Foreign Tastes
Continental chefs dominated London’s restaurant world in the nineteenth century, says Panikos Panayi.
Today no high street in London is without its restaurants and takeaways selling food from all around the world – China, Thailand, South Asia as well as southern Europe and the Middle East, Mexico and South America. While such establishments have proliferated in recent decades, the origins of the foreign restaurant are inseparable from the development of the modern idea of dining out as it developed in nineteenth-century London – indeed, the very concept of the restaurant was a continental import, having evolved, according to common belief, in post-Revolutionary Paris from where it spread to the rest of the world (the word restaurant itself derived from the French ‘something that restores’, such as a broth, and by extension to the place where such food was sold and eaten).
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