Cafés, restaurants and hotels are some of the core spaces of modernity. These spaces of taste and leisure have long provided the settings for public performance and image cultivation for city-dwellers in the emerging metropolises of the world. This is where modernity is felt most strongly. Suspended between private and public space, these sites offer a backdrop for urban bohemians, for the plotting of revolutions, for the beginnings and ends of romances.

Architecture historian Franziska Bollerey takes readers on an engaging journey through the history of cafés, restaurants and hotels, analyzing their architectural and cultural significance and charting their shifting roles in the development of the modern metropolis. Thoroughly researched and abundantly illustrated, Bollerey’s Setting the Stage for Modernity: Restaurants, Cafés, Hotels offers a richly faceted view of this important part of Western cultural history for the first time.