Similarly, “Châtaignier, rue du Cherche-Midi, despite its very simple service, offered nothing to anyone, but its pike with white butter and nutmeg being better than in Nantes or Saint-Nazaire and the quality of all its dishes remaining perfect.” [HER 56, p. 284, author’s translation]
In 1932, Marthe Allard, a peasant woman from Burgundy, acquired a restaurant at the corner of rue Saint-André-des-Arts and rue de l’Éperon (see Figure 2.6). The chef mother and her daughter-in-law offered Burgundian cuisine dishes: frog legs, duck with olives and rooster in wine. The restaurant was a former wine merchant (the window grills preserved) transformed into a bistro La Halte de l’Éperon by Vincent Candré. Simple dishes were cooked by Josephine, “one of the first ‘Parisian cooking mothers’”9. From the 1930s until the end of the war, Allard remained a family-oriented neighborhood bistro. After the war, Allard forged a reputation that would be consolidated year after year. In 1946, Marthe and Marcel Allard’s son, André, married Fernande who continued to serve the dishes passed on by her mother-in-law. They were served with wines from Beaujolais and Burgundy. In July 2013, the restaurant was bought by Alain Ducasse: “Fernande Allard’s precious legacy will continue to inspire us. There is no question of touching the house’s DNA, we will simply make sure that it is part of its time.” The kitchen is still being prepared today by a woman, Pauline Berghonnier.
Figure 2.6. Restaurant Allard, located at 41, rue Saint-André-des-Arts (source: Olivier Etcheverria)
However, René Héron de Villefosse points out that: “This does not mean that between these two world wars the taste of foreign cuisine was not within reach of our jaws. You could go around the world in 12 restaurants…” [HER 56, p. 285, author’s translation]
Valérie Ortoli-Denoix points out: “Accessible to a large number of people financially and locally, Parisian restaurants are exploding in various directions. The most characteristic extension is to the south.” [ORT 90, p. 24, author’s translation] Especially in the western part of the left bank.
Jean-Robert Pitte therefore specifies that:
“Throughout the 20th Century, this distribution persisted. A diffusion is carried out even in the peripheral districts of the capital and the suburbs, but for nine-tenths of them, the establishments are all located west of a railway line from East Bastille to Porte d’Orléans.” [PIT 91, pp. 172–173]
Until the second half of the 19th Century, the restaurant remained an essentially Parisian place, becoming emblematic of the capital as Rebecca L. Spang points out:
“The restaurant had become a true cultural institution, among the most familiar and distinctive of Parisian landmarks. Until well after the middle of the 19th Century, restaurants were to remain an almost exclusively Parisian phenomenon, one rarely encountered outside the French capital.” [SPA 00, p. 2]
She specifies:
“For even by the middle of the 19th Century, restaurants were still an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon, inventions of the capital and icons of its pleasures. To be conversant with the protocols, rituals, and vocabulary of restaurant going was to be quintessentially Parisian and supremely sophisticated.” [SPA 00, p. 172]
So how did restaurants spread outside the capital?
1 1 The Ancien Régime is a French term for the political and social system of France from the Late Middle Ages until 1789.
2 2 http://grand-vefour.com, accessed September 22, 2018.
3 3 Ibid.
4 4 Ibid.
5 5 Ibid.
6 6 Ibid.
7 7 Book republished by Les éditions de l’Épure.
8 8 See Jeanne Gaillard, Paris la ville, 1851–1870, Honoré Champion, Paris, 1976.
9 9 www.restaurant-allard.fr, accessed January 3, 2019.
3
The Geographical Diffusion of Restaurants in Provinces by Cities and City Networks
The geographical diffusion of restaurants in the provinces was slow and uneven. It passed through cities organized in networks:
“From the beginning, the most permanent role of a city has been to enhance a situation in a network. Centrality is nourished by the agglomerated power that converges exchanges and relations towards privileged centers: the polarization of the territory arises from this duality between the centers and their peripheries.” [PUM 89, p. 75, author’s translation]
City networks show a hierarchical organization that is expressed in regular arrangements according to the size of cities [PUM 89]. This model is formalized by the central place theory [PUM 89].
3.1. The geographical diffusion of restaurants in the provinces: an application of rank-size law…
In the provinces, restaurants spread geographically through the cities in a rather hierarchical way.
Overall, the first restaurants appeared in the old centers of the big cities. They were particularly well supplied with multimodal transport (intertwining of the different modes of transport) and a point of convergence of flows (intertwining of interrelationships).
In Bordeaux, for example, Philippe Meyzie, writing in the Journal de Guyenne, mentioned the existence of “restaurant tables” at 1784 rue Mautrec and 1785 place Saint-Rémi. He specifies that this was a complementary activity for café owners [MEY 07, p. 72]. He also mentions the creation of the Restaurant de la Poste at 1805 rue Porte-Dijeaux [MEY 07, p. 73]. However, Philippe Meyzie points out that the development of restaurants remained very limited during the first half of the 19th Century [MEY 07, p. 73]. In 1825, Le Chapon Fin opened on rue Montesquieu near the Théâtre-Français, “but it was not really successful until the second half of the 19th Century” [MEY 07, p. 73, author’s translation]. In 1901, Cyprien Alfred-Duprat created a decor of stony ground and caves and Joseph Sicart (former sauce chef at Café Anglais) served a fine cuisine:
“Very quickly, all of Bordeaux was seduced, as was the clientele of cruise ships calling at the nearby port. Then, to verify the emerging reputation of this exceptional 28-year-old master chef, the rich customers of the Café Anglais, owners of the very first motor cars, stopped in Bordeaux on the road to Biarritz, which was then the queen of the seaside resorts.” [MES 98, p. 27, author’s translation]
The restaurant was awarded 3 Michelin stars in 1933. The development of restaurants took place at the end of the 19th Century and