Definition
A restaurant is an establishment where food and drink are prepared and sold to customers for consumption on the premises. In ordinary usage the term describes a broad range of eating establishments, from formal sit-down dining to fast-food counters. In law, the term carries no single fixed meaning but arises most frequently in regulatory contexts — licensing, health and safety, zoning, liquor permitting, and liability — where the specific statutory or ordinance definition governs. The critical historical legal question was whether a restaurant could qualify as an "inn" for purposes of innkeeper liability and related common-law duties, a question the sources treat as open rather than settled.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An eating establishment in which diners are served food, usually by waiters at their tables but sometimes (as in a fast food restaurant) at a counter.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An eating house.
The gap between common and legal meaning is not a difference in what a restaurant is, but in what legal category it occupies. Common usage treats "restaurant" and "inn" as obviously distinct concepts. Legal usage historically refused to draw that line with precision — a restaurant could, depending on its operations, fall within the legal definition of an inn and thereby trigger a different and more demanding body of obligations.
Common Confusion
Restaurant vs. Inn: The historical dictionaries uniformly flag this confusion. A restaurant as commonly understood is merely an eating house; an inn traditionally provided both lodging and food. But the legal definition of "inn" was never strictly limited to establishments offering overnight accommodation, and courts were asked to determine whether a restaurant that served meals to the traveling public could be treated as an inn for purposes of innkeeper duties (including liability for guests' property and obligations to receive travelers without discrimination). The answer turned on the specific facts and the jurisdiction's definition of inn — not on the word "restaurant" alone. Researchers should not assume the modern categorical distinction maps cleanly onto historical legal analysis.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical research challenge with "restaurant" is that it is primarily a regulatory and statutory term rather than a common-law term of art. Its meaning in any given source depends entirely on the definitional section of the governing statute or ordinance — a liquor licensing act, a health code, a zoning ordinance, or a food safety regulation may each define "restaurant" differently, and those definitions do not necessarily align with one another.
For historical corpus research, the more productive pathway is often through the related terms: inn, innkeeper, eating house, tavern, and saloon. Historical legal literature organized food-service establishments along a different taxonomy than modern regulatory law does, and "restaurant" appears infrequently in older treatises as a legal category in its own right. When it does appear, it is almost always in the context of the inn question.
Researchers working in liquor law, tort liability for food service, or premises liability should check whether the jurisdiction's statute defines the term and whether the definition has changed over time. Definitional shifts in food-service licensing law have been frequent, particularly in the twentieth century, and a term that meant one thing in a 1920 ordinance may mean something quite different in a modern health code.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four historical sources agree on the core point: "restaurant" as commonly understood means an eating house, but the term has no fixed legal definition sufficient to exclude it from the legal category of "inn." Black's (2nd Ed.) and Bouvier's both cite the same underlying authority for this proposition. Anderson's frames it most usefully for researchers by directing cross-references to eating house, entertainment, inn, saloon, and tavern — signaling that the legal literature of the period organized this subject through those established categories rather than through "restaurant" as an independent term.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the modern regulatory dimension. They were written before the dense statutory framework of food-service licensing, public health codes, and zoning law developed into its present form. That silence means historical dictionary entries for "restaurant" are largely unhelpful for regulatory research and are best consulted only for the narrow inn-qualification question.
Jurisdictional Note
Modern statutory definitions of "restaurant" vary significantly across jurisdictions, particularly in the context of liquor licensing (where a "restaurant" license often requires a minimum percentage of revenue from food sales) and health regulation (where definitions may turn on seating capacity, service method, or food preparation on premises). Researchers should always locate and apply the operative statutory definition rather than relying on any general or dictionary meaning.