The restaurant: Stage set and functional arrangement, the short history of an impossible typology

The historical growth in the number of restaurants is reflected in a marked increase in variety. In common parlance the term ‘restaurant’ includes everything from the exclusive temple to the gastronomic arts to the utterly unpretentious canteen. This chapter offers an introduction to some of the architectural types that have been developed for public food consumption. It discusses the role of the restaurant as a stage for public appearance and as a place in which food is consumed and prepared. It also examines the way in which design affects how food is tasted and experienced and how eating out is understood as a social event. Tracing this historical development of the formal – typological and interior – solutions from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, this chapter shows the extraordinary variety of the concept ‘restaurant’.