According to one story, the small restaurants known as bistros acquired their name thanks to Cossacks who, during the Russian occupation of Paris, would barge into restaurants shouting vee-stra!, Russian for hurry up! The French restaurateurs assumed that vee-stra! meant fast food! and so later they bestowed this Russian word\u2014which they spelt bistro\u2014on little cafes that served quick snacks. The problem with this explanation is that it seems unlikely that the French would take a rude, foreign command and apply it to an inviting, cozy establishment; as well, the word did not appear in French until 1884, almost three generations after the Russian occupation in 1815. A more likely origin, therefore, is that bistro is short for bistmuille, a French name for a drink made of coffee and brandy. Bistmuille in turn derives from the French bis, meaning twice, and touiller, meaning to mix, the coffee first being mixed with milk and then with the brandy. In English, the word bistro did not appear until the 1920s.<\/p>\n
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According to one story, the small restaurants known as bistros acquired their name thanks to Cossacks who, during the Russian occupation of Paris, would barge into restaurants shouting vee-stra!, Russian for hurry up! The French restaurateurs assumed that vee-stra! meant fast food! and so later they bestowed this Russian word\u2014which they spelt bistro\u2014on little cafes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-b"],"yoast_head":"\n