latter days of the ancien regime, the design of restaurants has been closely related to ideas of how food should be presented and how it may be consumed in public. With the invention of the restaurant the consumption of elaborate dishes, which had been the privilege of a small minority of aristocrats and patricians before the modern period, underwent a democratisation. In the nineteenth century models for different types of restaurants were established as part of developing patterns of metropolitan life. The professionalisation of restaurant design has in due course also resulted in a substantial body of literature on the subject.