Sometimes the questions that five year old children ask are remarkable. This past Sabbath, I was asked a simple and straightforward question by a five year old who wanted to know where the word restaurant came from. She thought, straightforwardly enough, that the word had something to do with rest. This is how children tend to think, after all, that a similar sound has a similar meaning. Given that the word was nearly identical in English, French, Spanish, and Italian, I figured it came from some sort of latin root, but I was candid enough to admit that I did not know the origin of the word and would look it up. And so I did, and what I found was itself interesting and worthy of discussing and bringing attention at least to those few who brave the ominous Latin title of this entry to take a look at what it means, and how the restaurant we know, soup, and the Gospels intersect in one very strange way. Since odd connections are my expertise, let me begin.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary [1], the word restaurant itself, before it ever talked about a place where people bought food (its ordinary usage today), was itself a word used to describe bullion-based soups that were designed to restore health, or what we would call “chicken noodle soup” in terms of our own contemporary eating. A french term used since the Middle Ages, restaurant was a noun form of the french word restorer, which meant to restore or to refresh. So eating a bouillons restaurants (a refreshing bullion soup) was designed to make one feel better, just like the way I eat noodle soups of several kinds with such alarming regularity that one of my nicknames at work is “noodles” on account of my love for soup. It should be noted that my five-year old friend was quite accurate in realizing that a restaurant had something to do with rest.

This original use, though, only begins to hint at the reason why we call a place where we order food that others prepare and serve a restaurant, and this is where my friend’s intuition matches the shift in the word restaurant to describe the soup that is eaten to the place where refreshing food is prepared without our expenditure of labor. That shift only came about fairly late, in 1765, when a Frenchman opened up a shop that sold consumès (the fine dining name for chicken noodle soups and their fancier and more exotic cousins), including the familiar soups, with a Gospel verse quoted from the Latin vulgate written on the outside of the shop: “Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis et ego vos restaurabo [1].” If one knows a bit of Latin, one can recognize this as Matthew 11:28, which reads: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Here we see a few remarkable confluences. For one, the word restaurabo means rest in Latin, exactly confirming the intuitions of my young friend. For another, the word restaurabo, when combined with the fact that the shop sold familiar soups called restaurants, meant that the shop itself was considered a restaurant. Tying the business of selling prepared food that was designed to refresh at a markup to urban audiences near the Louvre, who presumably had enough income to spend on the markup for food preparation (and to pay the first restauranteur’s rent, which could not have been cheap in late ancien regime Paris), and the desire to save labor, with a message from the Gospels promoting rest made the term stick. Ever since then, especially once refugees from the French Revolution brought the practice to England and the United States (and, given the prestige of French haute coulture within Western Civilization, and the prestige of Europe and Europe’s settler colonies around the world), anywhere where one went to rest while being served refreshing food prepared by others was considered a restaurant, totally unaware of the cheeky and bold biblical reference that connected the class statement being made by going to a restaurant and the type of food that was consumed there.

This class statement is worthy of brief comment. To go to a restaurant, and by that I mean at least a casual dining place where one is not pressed for time, is making a statement of aspiration or belonging to a leisure class that can afford others to cook and serve food, often of a multi-course nature. This habit can be immensely refreshing, and it can also be extremely damaging to one’s clothing budget and alarming when one weighs themselves from time to time. Typically, I go to restaurants with friends to enjoy social time with others or when I desire to be refreshed with minimum labor to myself when I want to relax and read a book, which happens pretty often. This, apparently, was part of the design of Mr. Boulanger, and every time we eat at a restaurant, let us remember to give thanks for the connection between the biblical concept of Sabbath rest, a bit of corporate gamesmanship, and good cooking. We are still the beneficiaries of his innovation today.

[1] This is the entire entry to be found on the word restaurant:

restaurant (n.) Look up restaurant at Dictionary.com
1821, from French restaurant “a restaurant,” originally “food that restores,” noun use of present participle of restaurer “to restore or refresh,” from Old French restorer (see restore).

In 1765 a man by the name of Boulanger, also known as “Champ d’Oiseaux” or “Chantoiseau,” opened a shop near the Louvre (on either the rue des Poulies or the rue Bailleul, depending on which authority one chooses to believe). There he sold what he called restaurants or bouillons restaurants–that is, meat-based consommés intended to “restore” a person’s strength. Ever since the Middle Ages the word restaurant had been used to describe any of a variety of rich bouillons made with chicken, beef, roots of one sort or another, onions, herbs, and, according to some recipes, spices, crystallized sugar, toasted bread, barley, butter, and even exotic ingredients such as dried rose petals, Damascus grapes, and amber. In order to entice customers into his shop, Boulanger had inscribed on his window a line from the Gospels: “Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis et ego vos restaurabo.” He was not content simply to serve bouillon, however. He also served leg of lamb in white sauce, thereby infringing the monopoly of the caterers’ guild. The guild filed suit, which to everyone’s astonishment ended in a judgment in favor of Boulanger. [Jean-Robert Pitte, “The Rise of the Restaurant,” in “Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present,” English editor Albert Sonnenfeld, transl. Clarissa Botsford, 1999, Columbia University Press]

Italian spelling ristorante attested in English by 1925.

Source: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=restaurant. Accessed 17 April 2015.