Dining Out: A Global History of Restaurants

(Paperback)

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A global history of restaurants beyond white tablecloths and the matre d', Dining Out presents restaurants both as businesses and as venues for a range of human experiences. From banquets in twelfth-century China to the medicinal roots of French restaurants, the origins of restaurants are not singular nor is the history this book tells. Katie Rawson and Elliott Shore highlight stories across time and place, including how chifa restaurants emerged from the migration of Chinese workers and their marriage to Peruvian businesswomen in nineteenth-century Peru; how Alexander Soyer transformed kitchen chemistry by popularizing the gas stove, pre-dating the pyrotechnics of molecular gastronomy by a century; and how Harvey Girls dispelled the ill repute of waiting tables, making rich lives for themselves across the American West. From restaurant architecture to technological developments, staffing and organization, tipping and waiting table, ethnic cuisines, and slow and fast foods, this delectably illustrated and profoundly informed and entertaining history takes us from the world's first restaurants in Kaifeng, China, to the latest high-end dining experiences.

Reviews

"In their sweeping history of the restaurant, Rawson and Shore are at pains to stress that the very social context in which public eating takes place invites competitive distinction, commercial wiles, the display of prestige, an atmosphere in which the customer is encouraged to feel as though he--and then, much later in history, she, too--is being feted. . . . Dining Out is written with accessible lucidity, its passage eased by Reaktion's characteristically generous approach to illustration. If you are boarding a long distance train to the family Christmas, expecting to be consigned periodically to the lumbering trolley and its cargo of carbs and sucrose, the photographs herein of the gilded dining cars of the great era of American railroad travel will feel as smart as salt in the wound."-- "World of Fine Wine"
"Unlike many books that delve into the history of restaurants and begin with France (or wayside taverns elsewhere), the academics who have written Dining Out, a compelling volume, start in the Bronze Age. Their definition of a restaurant is elastic, referring to places where strangers might have gathered to eat and drink, including the symposiums of ancient Greece. Long before social upheavals gave rise to the modern restaurant in France, there were what we would consider to be restaurants in twelfth-century China; the authors cite a traveler's memoir of a huge dumpling house with more than fifty ovens. (The influence of Chinese restaurants globally is significant.) The book discusses the economic and technological evolution of restaurants; restaurant service and hierarchy; tipping; the influence of transportation; sexism; chain restaurants; and food writing up to the present day."--Florence Fabricant "New York Times"

Author Bio

Katie Rawson is director of learning innovation at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes on food history. Elliott Shore is professor emeritus of history at Bryn Mawr College. He has written on the history of restaurants, advertising, and German America.