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Comment by mike_h | Hacker News Reader

Who would have eaten at a place like this? e.g. wealthy tourists, middle class, laborers? I’m trying to contextualize this in the cost of living in the region in those times. This is the best source I found, but there’s no entry for takeout food, and it’s not clear what all these wages mean in terms of, say, monthly income:

http://www.constantinethegreatcoins.com/edict/

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If Pompeii was anything like Rome, most people.

https://www.parool.nl/english/takeaways-aren-t-a-new-thing-t...: “takeaways and deliveries are nothing new: they were the staple diet of most people in ancient Rome.”

https://www.businessinsider.nl/fast-food-ancient-rome-histor...:

“Ancient Roman fast food joints were called “thermopolia.”

These restaurants had a bad reputation, but they provided fast and cheap meals to the poor of ancient Rome.”

The poor in Rome lived in multi-story wooden buildings where open fire cooking is not a good idea.

That second link says Pompeii had 150 thermopolia, so I guess not having a real kitchen was fairly common for the poor there, too.

In Roman (and even medieval and early modern) cities the poor and working class ate food prepared off site because they lacked kitchen facilities, specifically for cooking. If you lived in an insula (apartment) or such, you would take your ingredients to a bakehouse to be cooked, or eat fully-prepared food from a taberna like this.

The wealthy would have kitchen facilities in their villa, and usually the middle class in their domus, and would probably usually eat at home (as might their servants and some clients) but even then they might have lunch on the street while in town transacting business.

People who lived in apartments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building)) would have gone to such places - if they tried cooking on the upper floors they'd burn the place down.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeii), there are signs that it was a wealthy town, signs like public buildings and houses with fancy decorations and art. Enough so that, not long after the disaster, people dug into it to remove items of value.

So I would imagine many of the residents had disposable income for dining out.

Poor to middle class, probably. The rich had kitchens; cooking facilities wouldn’t have been so common in normal-person housing. There would likely have been no significant numbers of tourists.

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