Bistros

Appears in

Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America

Published 2004

About

The original French incarnation of bistros is that they feature cuisine de grand-mère, or grandmother’s cooking. Bistro foods and wines are robust, rustic, and plentiful. Bistros serve simple dishes, presented simply and priced inexpensively, as would be expected in neighborhood restaurants that cater to nearby residents. Bistros in France still preserve their social center feeling.

No one is certain where the name “bistro” came from. There are several apocryphal tales to explain it, but none is convincing. One theory says that Russians occupying Paris in 1815 shouted “bistrot,” meaning faster, while they waited for food, and the French adopted the term. The only problem with that idea is that “bistro” did not enter written French until the 1880s, and the variant “bistrot” did not enter the language until the 1890s.

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