The Global Food Heritage Project identifies the places connected with our food heritage and spotlights the people who continue to preserve these sites today.

Food Heritage Sites:

Where Foods Began

Agricultural Technology

Farms

Ranches

Meat Industry

Seafood Industry

Orchards, Groves
& Plantations

Wineries & Breweries

Markets

Kitchens, Dining Halls & Cafeterias

Restaurants

Taverns, Pubs, Cafes & Teahouses

Processing Sites

Baking

Famous Recipe Sites

Factories

Famous Foodies

Corporate Origins

Historic Food Events

Museums & Exhibits

Remembering Food Places Past

Global Food Heritage Project:

Restaurants

Landmark restaurants in continous use or preserved as historic sites

Rules, London's Oldest Restaurant

More heritage restaurant sites & history here.
(This is a work in progress. We welcome input. Contact us.)

Oldest Documented Restaurant Heritage

Hangchow, China according to Nicholas M. Keifer, ("Economics and the Origin of the Restaurant") has one of the oldest restaurant heritages in the world. Keifer writes:

"Before the Mongol invasions, Hangchow was the largest city in the world, with about a million inhabitants. By contrast the largest cities in Europe,
including Paris, were only a few tens of thousands. Hangchow had both roads and canals, and boats were used for passenger traffic as well as for freight. The main thoroughfare was the Imperial Way, stretching three miles from the Imperial Palace to the city gates. It was 60 yards wide and paved with stone and bricks. The centercity featured multistory buildings, and ten major market areas featured pork, game, vegetables, fruit, fish (fresh and salt), and rice. Fashion products were available in specialized shops,and street vendors sold pieces of roast pork.Hangchow was wealthy and luxurious, the center of elegance in China, much as Paris was for Europe 500 years later. Street entertainment(e.g., jugglers, minstrels, acrobats) was common,and there were daily performances in popular theaters, including singing and dancing. Teahouses and taverns, specializing in varieties of rice wine, proliferated. At this point, tea drinking had been popular in China for about 500 years. Three varieties of tea were cultivated near Hangchow. Others were imported from elsewhere in China. Taverns typically sold a limited selection of food as well as drinks. Menus would behanded to customers and might list pies (e.g.,shrimp pie, silkworm pie, pork or mutton pie) or bean-curd soup, oysters, or mussels. (In contrast,taverns in the west, much later, would simply set out food for those who were drinking."

"This practice was common in pre-prohibition America and does not, by the definition used here, make the tavern a restaurant.) The street activity and abundant commercial traffic in Hangchow generated demand for restaurants. The economic environment was perfect for the development of the restaurant trade, and contemporary accounts note “innumerable” restaurants. Gernet, for example, wrote: “The big restaurants had doors in the form of archways decorated with flowers.” Quoting an account dated 1275, Gernet continued: “‘As soon as the customers have chosen where they will sit, they are asked what they want to have. The people of Hangchow are very difficult to please. Hundreds of orders are given on all sides: this person wants something hot, another something cold, a third something tepid, a fourth something chilled; one wants cooked food, another raw, another chooses roast, another grill.…’” Hangchow also had many restaurants devoted to certain kinds of food or to regional cooking. Marco Polo commented on the restaurant scene there (with descriptions similar to those of the Chinese contemporaries) and in fact referred with enthusiasm to Hangchow as “the most noble city and the best that is in the world.”

"Market segmentation had become quite sophisticated by 1275. Rice was a staple, both in home and restaurant cooking. Nine different types of rice were cultivated near Hangchow. Beef was not eaten because the ox was a useful and expensive farm animal. As in contemporary China, there was no dairy herd. Milk and cheese were not part of the diet, but there was extensive variety in the restaurant cuisine. There were restaurants in the Kaefeng style, Szechwan (spicy even at that time), Ch’uchou (low-priced restaurants serving noodles with meat or fish), and possibly restaurants catering to the Muslim population—omitting from the menu pork, dog, and snails. Both fresh and salt-water fish were readily available. Geese and duck from the lake area andgame from the nearby mountains found their way to the menus in Hangchow. Restaurants were also known for particular dishes like goose with apricots, pimento soup with mussels, scented shellfish soup in rice wine, ravioli stuffed with pork,and pig cooked in ashes."

Oldest Continuously Operated Restaurant

Sobrino de Botin (Calle de Cuchilleros 17, 28005 Madrid, Spain) is a restaurant established in 1725. It is listed by the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest eatery currently in existence. Part of the restaurant's folklore has it that a young Francisco Goya worked there as a waiter whilst he was waiting to get a place at Madrid's "Royal Academy of Fine Art").

The Sobrino and its speciality of cochinillo asado ("roast suckling pig") are mentioned in the closing pages of Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises. Its other signature dish is sopa de ajo (an egg, poached in chicken broth, and laced with sherry and garlic): a favourite pick-me-up with Madrileño revellers.

Paris' Oldest Restaurant

Le Grand Véfour Paris, France

A leading restaurant of the Napoleonic era was the Véry which was lavishly decorated, and boasted a menu with extensive choices of soups, fish and meat dishes, and scores of side dishes. Balzac often dined edaciously there. Although absorbed by a neighbouring business in 1869, the resulting establishment Le Grand Véfour is still in business in the 21st century.

USA's First Restaurant

Boston, USA

The French Revolution encouraged the growth of restaurants by abolishing the monopolistic cooks' guilds and by forcing the aristocrats' former chefs to find new, proletarian uses for their talents...Travelers to France excitedly brought the news of these Parisian restaurants to an American public that already enjoyed a spiritual kinship with France ever since that country allied itself with our own Revolution. French culture had already had a considerable effect on our own...This affinity for French cooking convinced a former cook to the archbishop of Bordeaux to open his own French-style eating house in Boston in 1794. His name was Jean Baptiste Gilbert Payplat, and he called his establishment by his nickname, "Jullien's Restarator," where he became known as the "Prince of Soups," echoing the original meaning of the word "retaurant."...

Early USA Restaurant History

"But the growth of the concept of freestanding restaurants depended ultimately upon a large enough number of people willing to accept it and pay for it. In 1800 the total population of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston combined was only 200,000, but soon it began to soar. New York grew fastest--160,000 inhabitants by 1825...By 1805 New York had four coffeehouses, four oyster houses, four tea gardens, two victualing houses, and a cookshop, as well as forty-two combination boardinghouses and taverns and these increased rapidly for absorb the new prosperity...The food available in these new eating houses--which went in and out of business at an amazing rate of failure--continued to be for the most part coarse, heavy, and of mediocre or poor quality. Game was plentiful, including venison, pigeon, racoon, and elk. Turtle was considered a delicacy...Fresh meat went bad quickly, so many workers slaughtered the pigs that freely roamed the streets consuming refuse, and Broadway was lined with vendors selling roast pork. Others hawked oysters, fast becoming a passion with Americans...Once the food was set on the table, the customers tore into it with what one observer called "inconceivable rapidity," and other defined as a technique of "gobble, gulp and go." This was pretty much the standard procedure in most eating houses and taverns. Even in the grand, new, modern hotels like New York City's Hotel (1794), a service philosophy of "come-and-get-it" was accepted as normal, and communal dining rooms serving up fixed meals at set hours were till the rule, although the spendiferous Tremont House in Boston, which opened in 1828, inaugurated "French Service" in its two-hundred-seat dining room, where guests might dine at individual tables and use th new four-tined fork. By the 1830s the "American Plan," by which travelers were forced to pay for room and board whether they ate a meal or not, was becoming standard in the hotel industry. In lesser hotels and taverns, it was not so much a question of "come-and-get-it" as it was "try-to-to-eat-it."
---America Eats Out, John Mariani [William Morrow:New York] 1991 (p. 25-7) (republished from Food Timeline.)

America's Oldest Restaurant

The Union Oyster House is the oldest restaurant in Boston and the oldest restaurant in continuous service in the U.S. — the doors have always been open to diners since 1826.

Rome's Oldest Restaurant

La Campana, Vicolo della Campana 18

This restaurant, which claims to be Rome's oldest, upholds tradition with rich fava bean soup and saltimbocca.

Here's a review: "This eatery is reportedly the oldest one in Rome, opened around in the 15th century. Circa 1518, if you really want to know the exact year. The Zagat Survey says this one always turns out "basic" and "honest" Roman food and also awarded it with a very high grading for their food, second only to my favorite Agata e Romeo. The food aside, this restaurant warrants my visit just for the seek of its muturity. The common sense of a gourmet tells me that if an eatery can stand there like a stalwart for 5 centuries, it can’t be too bad."

Read the rest of the review here.