A new book has come out about Don ‘s wife, Sunny Sund, who took over the Beachcomber chain and made it a success. Its author is Sunny’s daughter Karen, working with Cindi Neisinger. It is largely a personal account filled with anecdotes, a view of a mother/daughter relationship, celebrity mentions, and some of the harsh realities that shaped Sunny’s life. A drink recipe ends each chapter.
A trip to Maine to celebrate two birthdays (not mine) got me thinking about how restaurants observe these events with customers. [above: at Wolfie’s, Miami, 1986]
The custom of restaurants recognizing birthdays with songs, cakes, fancy drinks, free dinners, and serenades took hold in the 1960s. It’s unclear whether it had anything to do with an IRS decision ca. 1959 not to charge a cabaret tax in eating places where servers sang birthday greetings.
But there was a notable earlier cake bestower: cafeteria king Clifford Clinton of Clifton’s fame. By 1945 he claimed to have given away over 110,000 birthday cakes to patrons. Of course since his restaurant was a cafeteria, it’s likely that there were no singing waiters involved.
Apart from the IRS, another barrier to growth of the custom was the royalties levied by a copyright holder who claimed rights to the Happy Birthday song until 2015. It led many restaurants to write their own birthday songs, particularly if they were large chains that would have been most likely to be caught. Otherwise, it seems that in independent restaurants waiters and waitresses sang the familiar, homey version pretty much fearlessly.
Songs aside, the special attraction that actually brought celebrants to a restaurant for their birthday was probably the freebies. There were numbers of people who wanted a free meal, dessert, or drink but didn’t really like being in the spotlight.
Despite all the deals, generous or skimpy, some diners rejected the whole idea of a public celebration of birthdays in restaurants. In his Chicago Sun-Times column, Roger Simon advised, “Never eat in a restaurant where the waiters sing ‘Happy Birthday.’” He echoed the spirit of the author of the “Lonely Man’s Doggy Bag Diary” who wrote in the Oakland Tribune that along with lobster bibs, wooden menus, flames, mushrooms, anchovies, patés, and so much more, he disliked “waitresses singing Happy Birthday to everyone.” The T.G.I. Friday’s chain eventually dropped the custom, sensing that many customers found it embarrassing.
Of course many restaurant owners found birthday (and anniversary) celebrations attractive as a way to draw customers. But it seems that deluxe restaurants were less likely to observe this custom, possibly judging that their guests weren’t looking for reduced prices or free desserts, preferred privacy, and didn’t find the drama of singing waiters appealing.
Restaurant chains, on the other hand, tended to make a big deal of their generosity toward birthday celebrants. As the growing popularity of television kept families home and reduced restaurant visits in the 1950s and later, a restaurant management advisor suggested “. . . one possible way to help offset the decline in business might be to get more people to celebrate birthdays by going out to dinner.” Many restaurants created birthday clubs.
Often customers seeking birthday specials were required to fill out forms prior to their birthdays, and to notify the restaurant when they were planning a visit. And, quite a few restaurants required that would-be celebrants bring along their birth certificates, suggesting there were customers who lied about their birthday.
Some customers evidently had a much harder time convincing restaurants that it was really their birthday. As late as 1991, a 13-year old Black girl in Vallejo CA was refused her free birthday meal at a Denny’s restaurant even though she brought her baptismal certificate. She told a reporter that “They just said that wasn’t enough and made a big scene. I felt embarrassed. It was humiliating because other families in there were looking at us, and I guess they thought we were some kind of bad criminals.” Her case became part of a successful class action suit brought against Denny’s in California.
There were some restaurants that developed more elaborate rules concerning the precise kind of “deals” they were offering and who was eligible. The Bill Knapp’s restaurants offered free birthday cake, not just for the guest celebrating their birthday, but for the entire party. The main guest also benefited from a 1% reduction in the price of their meal for each year of age over 11. Another Michigan restaurant, Dennison’s in Farmington Hills, offered cake plus a discount on the celebrant’s meal based on the size of the party. Benihana in New Orleans served a free dinner valued at upwards of $14 to the birthday guest in the early 1980s, but only if there were four in the party.
Cake wasn’t the only kind of birthday food offering. Brennan’s in New Orleans presented French bread decorated with cherries, olives and lemon slices. The bread was not meant to be eaten, just to hold a candle. Accompanying it was a character made of fruit and vegetables, followed by an Irish coffee. Cocktails took the place of dessert in some restaurants. At the Asian restaurant Jade East in New Orleans a celebrating guest received a flaming pousse-café with layers of blue Curaçao, grenadine, and rum or gin.
I’m not expecting any free cake or singing waiters/waitresses in restaurants we’ll visit this weekend — but if I’m wrong I’ll report back.
© Jan Whitaker, 2024
Filed under chain restaurants, family restaurants, food, restaurant customs
The 19th century was the century of world’s fairs, but the United States did not have a fair to call its own until 1876 when Philadelphia celebrated the 100th anniversary of U.S. independence. After Philadelphia, Chicago’s, in 1893, was the largest in this country. [above, outdoor beer garden at the Tyrolean Alps]
So . . . for St. Louis organizers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, when St. Louis was the fourth largest American city, second-largest Chicago figured as the one to beat. St. Louis fair organizers hoped to surpass the Chicago fair in all ways, particularly attendance.
The St. Louis fairgrounds occupied an immense 1,200 acres, double the area of Chicago’s. Not only was the area very large but so were the buildings. A hotel on the fairgrounds, the Inside Inn, had 2,357 rooms and dining rooms accommodating 2,500 at a time. The Palace of Agriculture building alone covered 23 acres. Big money too: the entire outlay for the city, U.S. government, participating nations and states, exhibitors, and concessionaires came to over $500M in today’s dollars.
Planning the fair’s restaurants, with enough variety in fare and price to please fairgoers, was a formidable task. In St. Louis, those interested in being considered included owners of existing city restaurants, experienced professionals who made a career of running restaurants at fairs, various exhibitors who wanted to include a themed restaurant as an added attraction, some state and foreign nation buildings and exhibits, and food and drink companies and promoters.
The offerings ranged from about 50 stands selling sandwiches to 75 full-scale restaurants, some of them expensive. There were also oddities such as a proposed underground eating spot in the Anthracite Mining exhibit’s coal mine with waiters dressed as miners. Or, the restaurant in Hereafter — a tour through Dante’s Inferno — where diners ate off coffins in the Café of the Dead, probably an imitation of the Café of Death in Paris’ Montmartre.
Without a doubt the most lavish, expensive, huge, and overall outstanding restaurant was the Tyrolean Alps, organized by two prominent restaurateurs, New York’s August Luchow and St. Louis’ Tony Faust, plus three other experienced St. Louis caterers, and with many backers including St. Louis brewer Adolphus Busch. Like several others it could handle an estimated 2,500 diners at a time. Despite all the banquets it catered, the famous people who dined there, its extensive menu, its general popularity, and its gross receipts of nearly $1M, like so many concessions it managed to lose money by fair’s end. It carried on for a time post-fair, into the summer of 1905.
Even before the fair ended some restaurant concessions had failed. The two owners of the Japanese restaurants [shown above], overcome with debt, filed for bankruptcy. The German Wine restaurant that charged $2 for a lunch with wine, proved to be far too expensive for fairgoers. Also, beer, not wine, was the preferred beverage at the fair, costing a nickel for a glass or a dime for a stein. Beer pavilions, such as Falstaff’s and Blatz’s, competed with the almighty Budweiser, widely available and practically the official beer of at least 17 of the restaurants.
I haven’t found reports on how well the food stands did, but I’m guessing they fared better than many of the full-scale restaurants. The Barbecue, with six stands spread around the fairgrounds, was quite popular with the crowds. A reporter from Wichita KS let her readers know that it was a good deal, not requiring much money or time in being served, whether ordering hot beef, pork, mutton or sausage sandwiches. Plus, she reported, they supplied free paper cups and spoons (!).
Another winner was the enormous Inside Inn, the only hotel on the fairgrounds and the biggest financial success of the fair. A ham sandwich was 10 cents, while a complete dinner was 75 cents, and breakfast and lunch each cost 50 cents. At fair’s end, the Inn showed a sizable profit.
There were about a half dozen women operating restaurants. Prominent among them was well-known cookbook author Sarah Tyson Rorer who had also been at the Chicago fair. She ran a large restaurant seating 1,200 prominently located in the East Pavilion building [shown above], and she taught cooking classes. Harriet McMurphy, a food reformer and domestic science lecturer from Omaha, ran an eating place designed for people with digestive difficulties. She had very definite ideas of what was best to eat, rejecting pastry as something that should not be eaten more than once a year. Instead she offered baked apples with almonds and whipped cream. A local woman, Mrs. Reid, operated a breezy tea room called The Bungalow designed for women guests.
A few of the women restaurant operators also did the catering for some of the many banquets given during the fair, possibly including wedding ceremonies held in Ferris wheel gondolas [visible above] accommodating 60 persons.
The St. Louis fair has often been criticized for its disrespectful treatment of Philippine tribal people brought there to demonstrate the U.S.’s beneficial domination of developing nations considered inferior. Evidently they adjusted to modernity very quickly, soon tiring of the rice diet they were fed at the fair and demanding an American diet such as found at the restaurants. They were granted their wish.
A lesser known scandal was how Black fairgoers were treated. In June, a group of Black visitors observed notices posted by restaurants on the Pike that read “No colored people served in this restaurant.” Then complaints were received that white servers were refusing to sell glasses of water to Black visitors, claiming that if they did they would lose their white customers. The fair organizers expressed dismay and there was discussion about hiring a Black woman who would run a stand to greet visitors of color, but that did not materialize and the number of Black visitors declined. The water issue was supposed to be “solved” with separate tanks of water and distinctively marked glasses. Unsurprisingly, the Black press denounced the fair. The Cleveland Gazette, for instance, advised “Our people had better stay away from the St. Louis World’s fair. There is much discrimination on the grounds.”
In the end, the St. Louis World’s Fair drew about 8 million fewer visitors than had Chicago’s exposition. The sideshow amusements lost so much money that the chairman of the Pike Financing Co. reported, “So universal has been the losing on the Pike that not one of the St. Louis shows will be taken to Portland,” the site of the next big fair. Despite all the losses for private investors who naively expected to make money, the fair’s Exposition Company managed to break even after paying back government loans.
© Jan Whitaker, 2024
Filed under food, Offbeat places, racism, women
Here are some of my blog posts from the past that were about visiting restaurants when it’s hot outside.
See also “Dining in a garden.”
Americans living in cities enjoyed spending hours in tea gardens in the 18th century and beer gardens in the 19th and early 20th. One example of such a pleasure garden was a grassy Philadelphia spot outfitted with “tables, benches, boxes, bowers, etc. and delightfully shaded by fruit trees.” However, eating outside near a road was disagreeable and largely unheard of. This began to change around the start of the 20th century — but even then only in a small way, except maybe in New Orleans where sidewalk cafes were said to be common.
Ice cream has a long history as a commercial product in this country. For decades it was not sold packaged in stores but was mainly consumed in public settings, often in park-like pleasure gardens. By the 1860s, though, Bostonians could enjoy their ice cream at Brigham & Son’s Ice Cream Saloon which also furnished a variety of other sweet treats such as Charlotte Russe and Jelly Whips. By the 1920s, as car ownership increased, roadside chains selling ice cream began to appear, including of course, Howard Johnson’s.
Summer was a slow season for eating places even into the early 20th century. Small marginal cafes, of which there were many, could not always afford to install large fans, assuming they even had electricity. Another alternative, at least for restaurants higher in the pecking order, was to close up their city location and run another place in a summer resort. Needless to say the adoption of air conditioning around WWII was a life saver for restaurants and they were quick to announce it in their advertising.
Rooftop drinking and dancing became popular in New York City in the 1890s. Over time these spots added dinners. They were especially likely to be atop hotels. Soon their popularity spread across the country. Clearly the attraction was about avoiding summertime heat, so it is not surprising that they tended to disappear as the 20th century found new ways to keep people cool.
Filed under outdoor restaurants
It was an orphaned family that had gone through some difficult times that developed one of the early, very successful chains of cafeterias in California.
The chain of Boos Brothers cafeterias was one of the first in Los Angeles, contributing to the flood of cafeterias that soon appeared in that city and elsewhere in Southern California. Californians to the north ridiculed the trend, referring to Los Angeles and southern California as the “State of Cafeteria.” It’s true, of course, that cafeterias have never been seen as fashionable and sophisticated.
The Boos [probably pronounced Boes] family story reads like a fictional tale. The Moscow, Ohio, family of nine children were orphaned when both parents died in the late 1880s, followed by the eldest son’s demise two years later. That left Horace, about 19, as caretaker of his three brothers and four sisters. In his will, their father had expressed a wish that they all stay together, live in the family home, and be self supporting. They followed his wishes except for staying in their small hometown. At some point Horace moved the family to Cincinnati where he got a job as a typesetter for the Cincinnati Enquirer. He and his brothers, and at least one sister, also operated a grocery story, then a hotel and restaurant in Cincinnati.
Before the brothers, and some of the sisters, moved to California in 1906 they had also lived briefly in Rochester, New York City, and St. Louis, operating restaurants in all of them, including a lunchroom at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
Once in California they acquired a ranch in San Gabriel, offering eggs for sale in a 1906 advertisement. By August of that year they had opened their first cafeteria in Los Angeles. They also continued to operate the ranch, supplying their restaurants with eggs into the 1920s.
By 1909 they had expanded to three cafeterias. Judging from postcards like the one here, the early cafeterias may have been exceptionally sanitary and well outfitted but had a somewhat functional appearance. Gradually their cafeterias became more decorative, particularly when they moved into buildings they had built.
In 1922 they opened a newly built cafeteria at 618 S. Olive decorated in what they described as Spanish and Moorish style. An advertisement celebrated its interior: “Accentuating the impressive spaciousness of the place, are three arched windows of great height in the north wall. In corresponding positions in the south wall, equivalent in number and size, are mural paintings of exquisite technique, depicting with historical exactness, Cortez before Montezuma.”
The newest, and last, cafeteria, built at 530 S. Hill in 1926 — a location previously occupied by a failed B&M Cafeteria — was custom-built and featured the largest orchestra, one of 9 pieces. It also was fitted with rest rooms filled with upholstered arm chairs and settees. A row of water fountains referred to as a “Persian fountain” was backed by a large and impressive scene painted on tiles [shown here].
In 1927 the cafeteria company celebrated its 20th anniversary, publishing a booklet called “Glancing Back Along the Cafeteria Trail.” At that point the business operated six cafeterias in Los Angeles and one on the island of Catalina opened in 1918.
The booklet celebrated their success and gave some idea of what it took, such as purchasing 870,000 pounds of beef per year and 40,800 chickens. An estimate of how many acres it would take to grow the fruits and vegetables used by the chain came to 20,000. The Boos used only fresh vegetables, nothing canned. All but one of their locations had live orchestral music.
Surprisingly, the year after the celebratory booklet was published, the brothers sold the chain to the Childs corporation, including all six cafeterias in Los Angeles and the one on Catalina Island. At that point the six L.A. cafeterias were reputedly serving 10M meals a year. The sale to Childs, which kept the Boos name, was said to net $8M for the three remaining brothers. Horace Boos had died the previous year and it’s possible that might have motivated the sale.
In the Depression, Childs sold their Boos holdings, two going to Clifford Clinton of Clifton’s Cafeterias fame, and two returning to the Boos brothers, according to some accounts. Other reports, confusingly, had the brothers buying back all the cafeterias. Whichever was the case, the only one that seemed to reopen under the control of the Boos brothers was the cafeteria at 530 S. Hill. During the Depression it met the needs of people with little money, offering low-priced dishes such as soup and spaghetti for 8 cents and most vegetables for 7 cents.
The S. Hill Boos Brothers cafeteria was still in business as late as 1955, advertising in the Los Angeles Times as “The Original.” But at some point it acquired a new owner doing business as Green’s Cafeteria. In 1960 Green’s was out of business and the equipment was auctioned.
© Jan Whitaker, 2024
Filed under cafeterias, popular restaurants, proprietors & careers
To gather recipes for the Sardi’s cookbook Curtain Up at Sardi’s [1957], co-author Helen Bryson spent two and half weeks, six days each week, in Sardi’s restaurant kitchen. She asked a lot of questions about the food preparation. It was the only way to put together a cookbook, something that she said had never been done before in the restaurant’s long history that dated back to the 1920s. [The restaurant pictured above in the 1950s; below is a 1924 advertisement — “Your Restaurant” is aimed at theater people]
The recipes were intended for use by the public. Whether the restaurant’s chefs ever looked at them is another question. Of course the book’s recipes were adapted for smaller amounts than were normal for the restaurant, and they were no doubt simplified for home cooks too.
And yet the book also includes 26 sauces and dressings, some of them classic French sauces that are far from simple. “Sardi Sauce,” for instance, is made with Sherry wine, light cream, and whipped cream, but also includes Velouté Sauce and Hollandaise Sauce. Velouté Sauce is made with chicken stock and roux (chicken fat and flour). The book also includes a much simpler version, perhaps designed for the homemaker, called Emergency Velouté Sauce (butter, flour, canned broth, and bay leaf).
Later, in contrast to the intricacies of sauce making, comes an amazingly simple recipe for Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce en Chafing Dish which calls for spaghetti, boiling water, salt, tomato sauce (can be canned!) and grated Parmesan. The cook could instead choose to make the book’s Tomato Sauce, but that, by contrast, calls for 11 ingredients including a ham bone. Using that sauce the spaghetti might qualify for a chafing dish but otherwise, I think not.
Mid-century dishes at Sardi’s covered a wide range of cuisines. Italian and French were in the lead, as were favorites of indeterminate origin such as Supreme of Chicken à la Sardi ($1.50 in 1939). But the book also includes hot tamales with chili con carne and turkey chow mein, and even makes room for a few “low-calorie plates,” which were becoming popular in the 1950s.
The recipe for Supreme of Chicken à la Sardi is as follows — minus recipes for the accompanying Duchesse Potatoes and Sardi Sauce. Together, those two components add a major amount of cream to this mid-century “specialty of the house.”
1 cup Duchesse Potatoes
6 slices cooked breast of chicken, heated in sherry wine
12 stalks green-tipped asparagus, canned or cooked
1 cup Sardi Sauce
2 teaspoons grated Parmesan cheese
After being assembled on a serving dish, with the chicken resting on the asparagus, surrounded by piped potatoes and all covered with Sardi Sauce and Parmesan, the dish was to be browned lightly under the broiler.
Though Sardi’s food was considered good, the restaurant was not among those that won awards for their cuisine. It is rarely mentioned in “best food” books and articles. Rather, the restaurant’s fame derived from its role as a haven for theatrical people of every kind – actors, agents, producers, publicists, and devoted patrons of live theater. In the early days, Vincent and Eugenia Sardi won over theater people by extending credit to those down on their luck. To the wider public it was most attractive as a site for celebrity spotting and autograph collecting. The restaurant was also well known for years for its canny hat check “girl.”
In the 1963 movie Critic’s Choice Bob Hope plays a critic whose wife, played by Lucille Ball, writes a play which he will need to review. Since it isn’t very good, an honest review would threaten his marriage. [Lucille Ball does not appear in the Sardi’s scene shown above.]
Like the Brown Derby in Los Angeles and the London Chop House in Detroit, Sardi’s decorated its walls with portraits of its celebrity guests – and still does. Some of the older drawings, from the 1920s through the 1950s, have been saved and can be seen by appointment at the NY Public Library.
Until 1947, when Vincent and Eugenia (“Jenny”) Sardi retired and sold the restaurant to their son, Vincent Jr., they divided duties, with Vincent in the dining room greeting guests and Jenny looking over the kitchen and doing the buying. According to one account she was the beloved member of the couple, attracting theatrical guests to the kitchen to visit with her, while Vincent did his duty greeting guests wearing his “guest smile.” A profile in 1939 referred to him as a “chilly individual.” He did, however, give his wife credit for her role in the restaurant’s success. “She does it all,” he said in one interview. [above: the Sardi’s in 1939]
Despite some rocky years and changes in ownership, Sardi’s restaurant, still decorated with celeb faces, continues in business today on W. 44th Street.
A final note: in case anyone was wondering, Sardi’s in New York had no connection with the restaurant of the same name in Los Angeles that opened in the 1930s clearly modeled on the original – a situation that vexed the Sardis.
And thanks to the kind reader who sent me a copy of Curtain Up.
© Jan Whitaker, 2024
Filed under food, patrons, popular restaurants
This morning I heard a story on the radio about Caesar salad that claimed today was the salad’s 100th birthday.
I can understand that it becomes difficult to come up with holiday stories that are novel and of general interest. But I have my doubts about the accuracy of that anniversary date.
Still, I will take advantage of it to recommend a story about Caesar salad that I wrote in 2009, at a time when my blog was fairly new and had fewer readers.
Meanwhile, have a great holiday!
Filed under food
There is nothing as interesting (to me) as a memoir about a restaurant from an insider who reveals its workings not usually known to customers. Papa’s Table d’Hôte by Maria Sermolino is such a memoir, published in 1952, decades after her father’s ownership of the New York City restaurant, Gonfarone’s.
Maria’s career as an editor and writer was extensive. After graduating from the Columbia School of Journalism and spending a couple of years writing about post-WWI conditions in France, she interviewed Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Later she worked for Time, was the editor of The Delineator and for 11 years an associate editor for Life magazine. She attributed her lifelong unmarried status to overhearing conversations about women among waiters and from male guests invited by her father to join him at his table. [above, Maria at age 25, in 1920, the year she interviewed Mussolini]
Gonfarone’s began in business around the turn of the last century as an Italian pension-type eating place, transitioning into a bohemian resort for Greenwich Villagers. It was run initially by Caterina Gonfarone who operated it in a basement on the corner of Eighth and McDougall streets. She soon partnered with Maria Sermolino’s father, Anacleto, who saw to it that the dining room was moved upstairs. Then, as neighboring residences were acquired by the partners, the popular Latin Quarter table d’hôte expanded to eventually accommodate 500 diners at a time. Sermolino soon acquired the restaurant from Madama Gonfarone, but kept her name.
After the Sermolino family moved into the complex of buildings (which also included a small hotel), Maria spent much of her childhood in the restaurant. Chapter 6 of her book is entitled “The Barroom Was My Playground.” She assisted her mother, the restaurant’s cashier, by spotting waiters who failed to pay her mother for drinks they ordered for customers at the bar. (They would have been reimbursed later, but without paying first they were able to keep the customers’ payments for themselves.)
But that is not the only way in which the staff tried to make extra money on the side. Dishwashers sold food scraps and fat to a company that made soap, with higher prices paid for barrels with more fat. On occasion Madama Gonfarone would catch a dishwasher pouring a large tin of unused lard into a barrel for a higher payoff. It was also common for the staff to smuggle out bottles of wine, chickens, lobsters, and other choice food items when they left at night. Her father refused to institute routine searches because he thought it would be bad for morale.
Because the restaurant was connected to a hotel, the bartender also acted as the room clerk. He took advantage of his position by renting rooms to prostitutes, even on occasion — when she was away — renting Madama’s room for more than double his usual charge.
Not all the restaurant’s customers were treated equally. Waiters would see to it that their favored regulars got larger portions, choicer cuts of meat, and less melted ice in their drinks. A standard menu, 50 cents on weeknights and 10 cents more on Saturdays and Sundays, featured Antipasto, Minestrone, Spaghetti, Salmon with Caper Sauce, a Sweetbread, Broiled Chicken or Roast Beef, Vegetables, Potatoes, Green Salad, Biscuit Tortoni or Spumoni, Fresh Fruit, Assorted Cheeses, and a Demi-tasse. In all likelihood the portions would have usually been on the small size.
“By the simple act of ordering spaghetti an American was plunged into a foreign experience,” observes Sermolino. [above, 1916 advertisement from The Greenwich Village Quill; below, 1919 Quill]
All meals came with a glass of California claret, which the restaurant bought 40 or 50 barrels at a time, reducing their cost to ten cents a gallon. Apart from that free glass, which impressed many American patrons who were unfamiliar with wine and considered it exotic, the bar was a money maker. Maria called it “a gold mine.” A Manhattan cocktail — with cherry — cost 3 cents but sold for 15 cents, she explained.
Banquet menus were grander and supplied more alcoholic beverages, as is shown in a 1904 menu above for a dinner given to honor a supporter of Democrats in the Tammany-controlled area occupied by the restaurant.
The restaurant’s best years were before World War I, when it was not unusual to serve four to five thousand dinners on an average weekday and double that on a good Saturday or Sunday, with waiting patrons spilling down the hall and into Macdougal Street. When food ran low the cooks would water the soup and waiters would offer patrons omelets.
With the onset of Prohibition, Maria’s father decided to get out of the business and concentrate on his other interest, real estate. Under new ownership, Gonfarone’s remained open for another 10 years, until 1930. The buildings were razed in 1937.
© Jan Whitaker, 2024
Quite by accident I discovered a book called Fresh Leaves from the Diary of a Broadway Dandy, a moral tract that conceals its true purpose by enticing the reader with details from the wild life of a roguish playboy in New York city. It was published in 1852. [Except for one Thompson’s advertisement, also from 1852, the images in this blog are from the book.]
The book was promoted with the headline “Rich and Racy.” Author John D. Vose, who had earlier been the editor of a humor publication called The New York Picayune, wrote a few other short “diaries,” one titled Seven Nights in Gotham, another called Yale College Scrapes, and a third, Ten Years on the Town. Alas, I could not find those.
The Diary of a Broadway Dandy describes the doings of one particular young man named Harry for whom money flows endlessly. At one point he enumerates some of the 30 bills he just received from fashionable eating and drinking spots around town, all of which amount to a considerable sum which he dismisses as insignificant.
In an average week, he and his pals spend most of their time drinking uncountable bottles of booze of every kind, destroying property by breaking furniture, mirrors, and other things, and arriving back at their abodes extremely late in a drunken state. The dandies also pursue women, but just how far that goes is not detailed.
When Harry’s parents try to get him to go straight, attend church, and get a job on Wall Street, he balks and moves into a hotel. Clearly he belongs to a set of men identified in an advertisement for Charley Abel’s place on Broadway in 1852 as “the wits, fast men, and bloods of the town.”
His favorite eating and drinking places were plentiful, and included many on Broadway, among them The Arbour, Shelley’s Restaurant and Oyster Saloon, Taylor’s, and Thompson’s. (Note that at that time “saloon” meant a large roomy space, not necessarily a barroom.)
Of course, being a member of the “bon ton,” he also patronized Delmonico’s, taking his pals there for dinner one evening. He clearly liked to play the generous host not concerned about cost, but things didn’t go just as he planned this time. The day before he had ordered a dinner costing precisely $50 (about $2,000 today). When the bill came it was only for $42 and that made him quite angry. Next, he ordered a slice of white bread. Then, to make the point that he expected his exact demands to be met, he buttered the bread, placed a $50 bill on it, and ate it all.
At other places he and his friends visited, they drank vast amounts of booze and left behind a trail of destruction. On one occasion, on which nine bottles of champagne were consumed, then some brandy to settle their stomachs, he described the following:
“By some unknown way, a large mirror got cracked; but, as the landlord was a clever man, and I didn’t want to have no fuss, it being Sunday, I at once settled the loss with seven ten dollar bills, as I was not confident whether I did throw a champagne bottle against it or not. It has rather run in my mind since, that I did, but I won’t be certain. Yes, several chairs got broken, and were minus of legs and backs, yet that was laid to unknownity.”
Other casualties of drinking bouts at various times included damage to himself such as losing the heel of his patent leather shoes, staining his white pants, breaking his gold watch chain and his watch crystal, and breaking a bottle of champagne. He dismissed them, and he didn’t sound terribly contrite about an accident that happened on a Sunday either:
“Sloped from home, and took a drive with a particular friend out to the ‘Abbey.’ Found a great number out there. Our team being very dashy, attracted attention from every quarter – especially of the ladies. We drank twice, order a waiter to brush our attire three different times – made five new acquaintances, and then returned home. On our return we run the tire off of one hind wheel, causing four spokes to fall to the ground. So much for not being at church!”
By the end of the book, after the reader has enjoyed delving into the seamy exploits of the rich, the author issues stern criticisms. He concludes that it isn’t enough for a young man in New York who wants to be seen as an elite to have “the rocks,” go to the right places, or dress fashionably. Along with the rules of being a gentleman, “He must know how to be the part of a knave, a rascal,” . . . cultivating deceit “between the two gateways of virtue and vice, by sun-light and by gas-light.” Why? Because “This is a very wicked city.”
© Jan Whitaker, 2024
Filed under elite restaurants, patrons
Slim pickings for a restaurant ephemera collector at the giant Brimfield flea market recently, but at least I turned up a few finds. Among them were two small menus and a business card, all from eating places run mainly by women. The size of the two menus makes me wonder if male-owned restaurants ever employed any this tiny.
The Henniker Tea Room
The oldest of the three finds was a menu from The Henniker Tea Room in 1932. It took me a while to realize that its location “Midway between Westfield and Brocton” put it in New York state.
I discovered that it is a relic of hard times in a double sense. The front of the menu says “Tenth Season,” so it was begun in 1922. That was the year that the owner’s husband, a superintendent of schools, died of tuberculosis, which probably meant that she had to earn a living for herself and her two daughters.
The second hardship associated with this menu is that it dated from the depths of the Depression. I suspect that is the reason she stopped charging an extra 15 cents for salad with Sunday dinner specials, and reduced the price of potato salad from 30 to 25 cents.
Possibly the tea room failed in the Depression because by 1940 Frances Swain was living in a lodging house and working as a secretary for the YMCA. But her fortunes must have improved after that because in 1950, at age 66, she had become director of the YMCA and headed her own household with additional income from three roomers.
The Salmagundi
The Salmagundi was a seasonal tea room that probably opened in the late 1920s. It was located on Beacon Street in Boston, in a rooming house that the married couple who operated it lived in. I’m guessing the menu shown here is from the early 1950s, an era when tomato juice appetizers were still popular.
The word salmagundi was an old-fashioned but rather artsy word. It could apply to many kinds of mixtures, whether art, collections of short stories or poems, or a multi-ingredient salad.
The Salmagundi was a frequent meeting place for women’s clubs, bridal showers, business and professional groups, and gatherings of college alums.
Duncan Hines, in the 1946 edition of Adventures in Good Eating, declared The Salmagundi “One of the most popular places in Boston,” and praised its “unusual food combinations, delicious hot breads, and good desserts.”
A student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took his girlfriend to dinner there in 1950. He said it was a quiet place with three small dining rooms and a limited menu but one he approved of since it included lobster, steak, and chicken. They ordered duck and found it delicious, and liked the “fancy rolls.” But the check totaled a bit over five dollars, so he had to borrow some money from his “chick.”
Around 1960 it passed into new hands, and the owner tried to get a license to serve wines and malt beverages. I found no trace of it after 1962.
Mary Hartigan Restaurant
Although Mary Hartigan’s business card is the smallest of the day’s finds, I discovered that hers was the most successful business of the three. She established it in 1933 in what was formerly a Dutchland Farms that she had run. [above, front and back of business card]
The Dutchland Farms chain in New England, beginning as dairy stores, developed into restaurants quite similar to Howard Johnson’s shortly before the chain failed in the Depression. Some were converted to Howard Johnson’s, but Mary Hartigan, who also ran one in Harwich Port MA, decided to run her Dedham place independently under her own name.
Nevertheless Mary Hartigan’s and Howard Johnson’s shared a similar appearance as well as a similar menu. A Hartigan menu from 1952 shows that she kept the strong link to dairy products in her new restaurant, dedicating an entire page to ice cream concoctions such as sodas, sundaes, freezes, frappes, floats, and malted milk. In addition to the standard steak and chicken entrees, the menu also presented a variety of seafood, including seafood plates, baked lobster, Cape scallops, broiled swordfish, and fried clams. Tomato, grapefruit, and pineapple juice served as appetizers.
1952 was also the year that the restaurant acquired a liquor license. In 1959 the building was enlarged and remodeled. [above, business card interior]
When Mary Hartigan died suddenly in 1961 her obituary in the Boston Globe observed that the restaurant was “one of the best known in the state.” She left it to a niece who ran the business until 1970 when it was sold to a new owner who said he planned to keep the staff, some of whom had worked there for three decades.
© Jan Whitaker, 2024
Filed under food, menus, proprietors & careers, restaurant prices, tea shops, women
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.
So, e-mail me! 
Restaurant-ing through history 