You may think that the chief reason for cooking food is to make it taste better. Actually, the changes cooking produces in food help us to digest it better. Cooking food also guards our health, because the heat destroys parasites and bacteria which might cause us harm.

No matter how good mother’s cooking is, we like to go out to a restaurant sometimes (if we can afford it). It’s not just because there’s different food to eat, but we also enjoy the “going out.”

Long before there were restaurants, there were taverns where people gathered to talk, have something to drink, and perhaps something to eat.

In London, there was another kind of place that was also the forerunner of the restaurant. This was the cookshop. The chief business of these cookshops was the sale of cooked meats which customers carried away with them. But sometimes a cookshop would also serve meals on the premises and was somewhat like a restaurant. There were cookshops in London as long ago as the twelfth century!

The first place where a meal was provided every day at a fixed hour was the tavern in England. They often became “dining clubs,” and these existed in the fifteenth century. By the middle of the sixteenth century, many towns-people of all classes had the habit of dining out in the taverns. Most of the taverns offered a good dinner for a shilling or less, with wine and ale as extras. Many of the taverns became meeting places of the leading people of the day. Shakespeare used to be a regular customer of the Mermaid Tavern in London.

About 1650 coffeehouses also sprang up in England. They served coffee, tea, and chocolate, which were all new drinks at that time. Sometimes they served meals, too.

In 1765 a man named Boulanger opened a place in Paris which served meals and light refreshments, and he called his place a “restaurant.” This is the first time this word was used. It was a great success and many other places like it soon opened. In a short time, all over France, there were similar eating places called “restaurants.” But the word “restaurant” was not used in England until the end of the nineteenth century.

In the United States, the first restaurant of which there are records was the Blue Anchor Tavern in Philadelphia, opened in 1683.