A public establishment where food is served.
The word restaurant first appeared in French in the sixteenth century as a name for highly flavoured soups that supposedly gave strength to someone exhausted by physical exertion; the name for these soups was modelled after the French restaurer, meaning to restore, which in turn derives from the Latin restaurare, meaning to give back. In 1765, the popularity of these nutritious “restaurants” prompted a Parisian soup-seller named Boulanger to open a shop specializing in them; by the 1780s the success of Boulanger’s shop had spawned many imitators, prompting the word restaurant to be transferred from the soups to the establishments that sold them. English borrowed the word in 1827, by which time these eating establishments sold much more than just soup. The word cafe had been borrowed from French about twenty-five years earlier, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that it lost its sense of coffee-house and came to denote a casual restaurant.