Great innovations in travel: The restaurant

When I travel, I like to count my blessings. Hotels, museums, public transport, guidebooks and multi-lingual guides. All great innovations. What would travel be like without them? But I feel that one more innovation deserves credit. An innovation both surprisingly recent, and fairly under-appreciated. That’s the restaurant. Beautiful, tasty, sexy, we all love a good restaurant when on the road, don’t we.

Now restaurants are actually a recent thing. Only some 200 years ago. Historians date them back to around the French revolution. As recently as say 1850, there were no restaurants in America, only “eating houses” and “oyster bars” etc.
So what existed before restaurants? Mostly, the “table d’hôte”: the communal table where you eat a set menu at a set time, side by side with other eaters. Once a day. Didn’t make it on time to the table d’hôte? Wait till tomorrow then. Such was the rule.

A restaurant is different altogether. You eat at your own table, at the time of your choice, and you pick from a choice of dishes that will be prepared and served rapidly upon request. And you get to choose the wine you drink, too.
Sociologically also, the communal table misses one set of people: women. Table d’hôte is not right for proper ladies. Women are to protect their virtue, and as such they do not eat in public. Rather, they ask to be served in their own rooms. More often than not, the ladies ended up eating particularly poorly.

Now imagine yourself traveling and trying to have a good time. But you are required to eat only once a day, at a set time, with other people, all men (or lower-class women, but these don’t count, do they!?). Worse yet for women: they would eat worse foods, locked up in their sleeping rooms. That would not make for good travel now, would it!?

Woman Sitting on a Wooden Chair – by Elina Sazonova – Pexels

So it becomes pretty obvious that restaurants are an essential element in the pleasure of travel.

So the question arises, why did France give birth to all these restaurants? And why around the time of the French revolution? The word ‘restaurer’ comes from se restaurer, to restore oneself (acquiring new strength from food). And why did these restaurants pop up at the French revolution? Because aristocrats had to flee the country hastily. They left behind chefs who were talented and out of a job. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, right? Thus restaurants were born.
And if you don’t think supply drives business, perhaps it was a demand that gave rise to restaurants. As a by-product of the Enlightenment Era. Enlightened bourgeois started looking for more elaborate food than table d’hôte and the inn. And restaurateurs applied to restaurants the good service in place in cafés – private tables, a choice out of a menu, long hours etc.

To us today restaurants do not just make travel possible. They can be the main purpose for traveling. I know people who travel just to eat – and you know some too, I’m sure…

We have come a long way – and in a past far more recent than we might think. In the 1970’s in the United States, there was one restaurant for every 7,500 people. Today there is one for every 310 people. And the food has got much better, too!
So let us celebrate restaurants not only for the wonderful foods they bring us. Not only for the setting they offer for that occasional difficult marital conversation. They are also the indispensable pre-requisite of a good trip. Or even the purpose for it…