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Will you bistro or brasserie?

The ins and outs of restaurant concepts

Don’t know about you, but every time I go to France and our pension owner recommends bistro this or café that for dinner, I pretty much lump them together in my mind unless they’re awfully grand or expensive. If we’ve bothered to ask it usually means we’re at the end of a long day and our respective ropes, and we’ve tried everything in the neighbourhood that looks good or we’re too weary to cross town and search out some recommended eatery.

So when Martine or Phillip suggests his favourite, we dutifully trot out and enjoy same, not really distinguishing a brasserie from a restaurant. Not until I read Martin Dorf’s Restaurants That Work , that is. There, by way of introducing prospective restaurant owners to some good working designs, he also gives we diners who are historically- and terminologically-challenged (that’s a challenge just to say!) an overview of the many restaurant styles.

Of course, these have hybridized and morphed over time, with some restaurants downplaying formality and cafés outgrowing their roots as places that serve coffee. Still, as we saw last week with the Four Seasons’ focus on the idea of bistro for their new restaurant, these are archetypal concepts that define sense of place and customer experience.

Simple cafes and high society

To undo some of the mystique, let’s start with cafés. These comfy haunts predate restaurants; they also give us an idea of how important stimulants have been in greasing the wheels of society and commerce.

Here in Canuckland, a café has come to mean a casual place, often with ma ’n’ pa or retro overtones, where we can get anything from burger and fries to a tofu stir-fry. But they began as places that served coffee and only coffee. Eventually they added brandy and sweetened wines and liquors to their menus and, later, food.

Early coffee houses opened in Venice in the 15 th century, as Venetians learned about coffee from their Muslim enemies of the time. But the first true café in the world opened in Constantinople in 1550.

In France, the evolution of the café went something like this, according to Larousse Gastronomique . After the departure of Suleiman Aga, who brought coffee in large quantities to France, an Armenian named Pascal opened a coffee shop at the Saint-Germain fair in Pairs in 1672. It was wildly successful.

As the French twigged onto the social delights of drinking coffee in public places, more cafes opened. Paris’s venerable Le Procope, which promotes itself, albeit questionably, as Paris’s first café, opened in 1686. It’s still in its original location, on Rue de l’Ancienne-Comedie, serving coffee to more tourists than philosophers and statesmen these days. But it has seen the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Diderot and Voltaire grace its tables. (Voltaire supposedly drank 40 cups of his favourite coffee/chocolate beverage there every day.)

By 1754 there were 56 cafés in Paris; by the end of the 18 th century there were 600. Most were little more than miserable little smoking saloons; the coffee was mediocre and service was lousy. Still, they became central to a certain lifestyle, offering a place where men of letters caught up on the latest news and politics, and smoked up a storm.

With time, certain cafés became hang-outs for certain types of people. Café de la Regance was taken over by chess players, including Rousseau. During the French Revolution, some cafés were meeting places of secret committees. Later, places like Café Riche were second homes to writers, journalists and dramatists. Eventually, celebrities discovered the café life.

Some cafés were richly decorated, with tables set in elegant china and crystal and menus designed by the likes of Renoir or Toulouse-Lautrec. Sidewalk cafés, offering the ultimate for seeing and being seen, were yet another step in social evolution.

Restoring your vitality

Restaurants, on the other hand, were a much more recent development. Until the late 18 th century in France, the only places where ordinary people could eat out were inns, which served very fixed menus at very fixed times, or at the shops of traiteurs (eating-house keepers) who could only sell whole pieces of meat. Such restrictions were the result of the guild system, which dictated who could serve what and where.

’Round about 1765, a Parisian bouillon seller named Boulanger created a sign for his stall that stated: "Boulanger sells magical restoratives". He embellished it with a joke in culinary Latin, which I couldn’t begin to translate for you. Nevertheless, the first restaurateur was born, one with a sense of humour. (The term restaurant , coined by the French, originally meant a rich spicy soup which could restore strength and vitality. Later – weak readers faits attention – chocolate, red meat and consommé were also declared restaurants. This meaning survived until the late 19 th century, when a restaurant meant an establishment that sold restorative foods.)

Wanting to augment his menus and unable to serve sauces or ragouts as he was not a member of the traiteurs , Boulanger offered his clients sheep’s feet in white sauce. The traiteurs promptly launched a lawsuit against him, but Boulanger won the case, which ended with a parliamentary decree ruling that sheep’s feet in white sauce did not constitute a ragout. Seriously.

After Boulanger’s adventure, the first Parisian restaurant worthy of the name was opened by Beauvilliers in 1782 – the Grande Taverne de Lourdes. It offered the novelty of listing the dishes on a menu and serving them at small, individual tables during fixed hours.

On the whole, early restaurants were clean, even luxurious places, distinguishing themselves from the spartan, sometimes filthy taverns that preceded them. By the end of the 18 th century, the private dining salon was so popular it offered distinct areas for each type of diner. The back was for travellers and large families in a hurry; the middle of the room was for regular customers (the table d’hôte ), and the rest was for customers wanting leisurely, elegant meals.

Le bistro, La brasserie

As we discovered last week, bistros also evolved – where else? – in Paris. They were later developments, springing up in the 1890s in or near Les Halles, the great wholesale food market, which opened 900 years ago (sometimes the history of a place like Paris hits you right between the eyes).

Bistros fed the poor sods who worked at Les Halles. They were usually run by grandmotherly old women, who nurtured both body and soul with their home-cooking, sympathetic ear and sound advice. With their simple but satisfying food, fair prices, and homey, softly-lit atmosphere, bistros quickly became havens for struggling artists and journalists as well.

Even though brasseries today are places where you can enjoy both food and drink, they began life as places where beer and cider were made or sold. In fact, brasserie literally translates as brewery, drinking saloon or bar.

While breweries were big in Germany and eastern France, they didn’t spread to Paris and the rest of France until the mid-1800s. They started out as pretty funky places, where people sat on wooden benches at wooden tables, drinking (lots) and eating things like sauerkraut or plates of oysters. Later they became elegant places, as ornate as the great cafés, serving hot and cold meals.

Like the other archetypal eateries, certain brasseries were and still are hang-outs for certain types of people, especially since they’re often open until the wee hours. Some attracted politicians, others artists such as Courbet, or men of letters or bohemians like Baudelaire.

So next time you’re in France, will you go bistro, café or brasserie? You chose, and leave plenty of room to soak up history.

NEXT: The American way of dining: lunchrooms, cafeterias, fantasy restaurants and McDonald’s

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who owes much to an earlier incarnation as a wench at Gastown’s Medieval Inn.

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