By hello
Status: Defunct; founded in 1789 and later demolished. (en.wikipedia.org) Literary passage: “Those words, spoken not four paces from Frascati's, were magnetic in their effect.” — Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions. (gutenberg.org) Why it matters: Frascati is the boulevard underworld in polished form: gaming tables, spectacle, expensive temptation, and social exposure. Balzac uses it as a machine that pulls characters toward ruin while still looking glamorous; the place is both gastronomic and predatory. The restaurant-café therefore plays a double role in nineteenth-century fiction, as a fashionable meeting-place and a trapdoor into debt, performance, and moral dissipation. (en.wikipedia.org)