[HN Gopher] What happened to the n in restaurateur?
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What happened to the n in restaurateur?
Author : turtlegrids
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-02-24 19:03 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ciachef.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ciachef.edu)
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Fascinating history - I didn't realize that restaurants were so
| recent.
|
| But language evolves to follow common use, and "restauranteur" is
| also correct:
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/restauranteur
| decimalenough wrote:
| The _term_ is recent. Places where you can pay for food are
| ancient.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| I was thinking about that... Is there a distinction between a
| restaurant where you can order specific dishes (made to
| order?) vs a place where you just got whatever is available?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Not anymore in english, because the second went basically
| completely extinct except a few location- or activity-
| specific exceptions like food trucks and sport concessions.
| puzzledobserver wrote:
| Not really.
|
| Or at least not completely extinct in South India. Some
| of my favorite childhood memories are from these messes
| (short for mess hall, I assume). You go there, pay what
| they ask, eat what they serve.
|
| MTR, Brindavan on MG Road (though that's long gone), Iyer
| Mess in Malleshwaram.
|
| What they lack in choice they usually make up for in
| taste.
|
| You're right that they have a more traditional ambience
| and newer restaurants offer more choice, but they are
| definitely thriving in the parts of Bangalore that I grew
| up in.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yeah sorry I intended there to be a more clear constraint
| on the claim I was making. It's mostly extinct in the
| anglosphere, so english doesn't really differentiate. But
| the concept itself is still popular globally.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I think "cafeteria" as used by outfits like S&W
| Cafeteria, etc. would have been somewhat close to the
| idea of "a place where you get what is available", but
| they have - as you say - mostly gone away. I suppose a
| "buffet" would also be close, in that you get to pick
| your food, but you're picking from an array of pre-
| prepared items with no room for variation for the most-
| part. As opposed to "made to order".
| jauco wrote:
| In the netherlands we use the french term 'a la carte' to
| mean that the restaurant allows you to pick a pre-defined
| set of dishes. As opposed to having a daily changing menu
| with maybe a choice between meat/fish/vegetarian which is
| called "table d'hote" but the latter has gotten a
| connotation of being less fancy. So if a fancy restaurant
| does table d'hote they generally call it 'our concept' and
| explain it to every guest as if it's a unique thing.
|
| I'm guessing the french use the same words. And maybe some
| english speaking countries as well? Given how pervasive
| french is around restaurants.
| theultdev wrote:
| hmm, usually a la carte in the US means you can buy
| individual items vs a meal combo.
|
| - adjective: (of a restaurant meal) having unlimited
| choices with a separate price for each item
|
| - noun: a menu having individual dishes listed with
| separate prices
|
| - adverb: by ordering items listed individually on a menu
| amyjess wrote:
| I believe the term is "short order" for when you have
| dishes cooked to order.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. Since ancient times there were
| places where you could pay for food, but that was always a
| side business of an establishment whose main purpose was
| either (a) selling alcohol (or, in some places, coffee or
| tea) or (b) providing lodging for travelers.
|
| I suspect that an establishment whose _main purpose_ is
| selling food to order may be a fairly recent innovation.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I suspect that an establishment whose main purpose is
| selling food to order may be a fairly recent innovation.
|
| It's not; every city has always had them. Food is actually
| far more important than alcohol is.
| neitsa wrote:
| Not sure if it would fit the definition of a restaurant we
| have today but a thermopolium was a shop where you would
| buy food. I'm not sure how widespread the concept was,
| though.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopolium
| burkaman wrote:
| This is wild, I have read this word many times but never
| consciously noticed that there is no N there. I would have bet
| money that "restauranteur" is the more common spelling in
| practice, but I'm completely wrong:
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=restaurateur%2....
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| I'm sure it's on every cookbook/restaurant/food editor's list
| of top things to correct.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Do they also ask for the meaning of entree in this test?
|
| Even Miriam Webster has a note that Americans mistakenly use it
| for main course (completely incorrectly) because French sounds
| fancier.
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entr%C3%A9e#:~:te...
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Semantic drift is not "incorrect".
| karaterobot wrote:
| At first it's a mistake, then eventually it's not.
| Clamchop wrote:
| English has borrowed French words a lot. It has often imported
| the same word multiple times, and they frequently have
| different meanings.
|
| Including entree, incidentally, which gave us the entree and
| the entry.
|
| Even in France, in the context of elaborate multiple course
| meals, the entree eventually stopped being the very first thing
| that was served. Soup started to take that spot, and gave us
| what we now call the appetizer, which used to be chiefly soup
| or salad but now could be almost anything.
|
| For those elaborate meals, the entree was just the first course
| of the multiple courses that were the "main" dish.
|
| Separate main courses have largely fallen out of fashion, and
| they collapsed into one plate with a serving of each. This is
| still the entree in the US and Canada, and that makes perfect
| sense, given the history.
|
| So no, it wasn't just that it sounded fancier.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > completely incorrectly
|
| That meaning is also accepted by the French Academy nowadays:
|
| Fig. En parlant d'une periode de temps, d'un processus.
| Commencement, debut. A l'entree de l'hiver. Des l'entree du
| repas. Par metonymie. Mets qui vient apres les hors-d'oeuvre et
| precede le plat principal. Une entree chaude, froide. Servir un
| vol-au-vent, un souffle en entree. Par extension. Plat
| principal. Un repas compose d'un hors-d'oeuvre, une entree et
| un dessert.
|
| https://www.dictionnaire-academie.fr/article/A7E1159
| plaguuuuuu wrote:
| I had no idea it was used for main course in the US, that's
| wild. This would be very, very confusing for Australians
| (probably Brits as well)
| tome wrote:
| This is just begging the question! So "restaurateur" was first,
| but did "restaurant" _get_ an "n"? Why isn't it "restaurat"? The
| reason is that in French (ultimately from Latin) "-ateur" means
| "person who" and "-ant" means roughly "ing". So a "restaurater"
| is someone who restores and "restaurant" means "restoring" (i.e.
| a restoring soup, subsequently place).
| banannaise wrote:
| You consult a restorator, who gives you a restorant!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Huh, the article immediately suggests a related question to me:
|
| > BTW, the feminine version of a restaurateur was
| "restauratrice."
|
| That makes perfect sense, since the feminine agentive suffix in
| Latin is -rix. But I thought the feminine agentive ending in
| French was -euse! Where did we get "masseuse"?
|
| Wiktionary suggests that -euse is an alternate equivalent of
| -rice, derived from Latin -osus (which has no agentive meaning
| at all; it means "full of [whatever]", and transformed into a
| French agentive suffix by people who felt that -eur and -euse
| must be related because they sound so similar.
| forty wrote:
| I cannot really come up with a good rule, but I notice that
| words in -teur seem to have a feminin in -trice (restaura-
| teur/-trice, ama-teur/-trice, institu-teur/-trice, anima-
| teur/-trice) while other -eur words seem to prefer -euse
| (mass-eur/-euse, football-eur/-euse, arnaqu-eur/-euse).
| llsf wrote:
| Since we are talking about spelling, it is "hors d'oeuvre" and
| not "hors d'oeuvre".
|
| On macos: Option + q for oe
| hughdbrown wrote:
| > This puzzler, like many other difficult-to-spell food terms
| (such as hors d'oeuvre), also has its derivation in the French
| language.
|
| That's the whole story: people who don't know French (or any
| foreign language, likely) cannot spell a French word.
| jjgreen wrote:
| Bouleuques.
| jauco wrote:
| This just pushes the question one step further. Why did the chefs
| who used to be employed by aristocrats, when they started opening
| public eating places. Not call them auberge (french for tavern or
| inn) or cantine or hotel or bistrot or even cabaret (which used
| to mean small restaurant) but instead picked 'restaurant' an, at
| that time, medical term.
| wahern wrote:
| Based on https://www.etymonline.com/word/restaurateur and
| https://parisfoodhistory.blogspot.com/2018/06/what-were-very...
| is seems the choice of wording was one part legal hack and one
| part marketing gimmick.
|
| TL;DR: Apparently only traiteurs were permitted to sell meals.
| Restaurants were marketed as a kind of (I guess) upscale health
| service, originally only selling fancy broths. One of the early
| restaurateurs is documented as using the advertisement, "Venite
| ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis, & ego restaurabo vos"
| ("Come to me, all of you whose stomachs are in distress, and I
| will restore you", an allusion to Matthew 11:28, "Come to Me,
| all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you
| rest.")
| bombcar wrote:
| Based on the other comment, maybe it's why many (most?) sodas
| we have today come from being marketed as cure-alls.
| kgwgk wrote:
| "Also, remember that the word is pronounced like it is spelled."
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| Damn. My French is pretty solid, and used to be good enough to do
| well in masters-level French literature classes at a French
| university in France, back when I was studying that kind of thing
| on a full-time basis. (I'm a native speaker of American English.)
|
| I'd have incorrectly spelled it with the N when speaking English.
| When speaking French, the word restaurateur, in my experience,
| has generally referred to someone who restores things like
| artworks or buildings. When referring to someone who owns a
| restaurant, we'd have *always* said proprietaire.
| cocoto wrote:
| No, restaurateur is often used here in France, simply for
| someone owning a business and working in "restauration". When
| using restaurateur instead of proprietaire we are emphasizing
| the work, because someone can be the owner without actually
| managing/working in it.
| forty wrote:
| Yeah I never heard "le proprietaire" especially used for a
| restaurant owners.
|
| Personally this is the first definition that come to my mind
| when seeing the word restaurateur, before artwork/building
| restaurateurs.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| I suppose I'm showing my age, or the biases of the space I
| lived/worked in, then!
| kristjank wrote:
| > BTW, the feminine version of a restaurateur was
| "restauratrice." The term was used in the mid to late 18th
| century, but thankfully never caught on.
|
| I don't know why the thankfully was needed. It looks like a
| pretty word to me.
| idoubtit wrote:
| Since about half the English words come from Latin, mostly
| through French, there are many cases of -ant and -ator in the
| English language. So I thought that most American adults knew
| that -ant is like -ing (see "migrant"), and that -ator is a role
| (see "gladiator").
|
| Here are words of this kind, like "applicant"/"applicator":
|
| officiant inhalant applicant aspirant fumigant coagulant
| communicant contaminant lubricant litigant participant
| refrigerant resonant radiant celebrant defoliant desiccant
| discriminant vibrant
|
| This list was built with: grep -E "^($(grep -E
| 'ator$' wordlist_en.txt | perl -pe 's/ator\n/ant|/'))\$"
| wordlist_en.txt
|
| The words of common English come from: aspell
| -d en dump master | aspell -l en expand | perl -pe 's/\s/\n/g;' >
| wordlist_en.txt
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