How did the restaurants of Paris get their culinary supremacy?
During the Revolution many of the nobles were ruined, and their chefs--among them Méot, Robert, Roze, Véry, Leda, Legacque, Beauvilliers, Naudet, Edon became caterers to gourmets at large. "Beauvilliers, who established his restaurant about 1782, was for fifteen years the most famous restaurateur of Paris, and provided liberally such delicate and sublimated dishes as those which had hitherto been found only on the tables of the king, of the nobles, and of the farmers-general. The great restaurateurs of modern Paris are nearly all successors of one or the other of the famous cooks above mentioned," as Theodore Child pointed out.
In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris I came across books giving curious glimpses of the restaurants at earlier periods. In 1574 there was published a "Discours sur les causes de l'extrême cherté qui est aujourd'hui en France et sur les moyens d'y remédier." The author complains that people are no longer satisfied with three courses but must have meats in half-a-dozen styles, with sauces, _hachés_, _pasticeries_, all sorts of _salmigondis_, etc. Every one he says, now goes to dine at Le More, Sanson, Innocent, or Havart, "maistres de volupté et despense, qui en une chose publique bien policée et reglée seraient bannis et chassez comme corrupteurs des mœurs."
This diatribe against the providers of savory food as corruptors of public morals who, if the police tended to its duty, would be chased from the city, seems to indicate that Puritan ideas on the subject of the enjoyment of food once prevailed even in France.
As late as 1842 there were only seventeen restaurants in Paris, where now there are more than seventeen times seventeen. At the date mentioned, most of them were near the Palais Royal, and one could dine for two francs--forty cents!--while lunch was only a franc and a quarter. There were places where a workman could get, for twenty centimes (four cents), bread, wine, soup, and meat enough for a meal.
In Paris, as elsewhere, prices have soared since that time, but correspondingly cheap eating places abound in all quarters. The lowest-priced restaurants likely to be patronized by tourists and resident foreigners are the Duval, and other "Bouillons," at which one who knows may get good dishes. Well-to-do Parisians and foreigners may often be seen in these eating places, and one of them actually has a star of excellence in Baedeker.