In the 12th century, roughly 600 years before Paris’s first restaurant welcomed customers, Kaifeng, China, already had a thriving restaurant scene. By then, the Song Dynasty was underway and the city’s roughly 1 million residents could not only choose to eat out, but select a restaurant specializing in certain dishes or cuisines. “If cooking was key to the revolution of humans in general, only the Chinese have placed it at the very core of their identity,” writes Fuchsia Dunlop in Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, which…
