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This wonderfully persuasive book should be on the reading list of every bon
viveur. Restaurants have never really been about food, argues historian Rebecca
Spang in The Invention of the Restaurant. They began in late
18th-century Paris, she recounts, as establishments in which the upper classes
could make public show of their delicate stomachs by sipping a quasi-medicinal
bouillon. The original restaurant was the soup, not the place—and
McDonald’s was still a long way off. Published by Harvard University Press,
£23.50, ISBN 0674000641