A Foodie view of restaurant guides: knock, knock

There were restaurant guides almost as soon as there were restaurants. In 1789, as cooks left the service of Revolution – chopped aristocrats, the number of restaurants in Paris rose from fewer than a hundred, in the year of the Revolution, to more than 500 in 1804, the year following the publication of the first restaurant guide, the Almanack des Gourmands. This annual was the work of Grimod de la Reynière (b 1758), a physically unattractive misogynist, who, according to Quentin Crewe’s Great Chefs of France, diverted ‘his sensual appetites into gastronomy’, and whose ‘power was enormous, being sufficient to make or break an establishment’. Blanc’s Guide des Dineurs followed in 1814, and by 1900 the Michelin Tyre company had published its first – and free – motorists’ guide to hotels and restaurants in France.