Fishes with Funny French Names

Abstract

The book’s focus is the establishment of the French restaurant in London in the mid- to late-nineteenth century and its subsequent development throughout the twentieth and into the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It is also concerned with the place of food as a form of cultural exchange, and how culinary practices are shared within the wider social, cultural, political and economic contexts of a diverse capital city. What happens when a modern Parisian institution arrives in London, a city with its own long-established food traditions and cultures of eating outside the home? Why is French cuisine so readily adopted by the English upper classes’ dining-out culture? Where else in the city, and by whom and when, was French cooking purveyed and consumed? What sorts of cultural exchanges are generated between the French and Londoners, and between Paris and London, by the development of the restaurant, and how do these evolve over a century and a half? British references to France and to the French are littered with associations with food from the status of haute cuisine and the restaurants and chefs associated with it to contemporary concerns about food poverty and food waste, to dietary habits and the politicisation of food, and at every level in between. Thinking about the place of the French restaurant in London restaurant and food culture over a long time span, in many and varied places and spaces in the capital, creates a more complex picture than that which may appear obvious.