Once upon a time there was a reservation book

One day in March 1793, in the midst of the French Revolution, a courier arrived at Le Procope, one of the oldest restaurants in Paris, with a very special request: in a week?s time, the 20 most prominent members of the Jacobin party would visit the café to hold an important working dinner. The owner of Le Procope was concerned ?these politicians had a reputation for being intransigent, impetuous and quick to use the guillotine in the face of any inconvenience. With such thoughts in mind, he made all the arrangements for the event without delay. He wrote down the 20 names and the date of the dinner in his son?s drawing notebook. This gesture, and the nervous writing, marked a beginning in the art of hosting. This first ever formal reservation brought along the invention of a device that is still used on a daily basis in the world?s top restaurants: the reservations book.

Brasserie Le Procope, in París

We must confess that this story is the fruit of our imagination but it is a plausible scenario, an event that could have easily happened around that time and in a place like the Procope. In those turbulent times, the restaurant trade in France experienced unprecedented growth. The Revolution had waived the prerogatives of the aristocracy and had put an end to the privileged lifestyle of the nobility in their palaces across France. This radical change meant that a considerable number of highly respected chefs who had been working in stately kitchens for a very restricted public were suddenly out of work. They started to open restaurants with a new clientele in mind: the liberal bourgeoisie that emerged victorious from the Revolution.

Public restaurants existed since the Middle Ages ?bouillons in France, taverns and inns in England, mesones and bodegas in Spain, gasthäuser in Germany and trattorie in Italy. The novelty after the Revolution was that the offer was designed to attract the wealthy. The end of the 18th century and the early part of the 19th saw a boom in gourmet restaurants, particularly in England and the US, where fine dining became a prominent cultural and consumption trend. One of the elements that set fine restaurants apart from the rest was the appearance of separate tables, in contrast with the long -and shared- tables found in traditional cafés and inns. The great restaurants of the time were so successful that the reservations system became an essential management tool, even to this day.

These stories are relevant because we have created our first reservations book. Elegant and useful, it is very well received by the numerous restaurants offering our wines on their wine lists. Would the anxious owner of Procope approve? We think so.

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