In the 1970s the restaurant industry and the custom of eating in restaurants grew rapidly. The decade was the gateway to the present in many ways. Despite economic woes (recession and inflation), the energy crisis, urban decline, crime, and escalating restaurant prices, restaurant-going continued to rise.
The president of the National Restaurant Association proclaimed “Dining out is a significant part of the lifestyle of this great country,” noting in 1976 that one out of three meals was being consumed outside the home.
Restaurant patronage was encouraged by all kinds of things, including relaxed liquor laws in formerly dry states and counties, which brought more restaurants into the suburbs, the spread of credit cards, more working wives and mothers, youth culture, and a me-generation quest for diversion.
New York exemplified the problems faced by restaurants in troubled inner cities. Fear of crime kept people from going out to dinner. Restaurants closed, few new ones opened, and cash-strapped survivors began to trade vouchers for heavily discounted meals for advertising. But as New York struggled, California experienced a culinary renaissance as did other parts of the country. Still, much of the U.S. wanted only steak and potatoes, and hamburger was the most often ordered menu item nationwide.
A number of restaurant formats and concepts faced senescence, but new ones came on the scene at a rapid pace. Going, going, or gone were automats, coffee shops, continental cuisine, diners, drive-ins, formal dining, Jewish dairy restaurants, and Polynesian restaurants, not to mention the rule of elite French cuisine.
Fast-food chains continued to grow, with the number of companies increasing by about two-thirds. Growth was especially strong in the Midwest which was targeted as a region susceptible to their appeal. Toledo was bestowed with Hardee’s, Perkins Pancakes, a Mexican chain, and, in 1972, the arrival of two Bob Evans eateries. Another Ohio city, Columbus, was christened a test market for new fast-fooderies while Junction City KS, bordering Fort Riley, looked like a franchiser’s fast food heaven. By contrast, greater Boston had only one Burger King and one McDonald’s in 1970.
Along with the chains and a shortage of (cheap) kitchen help, came an upsurge in restaurants’ use of convenience foods and microwaves. In response, municipalities across the country enacted ordinances to protect consumers against false claims on menus, many of them centering on misuse of the words “fresh” and “home-made.”
Yet as the country was swamped with fast food, it experienced the flowering of restaurants specializing in ethnic, artisanal, and natural foods. Hippie and feminist restaurants stressed honest, peasant-style meals. Burgeoning interest in nutrition made salad bars popular. Bean sprouts, zucchini, and more fish showed up on menus. Diners learned that Chinese food was not limited to Cantonese, but might also be Mandarin, Szechuan, or Hunan. Once languishing behind luxurious decor, impeccable service, and famous patrons, food took center stage in deluxe restaurants as they purged Beef Wellington from their repertoire and took up the call for culinary creativity and authenticity.
Though not unknown in earlier decades, the restaurant-as-entertainment-venue came into full flourish with the proliferation of theme restaurants with unbearably cute names such as Orville Bean’s Flying Machine & Fixit Shop. To supplement a shrinking supply of old stained glass windows, telephone booths, and barber chairs, restaurant fixture companies began to manufacture reproduction antiques.
However crazy and mixed up the foodscape, America had become the land of restaurants for every taste and pocketbook.
Highlights
1971 – In Berkeley CA Alice Waters and friends found Chez Panisse, marking the movement of college and graduate students into the restaurant field, a career choice which is beginning to have cachet.
1972 – NYC’s Le Pavillon, considered the finest French restaurant in the U.S., closes. In Kansas City MO the first Houlihan’s Old Place, adorned with nostalgia-inducing decorative touches, opens, as does Mollie Katzen’s natural-food Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca NY.
1972 –Dry since 1855, Evanston IL, home of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, grants liquor licenses to two hotels and six restaurants. Their business doubles in a few months.
1973 – Los Angeles County becomes the first jurisdiction in the country to enact a “truth in menu” ordinance. During the pilot program, the scenic Sea Lion Restaurant in Malibu is caught selling the same fish under five different names with five different prices.
1974 – A Chicago food writer throws cold water on arguments about which restaurant has the best lasagne, asserting that the debaters “might have found that same lasagne in restaurants all over the country” courtesy of Invisible Chef, Armour, or Campbell’s.
1974 – Restaurateur Vincent Sardi spearheads a campaign to get New Yorkers to eat out, claiming that the city’s major restaurants have lost up to 20% of their business in the past two years, thus precipitating the closure of 20 leading restaurants.
1976 – The CEO of restaurant supplier Rykoff says whereas his company once supplied whole tomatoes it now provides diced tomatoes “because the operator just can’t afford to pay someone to cut them up.”
1976 – Richard Melman’s Chicago restaurant company, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, operator of RJ Grunts, Great Gritzbe’s Flying Food Show, and Jonathan Livingston Seafood, opens Lawrence of Oregano and prepares to take over the flamboyant Pump Room.
1977 –Industry journal Restaurant Business publishes survey results showing that, on average, husband & wife pairs eat out twice a month, spend $14.75 plus tip, prefer casual restaurants, and tend to order before-dinner cocktails and dishes they don’t get at home. Measured by sales, Lincoln NE is one of the country’s leading cities for eating out.
1977 – Once characterized by blandness, San Diego now has restaurants specializing in cuisines from around the globe, an improvement one observer attributes in part to the new aerospace industry there.
1978 – A reviewer in Columbia MO complains, “A brick floor and pillars, old photos, Tiffany lamps, stained-glass windows and trim on the tops of the booths as well as revolving single-bladed, old-fashioned fans [is] a familiar type of decoration these days and I’m getting a little weary of the sameness of so many restaurants.”
1979 – As the year ends restaurant reviewer Phyllis Richman observes that more people are eating out than ever before, transforming once-lackluster Washington D.C. into “what is known as a Restaurant Town.”
Read about other decades: 1800 to 1810; 1810 to 1820; 1820 to 1830; 1860 to 1870; 1890 to 1900; 1900 to 1910; 1920 to 1930; 1930 to 1940; 1940 to 1950; 1950 to 1960; 1960 to 1970; 1980 to 1990
© Jan Whitaker, 2013
It's great to hear from readers and I take time to answer queries. I can't always find what you are looking for, but I do appreciate getting thank yous no matter what the outcome.
Restaurant-ing through history 
Does anyone know of a restaurant in the mid to late 1970s around the Kenwood area (of Minneapolis MN) that was set up in individual rooms of an old Victorian home with a bar in the old library. It was beautiful and the food was great!
When I read the line about Phyllis Richman in Washington DC it reminded me of when I worked as the Chef Tournant in the Westin Hotel in George Town in the mid-’80s. Phyllis Richman came in and wrote a review on the hotel’s fine dining restaurant “The Colonnade Restaurant” when the hotel first opened. She proceeded to rip on most of the dishes in the restaurant through her critique however she gave a nice comment about my Pheasant Gallontine that I prepared that was served that day as a special. At that time she was very well known in DC and was highly admired and feared by chefs and restauranteurs for her tough critiques of restaurant food.
Hi Jan, Coincidentally, the postcard of the couple dining, that you have highlighted in your post, is my sister Margaret, and her co-worker/friend, John. John was a professional waiter, who wore a full formal tuxedo at that time! This photo was taken in the late 1970’s, when Margaret was a manager at the Lobster Box restaurant, in City Island, N.Y. The owner was Bob Musacchia. I have a few original copies of this postcard, that I saved for my archives. What a blast from our family’s past! I’m just curious…how did you find this postcard image? Well, at least now, you have the provenance! Thanks for posting it!
Best regards,
Angela
Angela, that’s wild! I put that piece together so long ago that I have no idea of where I found that image. I collect old postcards, but I was thinking it was from a magazine advertisement. But you would know better! Nice to know more about it.
Hi Jan, Fascinating and fun, as usual. And entertaining! Could the restaurant photo at the top be a young Joe Manchin in 1979 Washington D.C.?
Funny! Or a Brylcream ad?
Does anyone remember The Cosmos Restaurant near Ithaca College NY in 1971-1972? Jim the owner, wore a loincloth like Tarzan & was the owner, sewed his own clothes… My boyfriend Benjamin Miles and I lived in a room upstairs, and worked downstairs in the restaurant, summer 1971. Maybe 1972. Trying to find photos of the place or any information. Thank you 🙂
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Can anyone remember a restaurant in Pennsauken NJ near The Pub? It was around 1964 and it was on Route 130, I think it was Montaneros but not sure.
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Hello! I’m helping my husband find information about his (deceased) father Jacques Nolle. He owned a steakhouse and a pizza parlor in Manhattan circa 1970. The steakhouse would have been French. Does anyone remember any French steakhouses during that time? Anything helps!!
Not much to go on, but there was a Jacques Nolle who owned a restaurant in NYC called La Crossette with his two brothers, Jackie and Jean. Later he lived in or around Reno NV, and may have also been associated with another place there called Mimi’s Hideaway.
Jacques passed in 2016, in Reno, Nevada. His brother, Jean, whom I knew and saw in 2017, lives in Stockton, CA. He has his mom’s restaurant (Mimi’s) sign at his place. His last French restaurant was in Stockton, CA and was sold when his wife passed away. Great family! Pretty sure he is doing well and still in Stockton. But it’s been a couple years now, so hopefully, he is doing okay. Sherry
What was the name of the restaurant on 59 st,, near 5 ave NYC in the 70’s that served Celebrity sandwiches?
I think you mean Reuben’s. https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/2012/03/11/reubens-celebrities-and-sandwiches/
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Thank you for all your help.
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Fiesta Cantina was the Mexican chain in Toledo in the early 70s. The most popular location was around the corner from the University of Toledo, on Dorr St. Good, filling, cheap fast food for poor college students. I loved the tostados. Then again, it was probably the first “Mexican” food I’d ever eaten, so there was literally no comparison. Fiesta Cantina was in the midwest long before Taco Bell made its way east from California.
I learned of this blog and Henry Voigt’s at about the same time, both are excellent indeed.
Perusing some of the entries here, this posting caught my attention perhaps because I became a restaurant goer in this era.
I liked the contemporary quotation of an observer in Columbia, MO who said that the decor of the era was becoming too standardized – in 1978 he (or she) noticed that! Very perceptive, and from a perch in Columbia, MO, too: not a trendsetting city then or now one would think.
One can see vestiges of this style to this day, e.g. the Old Spaghetti Factory still has that look, or at least the ones I’ve been to. You can see it in some bars which have undergone little updating since that time. He didn’t mention the potted fern plants though. 🙂
A favourite chain of that time was Lum’s, I always wondered what happened to it? It predates the 1970’s but seemed to come to fruition then. I knew the one in Plattsburgh, NY. Ollieburgers and schooners of beer! Ah the good old days.
Gary
Yes, the fern bar/restaurant creaks on! Thanks for your thoughts.
As far as I know, last Lums were in Plattsburgh and Rutland in the 1990s — sad shadows of the great Lums I frequented in Ithaca and Vestal in the 60s–with their great atmosphere, reasonable prices, icy schooners of beer, and terrific shaved roast beef sandwiches. The Rutland Lums closed around 1994. One of the Rutland grill cooks used to spit into take-out coffee, just for giggles.
There is the so-called lipstick effect – when the economy is down, lipstick consumption goes up – suddenly a necessary luxury when “logically” one should have been saving that money for, say, the electricity bill. I wonder if the “restaurant effect” is also something we could use as a measure of the economy and/or a measure of people’s perceptions of the economy. In my non-scientific study of one (okay, me), I am always amazed at my sudden desperate need to go to a restaurant to eat when my finances are tight. Surely it is more than escapism – since diners often go to places that they cannot really “afford” in such moments, and are choosy about where they dine and the experience and are ready to write reviews (whether positive or scathing) afterwards. Hmmm about to go to a conference where I certainly cannot afford to dine out, ergo I will do so – frequenting especially those places aimed at a decent-enough-meal experience that is affordable-enough-for-conference-attendees….!
Interesting thought and it could be true, a consolation prize. The explanation for a rise in eating out in the bad economy of the 1970s is that working women were adding to the household income. This was before employers discovered they could lower pay all around now that men were no longer the “breadwinners.” See you at dinner in Denver?
The working women explanation makes sense. It is similar to the rise in single women going out to drink (gasp) alone or with other women in World War I – they were working and had income of their own. Wouldn’t miss Denver and dinner with you for the world!
Really enjoy your Blog, keep up the good work!! My faves now gone, The Lord & Taylor (The Bird Cage??) That Dessert Cart!!! Charleston Garden, Mary Elizabeth Tea Room, and out here both the Bullock’s Tearooms, Wilshire and Pasadena, tears coming right now.
Patti Astor