Before sitting down at an inn to eat a meal he couldn’t pay for and setting off on a journey to Paris he couldn’t afford, the destitute Rabelais ostentatiously put aside a few packages that were sure to attract attention. They were labeled “poison for the king” and “poison for the dauphin.” When the innkeeper found them after the meal, he immediately had Rabelais arrested and transported to Paris, where he was welcomed by the king with hearty laughter at the free trip and the bill-avoiding scheme.
Since then, we are told by Rebecca L. Spang in the pleasingly spiced “Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and the Modern Gastronomic Culture,” any occasion when the bringing of a check has led to surprise or embarrassment has been called “le quart d’heure de Rabelais,” Rabelais’ quarter-hour. For him it ended in triumph, but for others the 15 minutes have brought far more discomfort.
During the French Revolution, for example, in June 1791, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette tried to flee France in disguise and stopped to eat at Varennes, where they were royally served by a restaurateur appropriately named Sauce. Varying degrees of gluttony have been ascribed to that last supper, but some accounts imagine the king’s arrest as a classic Rabelaisian quarter-hour: as the check is presented, and the portrait on the money is seen to bear a close resemblance to the corpulent diner.
But the settlement of accounts is always a bit awkward, and these anecdotes only emphasize how much of the restaurant experience — the fresh linen, the genuflecting servants, the artfully prepared dishes — really is a masquerade.
The restaurant is a space that is neither private nor public, everything costs money, but the pretense is that nothing does; the food is freshly prepared, but there is no sign of cooking.
The arrival of the check pulls the masks away. Your servants have moved on to other customers, your stained tablecloth is hastily hidden. But how has this restaurant ritual come to be? And why does it have this form?
Most histories until now, Spang writes, have argued that the restaurant had its origins in the years after the French Revolution when the unemployed cooks of the aristocracy set up shop in a new bourgeois universe.
But, she points out, the restaurant’s origins developed out of a “cult of sensibility” in the middle of the 18th Century. Unlike an inn or a tavern with community tables and an atmosphere of raucous and perhaps unsavory company, “the restaurant was specifically a place one went not to eat.” It was a place where customers who suffered from delicate dispositions and “weak chests” would be “restored.”
A restaurant was not originally a place to eat but the dish being eaten: a broth with purported medicinal properties, cooked in a sealed pot in which the essences of meats and vegetables were turned into a concentrated, restorative liquid.
These establishments, in Spang’s telling, had a difficult time after the French Revolution, when a revolution in gustatory habits included populist pot-luck community dinners eaten in the streets. In contrast the restaurant could seem aristocratic, even corrupt. So its precious atmosphere began to change.
Menus expanded and were codified. In the sybaritic years of the late 18th Century the restaurant became a refuge from the demands of public life. In its mirrored rooms a new art form, “gastronomy,” took root. The doctrine of “art for its own sake” was supplemented by “food for its own sake.”
