24 - À table !
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Patrick Rambourg
Cards-menus of a Parisian restaurant «Chez Mercier» from 1933 to 1971.
Le Temps des médias n° 24, Printemps-Été 2015, p. 66-81.
This study is based on a unique collection of menus-cards from a Parisian restaurant covering five decades, from the mid-1930s to the beginning of the 1970s, in a time when Paris is the gastronomic reference. It shows both the culinary continuity of an establishment that is appreciated for its bourgeois cuisine, the slow evolution of the taste, and the mediation of restaurant menus. It is indeed from the map of the tariffed dishes that the customer chooses the mets that he will consume. Where from the attention which the restorer will carry in his writing and in his presentation. The game of the scriptures, the used colors, the themes of the illustrations, but also the designations and the dishes offered, are a language understood by all, showing also the culinary style of the restaurant, while creating a complicity with the regulars the institution.