A house for eating, esp. one in which meals are supplied ready dressed; a cook’s shop, restaurant.
c. 1440. Promp. Parv., 143. Etynge howse, pransorium.
1673. Dryden, Marr. à la Mode, IV. iv. An eating house. Bottles of wine on the table.
1748. Smollett, Rod. Rand., xiii. To dine at an eating-house.
1805. N. Nicholls, Lett., in Corr. Gray (1843), 49. He dined generally alone, and was served from an eating-house … in Jermyn Street.
1848. Macaulay, Hist. Eng., I. 237. A third had stepped into an eating house in Covent Garden and had there heard a great Roman Catholic banker vow … to kill the heretical tyrant.
