[xlm1717]

This being the internet, you don't have to wonder about such things.

Here's a page with a lot of history on several different food topics: http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html

One interesting tidbit is that oldest dining menu comes from ancient Sumeria. They list a proper meal for the gods. Since the king was considered a living god, this could be considered a menu for the king. (So restaurants likely started off as a formalized meal "ritual" for the king.)

It also says that, broadly, street food can be traced back to military mess units. It's likely that during peacetime, the people who prepared food for military units went on to prepare food for the general public.

I also like to imagine that we have football stadiums now because of the Roman use of the Coliseum for watching live sports thousands of years ago, and the Coliseum was just the largest amphitheater, a structure which the Romans borrowed from the ancient Greeks. This would significantly predate the development of football.

[krishan711]

Ha, I should have thought to dive a bit deeper. I think the thought still makes sense though - I was just using football as an example, it can be extended to why did the Greeks build amphitheaters in the first place. It's not like one day they decided 'huge audiences must be great' - it must have started with smaller audiences and iterated into the big structures designed to hold larger audiences.

My point was we seem to be starting this iteration from scratch for a quite a few things.