Читать книгу The Restaurant, A Geographical Approach - Olivier Etcheverria - Страница 16

Restaurants were born in urban areas and are particularly concentrated in the city centers.

DEFINITION.– The urban center is an “urban geotype characterized by the maximum association of the density and diversity of social realities […]. An urban center has a potential, linked to its level of urbanity (urbanity being considered as societal production, arranged in space, resulting from the interaction of density and diversity), and also to the modalities of the spatial disposition of density and diversity. This potential, which expresses the attractive and polarizing capacity of the center, is called centrality” [LUS 03, p. 144, author’s translation].

The center offers the specific coupling of density and diversity from a human, socioeconomic and cultural point of view. The centrality of restaurants corresponds to a strategic location that places the needs of the dense and diverse at the heart of the concerns of the first restaurateurs. The density and diversity of the permanent inhabitants ensure a potentially stable local customer “fund”. In addition, the density and diversity of temporary inhabitants (tourists) allow for additional customers. More generally, this centrality of restaurants is expressed in the density and diversity of flows, relationships and exchanges, products, capital, information, discourses and imaginations.

The first restaurants were established and developed in the center of Paris, particularly at the Palais-Royal.

While the restaurant requires density and diversity, it was initially so, as shown by the solid and liquid contents of the menus of the first restaurants. The menu of the restaurant Véry is exemplary (see Figure 2.1). Pierre Andrieu recalls the geographies of this restaurant:

“At the beginning of the First Empire, a Lorraine native named Véry opened a restaurant in Les Tuileries, on the terrace of Les Feuillants, and then, in 1808, opened a branch near the Palais-Royal theater, and its reputation was soon to eclipse the first house […]. Véry’s name alone evokes a Palais-Royal sparkling with life and luxury, galleries cluttered with beautiful figures with bare arms, shoulders open to the air, while passing by them, dragging their Essling or Jena swords, the dashing officers, Oudinot’s grenadiers or Murat’s horsemen.” [AND 55, pp. 38–39, author’s translation]

In a context of concentration, restaurants, places of density and diversity, were intersected by flows and animated by centripetal forces. Through the service offerings, practices, discourses and imaginations they instilled, restaurants also produced density and diversity, and thus reinforced them. It was a dynamic of polarization.