Dinner Reservation vs. Engage a Table

Blogger Burrito Justice found references to West Coast restaurants that asked for reservations, even by telephone.

But I still wasn't satisfied.

So, I went to Rebecca Spang, a Cornell Ph.D whose first book was The Invention of the Restaurant,* published by Harvard University Press. She's now an associate professor of history at Indiana University, where her research focuses on food, money, and consumption. If anyone was going to know where the idea of the reservation came from, it was Spang. Her book traces the narrative of the restaurant back to 18th-century France, and given what Carmody and Appelbaum had said, I put the question to her like this: "Does the practice trace back to the 18th-century development of the restaurant? Or is it a bolt-on of the industrial age and widespread diffusion of the telephone?"

Fascinatingly, she told me that the question had never come up before. (Certainly it had never occurred to me, but once it had, it seemed like a gap in my knowledge that I had to fill.) But when she thought about it, she was able to come up with the definitive answer I'd been looking for.

Reserving a table is not so much an "industrial age bolt-on" as it's a slippage from the older custom of reserving a ROOM in a restaurant. As my book explains, 18th-cy "caterers" [traiteurs] either served clients in their homes or in rooms at the traiteur's, the first self-styled restaurateurs borrowed from cafes in having lots of small tables in one big room. Throughout the nineteenth century, many big city restaurants continued to have both a (very) large public eating room with numerous, small (private) tables AND a number of smaller rooms that could be reserved for more private meals. (Much as some restaurants have special "banquet facilities" or "special occasion" rooms today.) So, for instance, in Elisabeth Marbury, Manners: A Handbook of Social Customs (Chicago, 1888) we find: "When a dinner is given at a public restaurant, a table can be reserved in the public dining room or a private room can be engaged. It is usual to order the dinner beforehand, so that there will be no needless delay in serving it when the guests arrive."

Why did the practice develop? In the startup terms of our day, what problem did the institution of restaurant reservations solve? Well, the answer boils down to... sex and propriety.

I only have an impressionistic sense of this (no quantitative data!) but I have the strong feeling that restaurant reservations of the sort described above are also the product of gender imbalance in American cities at the end of the nineteenth century--comparatively lots of single, affluent men who could not decently invite single women into their homes. They therefore entertained in restaurants, treating the restaurant as a public extension of home. See, for instance, Walter Germain, The Complete Bachelor: Manners for Men (NY: 1897): "The public restaurant or dining room is the place for a bachelor supper when ladies are guests. A private room is not proper, and your guests want to see and be seen." The same text asserts "All meals in a restaurant, unless organized on the spur of a moment, are ordered beforehand and everything, including the waiter's tip, arranged and settled for. If you have not an account at the restaurant, pay the bill at the time you arrange the menu and reserve the table."



So, what we have in the nineteenth century is restaurant reservations as a way of hiring a caterer or being able to throw a dinner party in the absence of all the necessary physical and social accoutrements (from wife and maidservants to a cook, fingerbowls and fishknives for 16, etc. etc.)

What about the telephone? I've grown up in an era where technology has forced lots of changes in the envelope of social possibility. So I assumed that the telephone must have been an important force. If there is one thing that telephones are good at, it is making reservations at restaurants.