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Restaurants - A Publication
Lenny Reponas is the webmaster of Restaurant Hwy
one of the leading information resources on restaurants
available on line. For more questions, visit
http://www.restauranthwy.com
An outing has almost become synonymous with eating out in a
restaurant. Today's restaurants can be traced back to the
last part of the eighteenth century, when they made their
appearance in France. They existed even before this period
in the form of taverns and food shops.
The difference between a tavern and restaurant is that in
the latter there was a set menu served at a set hour for
a set price, while in a restaurant you chose individual,
and individually priced dishes from a menu, at anytime of
the day. Around 1783 Beauvilliers, once chef to the Comte
de Provence (who later became Louis XVIII), opened the
first restaurant in the Palais Royale. From 1789 onwards,
market was flooded with chefs and other personnel.
Beauvilliers~ establishment closed down ten years later in
1793 because of the French Revolution. Beauvilliers left
quickly for an enforced sojourn in England. In fact, large
numbers fled to other European countries particularly
England, then the richest country in Europe.
In the next fifteen years, from 1789 to 1804, the number of
restaurants increased from one hundred to between five and
six hundred, more than a five ~fold increase. This induced
a number of changes. The chefs, previously serving solely
the nobility, used the skills for the burgeoning
bourgeoisie. The dining patterns changed such that the
restaurants were serving `dejeuner a la fourchette~ or
breakfast with a fork between 11am and 12 noon, which was
preceded by `petit dejeuner~ or breakfast.
From the glitter and glamour of the dining rooms, let~s
talk about the boiler room of the kitchens. Count von
Rumford, an American, has the credit of introducing the
first commercially available ~modern~ kitchen ranges,
which began to appear about 1800. His invention
revolutionized the restaurant kitchen. It brought the
reduction in the number of dishes on the menu, thus roasts
virtually vanished from restaurant menus and a range of
dishes that could be prepared in a minute took over such as
pan-frying. Since then eating was never the same again. It
changed the eating-out as radically as the French
Revolution did politics.
A chronological growth of restaurants over the years is
given below:
Restaurant: It is believed that the first restaurant was
opened in Paris in 1765 by Boulanger, a soup vendor.
Cafeteria: The first cafeteria was opened by the YWCA of
Kansas City, Mo.
Drive-In Restaurants: The first drive-in restaurant opened
in Glendale, California in 1936. Here the patrons are
served food in their vehicles. The phenomenon reached its
height in the early 1950s.
McDonald's Happy Meals: Ray Kroc was the pioneer of the
fast-food industry with his worldwide McDonald's enterprise
(1954). He revolutionized the American restaurant industry
by imposing discipline on the production of hamburgers,
french fries, and milk shakes. In 1977, the first McDonald~s
~Happy Meal~ was regionally tested in St. Louis. The first
nationwide Happy Meal was served in 1979.
Lenny Reponas is the webmaster of Restaurant Hwy
one of the leading information resources on restaurants
available on line. For more questions, visit
http://www.restauranthwy.com