Author: toddric

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The Dog Who Wanted A Person

At long last I can announce the publication of the handsome paperback of The Dog Who Wanted A Person, an illustrated fable about a charming one-year-old dog named Huleekalabulee.

On his quest to find a person or people to live with and love, Huleekalabulee meets several remarkable dogs (and one groovy cat) who help him on his way. In the course of his exciting and humorous adventures he learns many valuable lessons about life and love while overcoming hunger, danger, fear, and loneliness to ultimately discover what is most important to him.

The beautifully illustrated paperback can be purchased from the usual online book sources and you can order the book from your favorite Actual Bookstores!

Here are links to the book from online sellers we know have the book ready to order. The Dog Who Wanted A Person from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Alibris, Abe Books. More online sellers will have the book soon.

I believe if Actual Bookstore owners see and read The Dog Who Wanted A Person they will want to have stacks of copies near the cash register for bountiful sales. The trick, of course, will be getting said bookstore owners to see the book.

I’ll let you know when the e-book edition debuts in a few weeks, and when the hilarious audio version starring yours truly comes out around then, too.

If you live in England or Australia or Canada or myriad other countries outside the United States, you can order the book from your favorite book source there and your bookseller will get you a copy.

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The History of The Dog Who Wanted A Person begins in the year 2020 when I wrote and posted on my blog the first iterations of the eight episodes composing The Dog Who Wanted A Person. To my surprise and delight, nine people contacted me to say they loved the story. Among those nine were three people who had never contacted me before.

Nine people may not seem like very many people to you, but when two people let me know they’ve enjoyed one of my blog posts, I consider the post a huge success. When nine people let me know they loved The Dog Who Wanted A Person, I considered the story an international blockbuster. And then I promptly forgot all about it.

Five years went by. One day I got an email from my friend Doug Fields saying he hoped I’d do something with that story about the dog looking for a person. I only vaguely remembered the story and couldn’t remember the title. Nevertheless, I searched through various archives, found the eight episodes, made them into a single manuscript, read the totality, and decided to spend a few days rewriting the story before giving the manuscript to Marcia to read.

To my surprise, Marcia loved the story and encouraged me to publish the tale, which is a kind of children’s book for grownups and smart kids. The vocabulary is fairly sophisticated and there are some racy parts, so the story doesn’t really qualify as a children’s book, though if I had read The Dog Who Wanted A Person when I was ten, I’m sure I would have read the story a bajillion times.

Why was Marcia’s reaction surprising to me? Well… though she generally enjoys my writing, she has never raved about anything of mine as she raved about The Dog Who Wanted A Person.

All we needed were eighteen terrific illustrations and the book would be ready to publish. I inquired of my friend Vance who illustrated my book Open Body: Creating Your Own Yoga, (Avon) and my chapbook Of Water and Melons. He said he was busy until the end of time and declined the gig. I then inquired of several artist friends if they knew any likely illustrators, and I queried a number of artists-for-hire online. The upshot of these inquiries was that illustrators whose work I liked wanted a thousand dollars or more per drawing, whether the drawing was used for the book or not, and I needed eighteen drawings!

Feeling over-matched by the fees demanded by illustrators, I gave up my search and turned my attention to publishing my novel The Farm at the East Cove Hotel.

Then one cloudy morning some weeks later I decided to walk to town to run some errands. I got about a quarter-mile down the hill from our house and realized I’d forgotten my wallet. So I hiked back home, got my wallet, and resumed my journey. The extra time spent retracing my steps is crucial to the outcome of this saga.

In town I ran my errands and started for home, but rather than walk home the way I usually do, I decided to take a longer route to see some sights I hadn’t seen in a while. And just as I reached the corner of Lansing and Ukiah Streets, who should come walking along but Marcia and our charming friend Marius Constantin, the locally renowned singer possessed of enviably curly hair. They were on their way to the Goodlife Café for coffee.

I crossed the street to say hello and let Marius know The Farm at the East Cove Hotel was just out and he had a cameo in the novel. And then Marcia proclaimed, “But wait until you read Todd’s new book about a dog seeking a person to call his own. It’s fantastic.”

And I said, “Problem is I can’t find a good illustrator I can afford.”

To which Marius replied with his charming Romanian accent, “Well you know my daughter Miruna draws, and she is quite good.”

My first thought was I wonder what he means by quite good.

Nevertheless, trusting our unexpected meeting was arranged by the universe to aid the cause, I sent Marius a copy of the manuscript to share with Miruna. A few days later, Marius and Miruna, who was fourteen at the time and is now fifteen, came to my house and Miruna presented me with an early version of the drawing that graces the cover of The Dog Who Wanted A Person. Huleekalabulee! Exactly as I imagined him. Miruna’s drawing style was exactly what I wanted. We agreed on a per-drawing fee I could afford and she felt was fair, and we agreed she would receive 25% of the profits if by some miracle there are any.

Several months later, fitting her illustrating work into her busy school/life schedule, Miruna completed the last of the eighteen pencil drawings and I then had a graphics artist clean the drawings up in Photoshop. Then I placed the illustrations where they belonged throughout the manuscript, and after a frustrating series of printing snafus spanning a few more months, the book was born.

I hope you’ll get a copy. If you do get a copy and you love the book, I’d love it if you’d spread the word and help me break my current record for copies sold of one of my self-published books: 53.

Here is a brief excerpt from the book.

Coming down from Bullwinkle Butte, Huleekalabulee encountered two mutts blocking his way. One of the mutts was small and brown with enormous ears, the other a huge dirty blond.

“Slow down,” said the dirty blond. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“To the beach,” said Huleekalabulee. “I’m questing for a person of my own.”

The two mutts found this so funny they laughed for a long time until the brown mutt said, “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Huleekalabulee,” said Huleekalabulee.

This made the two mutts laugh again for another long time until the dirty blond said, “What are you… Hawaiian?”

“Not that I know of,” said Huleekalabulee. “My mom is mostly Golden Retriever and my father, according to my mom, was a big brown mutt of uncertain ancestry.”

The Dog Who Wanted A Person from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Alibris, Abe Books

Thanks!

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The Old King

There once was a king who took the reins of power rather late in his life and ruled his large kingdom with great cruelty and shortsightedness, his entire purpose self-enrichment and the enrichment of his cronies and sycophants.

For reasons unclear to the majority of the king’s subjects, a sizeable minority of the population thought the old king had magical powers and therefore they would not turn against him even though his decrees caused them terrible suffering.

So the old king continued to plunder the kingdom and deprive many of his subjects the basic necessities of life while his corrupt parliament and judges did not dispute his cruel decrees.

And verily things might have gone on like this for many more years except the old king was fast losing his marbles and it would soon be impossible to disguise his demented state from his subjects.

The old king had never made much sense when he spoke, but at least he had known where he was and what he was doing from one minute to the next. Now he was starting to show the unmistakable signs of brain rot, and most of what he said seemed insane to even his most ardent supporters.

The cartel of cruel and greedy lords who supported the king were keenly aware of the king’s deteriorating mental condition and they began discussing how to deal with the fast-approaching moment when the king would no longer know who he was or where he was or what was happening around him.

“He will be no use to us as a doddering old fool who can’t remember anything,” said one of the evil lords. “In fact, he might possibly be a threat to us, especially if he becomes paranoid and senile. What if he decides we are his enemies and orders our heads cut off?”

“I’ve got it!” said another of the lords. “The old king will fall seriously ill, and with death approaching he will anoint a successor. Then the old king will die and we will hail him as a martyr for freedom or something equally ironic, and his successor will do our bidding and we can continue plundering the kingdom.”

And so it was decided the king would be given a potion to render him weak and sickly. He would then be put to bed from where he would name the new king to carry on his glorious rule. And then the old king would conveniently die.

Verily this plot might have come to pass, except the old king still had a few of his marbles left and guessed what the evil lords were planning to do. With the last of his strength and cunning he had those plotting against him beheaded, and thereafter the old king became a babbling idiot.

Then his subjects did rise up and dethrone him, and a strange and marvelous new idea took hold throughout the kingdom, a thing called democratic socialism, a system of governance in which every citizen of the kingdom was treated with kindness and respect and afforded what they needed to live safe and meaningful lives.

The End

The Goodly Fool from Todd’s solo piano album Ceremonies.

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Twenty Years On Halloween

Halloween 2025 was the twentieth anniversary of my arrival in Mendocino. My friend Bob Smith drove the big moving truck from Berkeley, and I followed him in a little old Toyota station wagon I’d just bought from a friend. I hadn’t had a car in seventeen years, but I would need one for my new life in these hinterlands.

We arrived at the house I was renting a few miles to the east of town just as darkness was falling, and my landlord greeted us with the news that she had belatedly discovered her previous tenants were secret smokers and she was having the place thoroughly detoxified before I moved in. She had arranged for us to spend the night at the Mendocino Hotel until I could move in the next day, and when we arrived at the hotel on Main Street there were several little kids in costumes trick-or-treating in the lobby.

The next day we moved my stuff, including my piano, out of the big truck into my new digs, and my new life began. I was fifty-six and knew almost no one in Mendocino, but trusted I would eventually find my way into the society here.

Twenty years later, the Mendocino Hotel is closed and crumbling, bought buy a large corporation in no hurry to re-open the once thriving hotel. Large corporations have bought many of the inns and hotels in the area in the last decade, many of the stores in Mendocino are vacant, and many of the houses in and around Mendocino are owned and left vacant by people who purchased the houses as investments and don’t want to bother renting them, which exacerbates the already deplorable rental situation.

Even so, Mendocino is mobbed on weekends and in the summer by visitors from near and far, though the town these visitors walk around in is nothing like the town I moved to twenty years ago. The legalization of marijuana ended an era here when many people made lots of money in that illegal trade, and all that cash fueled the local economy in a very big way for several decades. On the heels of legalization and the collapse of the local marijuana economy came the pandemic, which caused many shops and local businesses to close while creating our new retail reality in which most people are now habituated to buying things online rather than from small retailers.

In my twenty years here, nineteen of those years with Marcia as my loving companion, I’ve written sixteen novels and dozens of stories and hundreds of songs. And I’ve posted a thousand blog entries, most of which are archived and accessible to you. I’ve learned to grow things in big tubs, having finally conceded defeat to the redwood roots that make growing things in the ground in our neck of the woods nearly impossible.

And, of course, I’ve seen the rise of the cell phone and social media culture, which I have nothing to do with except as an observer from afar. That new media culture, more than anything in my life, has made me feel like a stranger in a strange land.

When I was in my early twenties and living in a commune in Santa Cruz, I and a few of my commune mates made a trip up to Mendocino, circa 1973, to pick apples at a farm somewhere around here, and I loved this area so much I vowed to one day live here. My vow took thirty-three years to become reality, and I have now lived in this lovely part of the world longer than anywhere else I’ve lived during this incarnation.

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La Entrada piano solo from Todd’s album Nature of Love

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Working With Universe

The Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa wrote, “There is the wisdom of all-accomplishing action, in which speed does not have to be included in one’s working situation, but things fall into your pattern.”

This is an intriguing idea and suggests that hurrying is unwise, as is worrying about how long something takes to accomplish. This idea also suggests that if we surrender wholly to our creative process, whatever that process happens to be, things will fall into our pattern of creativity. Which is to say, if we don’t force the creative process, we will find our needs being met.

And this reminds me of my favorite Buckminster Fuller statement. “I assumed that nature would evaluate my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done, and if I was doing it in promising ways, permitted by nature’s principles, I would find my work being economically sustained.”

Both Fuller and Trungpa believed in a universe that responds to our actions. They believed universe is the instrument of karma, and karma is the manifestation of universe reacting to what we do, what we think, and how we feel, individually and collectively.

Of course, if you agree with Trungpa’s and Fuller’s ideas, you must also believe universe is aware of what we do, that we are in a mutually conscious relationship with universe. For some people this seems obvious, and for many people this seems absurd.

What do you think?

Mystery Music Box from Todd’s album Mystery Inventions.

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Word Origin Stories

In my ongoing perusal of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature, published in 1939, from time to time I come upon fascinating (to me) word origin stories and thought you would enjoy the following items.

Gerrymander, so to arrange election districts that a particular political party shall obtain representation out of proportion to its numerical strength. The word is derived from Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts, who in 1812 so arranged the boundaries of the constituencies in that state that the map presented the appearance, someone said, of a salamander. “Gerrymander,” exclaimed Gerry, and the word became a proverb.

Gipsy (or Gypsy) a corruption of Egyptian, a member of a wandering race, by themselves called ROMANY, of Hindu origin, which first appeared in England about the beginning of the 16th century and was then believed to have come from Egypt.

Gnome, from modern Latin gnomus used by Paracelsus, though perhaps not invented by him, to signify beings that have earth for their element. The word as generally used means one of a race of diminutive spirits fabled to inhabit the earth and to be guardians of its treasures.

Peeping Tom (see Godiva)

Godiva, the wife of Leofric, earl of Mercia, one of Edward the Confessor’s great earls. According to legend, her husband, having imposed a tax on the inhabitants of Coventry, promised to remit it if she would ride naked through the streets at noonday. She agreed, directed the people to keep within doors and shut their windows, and complied with his condition. Peeping Tom, who looked out, was struck blind. The story is told by Drayton in his Polyolbion, by Leigh Hunt, and by Tennyson in his Godiva.

Great Go, university slang for the final examination for the degree of B.A. at Oxford. The term is now obsolete.

Nobel Prizes, THE, were established under the will of Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-96), a Swedish chemist distinguished in the development of explosives, by which annual prizes are given for the most important discoveries in the sciences, to the author of the most important literary work of an idealist tendency, and to the person who shall have most promoted the fraternity of nations.

Vignette, an ornamental design on a blank space in a book, especially at the beginning or end of a chapter, of small size, and unenclosed in a border.  The word is a diminutive of the French vigne, a vine; originally meaning an ornament of leaves and tendrils.

Tawdry (see Audrey)

Audrey, Saint, St. Etheldreda, patron saint of Ely.

 Appears in the earliest quotation as St. Audrey’s Lace. It was probably offered for sale at her fair, and this doubtless led to the production of cheap and showy qualities of the article, which at length gave to tawdry its later meaning.

Mocha Dick, a whale legendary among whalers, the model of Melville’s white whale, Moby Dick.

Pidgin, a Chinese corruption of the English word business. Hence PIDGIN ENGLISH, the jargon used for inter-communication between Chinese and Europeans in China.

Zany, from the Italian zani, the name of servants who act as clowns in Commedia dell’ Arte, a comic performer attending on a clown. Hence an attendant, follower (almost always in a contemptuous sense); or a buffoon; or a fool, simpleton.

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Incongroovity piano solo from Todd’s album Incongroovity.

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Fall Musings 2025

I have a friend, I think he’s still alive, who lives in Maine and says there are no seasons in California. Spoken like someone who has never lived in California and spent a long rainy winter pining for spring, or a long dry summer yearning for the rainy season. 

When I dropped out of college in 1969, I was semi-fluent in Spanish thanks to a wonderful professor of Spanish I was lucky enough to study with. My semi-fluency in Spanish came in handy when in 1970 I went on an expedition with a marine biologist and his family.

We drove south along the Pacific coast all the way from California to Costa Rica searching for specimens of boring clams, not uninteresting clams, but clams that bore into rocks. And though we found few boring clams south of California, by the end of our odyssey I was fluent in Spanish, fluency I have subsequently mostly lost.

Our two lemon trees are in the midst of blossoming profusely. It remains to be seen if this astonishing blooming will produce much viable fruit, but in the meantime the thousands of blossoms are attracting more bees and hummingbirds than we’ve ever seen around here.

For the first thirteen of my twenty years in Mendocino, the local pelican presence was a small one. Then in the aftermath of a big storm that battered the west coast of North America, thousands of pelicans arrived in Mendocino and nested on the islets adjacent to our headlands, and ever since then we have lots of pelicans spending time hereabouts every year.

On a recent beach walk, this beautiful pelican was sunbathing on the shore and allowed me to snap his/her portrait. What a bird!

October is my birthday month and is also the time of year when our aloe plant sends forth her remarkable orange flower, which always puts me in mind of Dr. Seuss.

This plant has birthed two others I have potted, and now that those two are thriving, I am hopeful they will send forth flowers one day.

I wrote this blog after writing several drafts of an essay about the sorrows of our time in which I tried to make sense of why the people running our country are so intent on doing harm to others, but decided instead to share these other musings.

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Ahora Entras Tu from Todd’s album Ahora Entras Tu.

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Birthday Peace Prize

October 17. Today is my birthday. I am seventy-six.

When I was born in 1949 there were not yet credit cards. For much of my life there were no such things as personal computers or mobile phones or the Internet, yet we somehow managed to communicate with each other. You could travel to thousands of small towns all over America on spacious Greyhound buses for very little money, and I did lots of that.

When I was an aspiring young writer, the only way to make multiple copies of the stories I wrote was to type the story on a piece of typing paper atop a piece of carbon paper atop another piece of paper. If I made a typo, the error could only be effectively corrected by re-typing the entire page again. The quality of the copies was lousy at best. I believe this is why so few people aspired to be writers.

The first photocopy shops opened in the early 1970s, after which a few more people decided to try to be writers. With the advent of personal computers and laser printers in the 1980s, almost everyone who could sort of write decided to try to be a writer. Today we have Artificial Intelligence capable of writing prose that almost no one can distinguish from prose written by really good actual writers.

I have a tradition of asking people on their birthdays if they have any words of wisdom they would like to share. Here is my answer to that question for this year.

Donald Trump, who somehow became President of the United States, not once but twice, really wants to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. I think this is a wonderful goal for him to have. Here are the eight things he needs to do in order to win the prize.

1. Remove all American military personnel from all cities, American and foreign.

2. Cut the defense budget by fifty percent and spend that 700 billion dollars a year to fund universal healthcare from birth to grave and free education from nursery school through graduate school for everyone in America.

3. Build high-speed electric trains connecting all major urban areas to greatly reduce the need for jet travel, which is the largest contributor to global warming.

4. Phase out the use of fossil fuels by creating a solar power system providing more than enough power for everyone and everything in the country.

5. Make producing and selling weapons of any kind illegal.

6. Hire kind, intelligent, well-educated, non-sexist, non-racist people to run the various arms of government.

7. Nominate intelligent non-sexist non-racist people to be our judges.

8. Dedicate the rest of his life to helping the poor and disenfranchised of the world.

If Donald Trump will do these eight things, I’m sure he will win the Nobel Peace Prize, and he’ll probably win more than once.

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Precious Dream from Todd and Marcia’s album So Not Jazz

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Various Colliding

October 5 was my dear friend Rico’s 74th birthday. Rico died five years ago and he’s always in my thoughts more than usual on his birthday. I communicate with Rico’s older brother Steve on the day, and this year Steve sent me a picture of Rico circa 1988 that made me glad somebody invented photography.

My friend JB Reynolds sent me some nasturtiums seeds a few years ago, and now nasturtiums are a year-round part of our garden scene. I no longer have to plant them. They just come up where they want to be, and this year they made a wonderful display on our orchard gate, a display so lovely that several passersby have stopped to have their pictures taken with the nasturtium wall as backdrop.

We have a feral cat in the neighborhood who includes our acres in his/her ranch, which is the technical term for a cat’s domain. I see him/her a few times a year, and recently he/she was sneaking by my office window and I got this picture. He/she is a brilliant hunter and since his/her arrival we no longer have gophers. Bravo cat!

Our friend Bill Fletcher is a fellow gluten-free baker, and after we sampled his delicious homemade tortillas, Marcia got a tortilla press to make tortillas and chapatis. Today we made chapatis combining sweet potato puree, chickpea flour, and Indian spices. Yum.

I’ve been finding the news of the greater world and the machinations of those in charge of our national government extremely upsetting, so much so I am now limiting my intake of outside news to a little bit in the morning, and nothing in the afternoon or evening because all that horror infects my psyche and ruins my sleep, which is easily ruined.

I don’t want to stick my head in the sand, but I don’t want to be a sleep-deprived zombie either.

My sense is that those in charge of our national government do not want there to be another free and fair election. I think Trump sending troops into cities where troops are not needed is a tactic to prepare the nation for his suppressing the next election on the pretext of some fake crisis.

Portland and Chicago and Los Angeles, contrary to what Trump and his minions keep saying, are not war-torn hellholes, though sadly millions of people believe this nonsense because they get their news from right wing propaganda stations.

In happier news, today we harvested the last of our apples and will soon be making apple huckleberry jam by adding our apples to the several quarts of huckleberries we harvested from the bushes on our property.

Take Care

Always Love from Todd and Marcia’s album So Not Jazz

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Ravens Apples Roses

We live in a particular part of the redwood forest near Mendocino favored by ravens, not to be confused with crows.

The ravens in our neighborhood check out what’s going on at our house multiple times a day. Within minutes of a package being delivered and left outside our gate, a raven or ravens will descend and with his/her/their incredibly sharp beak(s) decimate the cardboard box to see what lies within.

The ravens are also keen on the prune plums and apples growing in our orchard. Throughout the growing season, ravens will sample plums and apples until they consider the fruit optimally ripe. When the time is ripe, they send word to their brethren and a flock of the big black birds descend on our little trees to feast and carry fruit away to their nests.

As it happens, our ravens generally like to harvest our apples and plums a week or so before we ideally like to harvest the fruit. So sometimes we net our trees to keep the ravens from getting too much of the fruit, but this is a royal pain, so more often I daily monitor the ravens monitoring the fruit, and when the pace of their sampling grows frenetic, we harvest.

This is what happened yesterday when I went out to the orchard. I found two big ravens devouring apples from our most prolific tree and I decided the time had come to pick those apples while there were still some left to pick.

In other news, we’re coming to the end of rose-blooming time around here. Roses, as you probably know, are in the botanical family Rosaceae and share a common ancestor with apples, pears, plums, cherries, strawberries, and almonds.

If you cut an apple in half sideways, not along the core, you will see a star shape formed by the seeds. And if you cut a rose hip sideways, you will see that same star shape.

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Really Really You from Todd’s CD Through the Fire

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Gems From Larousse

During the pandemic I decided to read Larousse Gastronomique from start to finish, and I did. What fun. The 1200-page tome is considered by many to be the greatest culinary encyclopedia ever assembled. Along with over four thousand recipes, there are many thousands of fascinating culinary factoids, a few of which I will share with you now.

Cockaigne

A mythical land of plenty, where men live happily without working and there is an abundance of everything. The myth, which is found in Germany and Italy, is particularly deeply rooted in Flemish tradition and dates back to a time when the specter of famine often became reality. In the legend the lucky man arrives at the land of plenty by traveling through a tunnel cut into a mountain of buckwheat flour; there he discovers a roasted pig walking about with a carving knife in its belly, a table covered with pies and tarts, hedges made of sausages, etc. and roast pigeons drop into his mouth.

Colisée (Le)

A huge establishment for entertainment that was built in 1770 near the present Rond-Point on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. It catered to thousands of people and contained four cafes, several dance halls, an ornamental lake, shopping arcades, a restaurant with a fixed-price menu, and small indoor gardens. This leisure complex proved to be highly successful at first – Marie Antoinette went there twice! Eventually, it attracted too few people, and this, together with poor management, caused it to become bankrupt in 1780. It was demolished, and a road was named after it.

Duval (Pierre-Louis)

French butcher (born Montlhéry, 1811; died Paris, 1870) He supplied the Tuileries kitchens and owned several retail butcher’s shops in Paris. In 1860 he had the idea of creating a number of small restaurants serving a single dish – boiled beef and consommé – at a fixed price. The first ‘bouillon’, in the Rue de Montesquieu, was soon followed by a dozen others.

His son Alexandre successfully developed the chain of restaurants and made an immense fortune. A well-known figure of Parisian life nicknamed ‘Godefroi de Bouillon’ by humorists of the time, he composed a Marche de petites bonnes in honor of his waitresses, who all wore a coif of white tulle and, for the first time, replaced the traditional garçons in restaurants.

Fork fourchette

An implement usually made of metal with two, thee, or four prongs on the end of a handle, used at table either for lifting food to the mouth or for serving food. Forks are also used in the kitchen for turning food in cooking, etc.

The fork has a very ancient origin and is mentioned in the Old Testament. It was first used as a ritual instrument to grip pieces of meat destined for sacrifices; later it was used in the kitchen. According to the 11th-century Italian scholar Damiani, forks were introduced into Venice by a Byzantine princess and then spread throughout Italy. But it was Henry III of France who first introduced to the French the custom of using a two-pronged fork at the table.

restaurant

An establishment where meals are served between set hours, either from a fixed menu or a la carte. The word appeared in the 16th century and meant at first “a food which restores” (from restaurer, to restore), and was used more specifically for a rich highly flavored soup capable of restoring lost strength. The 18th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin referred to chocolate, red meat, and consommé as restaurants. From this sense, which survived until the 19th century, the word developed the meaning of “an establishment specializing in the sale of restorative foods.”

Until the late 18th century, the only places for ordinary people to eat out were inns and taverns. In about 1765, a Parisian “bouillon-seller’ named Boulanger wrote on his sign: “Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods”, with a motto in dog Latin: Venite ad me omnes qui stomach laboretis, et ego restaurabo vos (Come unto me, all you whose stomachs are aching, and I will restore you.) This was the first restaurant in the modern sense of the term.

One beneficial effect of the Revolution was that the abolition of the guilds and their privileges made it easier to open a restaurant. The first to take advantage of the situation were the cooks and servants from the great houses whose aristocratic owners had fled. Moreover, the arrival in Paris of numerous provincials who had no family in the capital created a pool of faithful customers, augmented by journalists and businessmen. The general feeling of wellbeing under the Directory, following such a chaotic period, coupled with the chance of enjoying the delights of the table hitherto reserved for the rich, created an atmosphere in which restaurants became an established institution.

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