How Wine and Restaurants Got Together — A Brief History

The relationship between wine and restaurants is not unlike the one between love and marriage. Or whatever you want to call a committed relationship these days. Plenty of drinking goes on outside the confines of an on-trade establishment, just as plenty of other stuff happens outside coupledom. But it is arguable that if the concept of the modern restaurant that emerged after the French Revolution had not taken hold, the wine industry as we know it would not exist in anything like its current form.This is the backstory to my analysis of what's happening to wine in restaurants in 2026 . What follows is how we got here.

To understand where we are today and, in an attempt to change a few misconceptions many of us - including myself - have shared, I think it is helpful to know a little about the history of restaurants . The French Revolution and the large number of chefs whose employers had just lost their heads and/or chateaux did not directly lead to the invention and popularisation of the modern restaurant.

According to Rebecca Spang’s The Invention of the Restaurant (Harvard, 2000) a restaurant - restorative - was a kind of bouillon/soup fashionable French began to enjoy in 1765–66 in places like Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau’s ‘restaurateur’s room’. is the usual starting point. The La Grande Taverne de Londres opened in 1782, seven years before the storming of the Bastille, while The Trois Frères Provençaux dates to 1786 and the Café de Chartres (later Grand Véfour) to around1784.

Stories that the number of establishments serving food of high quality exploded from 50 to over a thousand over the two or three decades after the Revolution seem to be unsupported. What we do know, thanks to Rachel Rich, author of Bourgeois Consumption: Food, Space and Identity in London and Paris, 1850–1914, is that there were 380 in an 1850 directory and 1,335 in one published 50 years later.

At around the same time, the way smart people enjoyed their dinners was changing. Historically, dishes were served ‘a la française’: all more or less at the same time, in the way we are used to in India, China and at a Georgian supra, butwith far more flamboyant effort going into the display. The switch to the ‘à la russe’ course-by-course model is associated with the Russian ambassador, Prince Alexander Kurakin, Russian ambassador who is supposed to have introduced it at his Clichy residence in 1810.

This dramatic move just under two and a quarter centuries, facilitated the notion of matching food and wine. But it took a while to take off. The key moment was the publication, in 1856, of La Cuisine classique : études pratiques, raisonnées et démonstratives de l’École française appliquée au service à la russe by Urbain Dubois and Émile Bernard which has been described as”one of the most influential foundational texts in culinary history… which permanently shifted how the Western world dines.”

Adopting service à la russe, involved hiring sufficient staff to have at least one servant behind two three guests and multiple sets of crockery, cutlery and glassware, all of which was very costly. It made far more sense to invite one’s guests to one of those new-fangled restaurants that were just beginning to open their doors.

Meanwhile, top quality wine, which had previously been served by taverns in carafes filled from the barrel had, coincidentally, recently begun moving into sturdy bottles, thanks to English and Dutch development of coal-fired manufacturing between 1730-1790. Then-modern cylindrical bottles could be stored in the racks that would be found in all those restaurants.

While service la russe became the default for formal dining and restaurants proliferated in France, something important happened in Britain. In 1860, William Gladstone, who would later become prime minister, used his authority as Chancellor of the Exchequer to bring in a Treaty of Commerce that slashed wine duty from 5s 10d to 3s a gallon, and a Bill seeking to let both grocers and restaurateurs sell alcohol without a justices’ licence. The stated aim of this last move was to weaken the “unnatural divorce between eating and drinking.” Initially, all forms of alcohol were to be included, but the brewers lobbied for the bill to exclude beer. So, during the Industrial Revolution when new generations of Britons could suddenly afford to spend at least a little money on their leisure, restaurants became places where food and wine were, like love and marriage, formally associated.

Between 1860 and 1880, French wine imports grew from 600,000 gallons to just under seven million, This, as James Nicholls, author of The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England was the era of what contemporaries called”cheap Gladstone claret.” Much of this wine was sold through retail stores but, by the end of the nineteenth century, the London Post Office Directory contained 1,280 refreshment rooms, hotels and dining rooms. Fifty years earlier, it had listed none.

So by the end of the nineteenth century, the pieces were in place: bottles, restaurants, and a tax policy that formally linked food and wine. The marriage was settled. Whether it's heading for divorce is the subject of my analysis of restaurants in 2026

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