The Surprisingly Salacious History of the Modern Restaurant

If you were to head to Paris in the mid-eighteenth Century and ask for a restaurant, you might be handed a bowl of meat bouillon, prepared in such a way as to improve vigor and perhaps even sperm production. Restaurant referred first to the broth itself and then to the eateries in which men, and less frequently women, could eat said broth. As restaurant came to mean the luxurious establishment at one which could eat an elaborate menu of delicate food items prepared by talented chefs, sex stayed the menu, and restaurants and the city’s sex workers formed a mutually beneficial relationship to serve diners’ appetites. Even as restaurants jumped across the pond to the US, the correlation remained. As a word of warning, this episode may not be appropriate for younger ears. Joining this episode is Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves , Professor of History at the University of Victoria and author of Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex . Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag , composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “ Sugar Blues ,” composed by Clarence Williams with lyrics by Lucy Fletcher; this perform…