Author Archives: Jan Whitaker

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About Jan Whitaker

A frequent restaurant patron who knows a lot of fascinating things about the history of American restaurants based on years of research, and who is also interested in how people relate to food, what it means to them, and how they form memories about meals in the past. I started my blog in 2008 (!) and by now have a huge number of posts. The early ones are just as good as the new ones, so look around.
April 16, 2023 · 12:18 pm

In their own words

I’ve collected numerous provocative comments about restaurants over time. Most of the following samples are excerpts from diaries, others from newspaper interviews. I selected them mostly because they were informative about restaurant conditions and practices at various times in the past, as well as patrons’ experiences.

There are some recurring themes. A number of the comments reveal women’s opinions of restaurants and their roles in them. Others show how unfavorably foreign travelers tended to view American eating places during the 19th century. Several comments reveal the high prices and deteriorated conditions that prevailed in the South during the Civil War.

1825, a Boston portrait engraver: “In the evening, at 8 P.M. we called on Mr. Allston at Rouillard’s Restorator. Found him at dinner; we sent up our letters . . . ; after waiting a few minutes Mr. Allston entered the parlour, and received us very cordially. He took us up to his dining room (quite private) and invited us to partake of his wine and cigars.”

1850, daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, in Cooperstown: “Then, again, there are seven taverns in our village, four of them on quite a large scale. As for the eating-houses – independently of the taverns – their number is quite humiliating; it looks as though we must needs be a very gormandizing people: there are some dozen of them – Lunches, Recesses, Restaurants, etc., or whatever else they may be called . . .”

1861, a Confederate clerk, in Richmond VA: “Mr. Tyler then invited me to join him at breakfast at a neighboring restaurant, where we had each a loaf of bread, a cup of coffee with milk (but brown sugar), and three eggs. The bill was sixteen dollars!”

1861, an Irishman visiting Montgomery AL: “Then, as to food – nothing could be had in the hotel – but one of the waiters led us to a restaurant, where we selected from a choice bill of fare, which contained, I think, as many odd dishes as ever I saw, some unknown fishes, oyster-plants, ‘possums, racoons, frogs, and other delicacies, and, eschewing toads and the like, really made a good meal off dirty plates on a vile table-cloth . . .”

1861, and then the Irishman visited Washington: “I dined at a restaurant kept by one Boulanger, a Frenchman, who utilised the swarms of flies infesting his premises by combining masses of them with his soup and made dishes.” [To be fair, Joseph Boulanger was in ill health and had been trying to sell his restaurant for a while when the visitor from Ireland came along.]

1864, a visitor to New Orleans: “Charges for living were most exorbitant; a simple breakfast at a restaurant, one dollar; a frugal dinner, two dollars; two small slices of dry toast, fifteen cents; the same for a cup of tea or coffee; ten cents for ice and butter; sixty cents for one small mutton chop. The simplest fare cost six dollars a day.”

1883, a touring Englishman in San Francisco: “After dressing, we all went to the ‘Poodle Dog’ restaurant to dinner. Here my sister Sarah behaved in an extraordinary way, affecting a morality which appeared to me immoral, and questioning the propriety of dining at this place.”

1893, a woman attending the Chicago World’s Fair: “Then we went to Rector’s Marine Restaurant [shown here], and on its breezy gallery had the swellest sort of little dinner. (The first glimpse of the menu made me faint. All the salads were .60 & .75, the fish all .60 & .75, relishes .25 & .30, vegetables .30 & .40, ice cream .25 . . .)”

1921, a European woman visiting New York: “We ordered some steak for our dinner, and when the waiter brought enough for a school treat I exclaimed, and he said, ‘In Broadway they serve the dishes — here we serve the food!’ They did indeed; even sharing it with a starving cat I couldn’t get through with it. The restaurant was rather a good one and very clean. I reproached Kenneth for not having taken me somewhere with more local color. I hate being treated as a Bourgeoise.”

1951, a male peace activist traveling across the country: “Another group, two whites and a Negro, stopped for coffee at a lunch counter in Maryland. The counter woman brought two porcelain cups and one paper cup. When the white man gave the paper container to the white woman and not to the Negro, the counterwoman said, ‘We’re not allowed to serve colored, it’s against the law.’. . . On the wall, all red-white-and-blue, was a poster which read, ‘If you don’t like this country, there are boats leaving for Russia every hour.’”

1970, a New York book editor: “First we went to Chez Vito and all I had was spaghetti and wine and iced tea. And the check was $6. My God.”

1973, a group vice-president of Howard Johnson’s: “I think anybody who’s not using convenience foods is out of it. And some of the prepared food around today is top quality. You’d never know the difference. We’re going to open a restaurant a week this year, and where could we get cooks and chefs for this kind of expansion? Even if we could get them we couldn’t train them fast enough.”

1989, a woman chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America: “Interviewers tell me, ‘You don’t look like a chef. You look like a hostess. How can people work around you? Or they ask, ‘Do you mind getting dirty?’”

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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April 2, 2023 · 2:50 pm

Not-to-miss menu show

Later this month, beginning on April 26 and through July 29, the Grolier Club in New York will host an exhibition of menus from the collection of Henry Voigt entitled A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941. Admission is free, and there is a 124-page illustrated catalog for $35. [above: back of catalog]

Henry Voigt is also the author of a well-researched blog entitled The American Menu in which he provides background for the banquets, dinners, hotels, and restaurants associated with a variety of menus from his collection.

Selections from his collection to be exhibited at the Grolier Club include rare menus from the 19th century, such as one from Parker’s Restorant in Boston dated June 29, 1842. In the catalog Henry notes that Harvey Parker’s restaurant occupied a basement, and preceded the opening of his better-known Parker House in 1855. Most of the main dishes offered that day in June, such as Chicken with Oyster Sauce, cost 37½ cents. Half of the Restorant’s Bill of Fare is devoted to a wide range of wines, with Congress Water for the probably rare non-drinkers.

The majority of the menus to be shown are from the 19th century and cover a range of types of eating places and occasions. As is the case of menus for banquets held in honor of distinguished guests, many are from hotels which, after all, generally provided the finest facilities throughout the early period. But visitors will also appreciate seeing Bills of Fare from less grand “Eating Houses,” such as that operated in New York by Sandy Welsh.

Also of particular interest to me are two early 1860s menus from Taylor’s Saloon in New York, a place frequented by women patrons where it was fashionable to see and be seen. It was grand-iose in its decor and pretensions. In the catalog Henry quotes an 1859 travel book which describes its marble tile floor, ornamental bronze ceilings, profuse gilding, giant mirrors, and richly upholstered seating. Not surprisingly it was sometimes ridiculed, notably by the witty culture-critic who wrote under the pen-name Fanny Fern.

It’s hard to stop listing all the gems in the exhibit, but in the 20th century there are specimens from a quick lunch, a vegetarian restaurant, Delmonico’s in its fading years, Bernarr Macfadden’s One-Cent Restaurant of the Depression, and Smalls’ Paradise Cabaret in Harlem. These are only a small sampling.

Maybe I’ll see you there?

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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March 26, 2023 · 11:45 am

The art of menu covers

Ask someone to name a designer of menu covers and it’s likely you will get a blank look. Although many stylish and eye-catching menus have been produced over time, their designers and illustrators mostly worked in anonymity.

In the early 20th century many of the menu cover artists were probably women. In 1900 the Kalo Shop in Chicago, for instance, employed six women graduates of the Art Institute who were trained in the esthetics of the arts-and-crafts movement. They created menu and magazine covers and other items. It’s likely that most of their menu work was for private banquets, while their biggest clients would have been steamships and railroads.

Individually produced menus such those from the Kalo Shop were rapidly being made obsolete by chromo-lithographers who could achieve quality effects at a lower cost. Unsurprisingly, the next chapter of menu production was taken over by printing companies with designers on their staffs. Some of the printing companies, such as Denver’s Standard Menu Co., were specialists in menu production as early as 1920. Like the women artists of earlier times, the names of designers in printers’ art departments are unknown. In more recent years, menu covers for well-capitalized restaurants have been designed by independent design firms. They created striking logos to be used on signs and menus and in advertising, giving individual restaurants and chains a thoroughly integrated visual signature.

In his book on menu design, “May I take Your Order?,” Jim Heimann says that well known illustrators such as Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell rarely, or never, designed menus or created art specifically for menu covers. That is mostly true, with a few exceptions, such as Al Hirschfeld, who contributed caricatures to New York’s Stage Deli menu and Charles Bragg, who painted a crowd of Hollywood celebrities for Chasen’s in Los Angeles [shown at top].

Chicago’s Blackhawk Restaurant used 8 drawings by Ludwig Bemelmans in the 1960s. They were not originally created for the restaurant, though owner Don Roth bought the originals, obtained Bemelmans’ permission to use them on menus, and gave them to customers as souvenirs.

Here are a few menus with designs that I particularly like.

Café des Beaux Arts, New York City, ca. 1910
A fashionable café of the early 20th century created by brothers Louis Andre and Jacques Bustanoby. Said to be a hangout of the artistic crowd, on Sunday nights it was so crowded no one could enter. Unlike other so-called “lobster palaces,” it reputedly served good food. It closed in 1920, a victim of Prohibition.

Carson Pirie Scott Tea Room, Chicago, early 20th century
In 1904 the old dry goods store named Carson Pirie Scott bought a building on Chicago’s State Street built by famed architect Louis Sullivan. The 8th-floor tea room soon became a city-wide attraction. This menu of uncertain date has the subdued but assured look of a pedigreed eating place meant to appeal to “ladies” who seek to be correct as well as stylish.

Café Society, New York City, 1938, 1940
In this case a known artist, Anton Refregier, not only contributed his artwork but did so in a full cover design when Barney Josephson, owner of New York’s Café Society music club restaurants, hired him to create menu covers for his two locations, first downtown at Sheridan Square in 1938, and then uptown at East 58th street in 1940. [Both covers are probably on beige-ish, not white, paper]

Harry Carpenter’s drive-in, Los Angeles, early 1940s
Harry Carpenter opened his first drive-in, an octagonal building, on the corner of Wilshire Blvd. and Western Ave. It was so popular he soon opened two more. In addition to hamburgers and hot dogs, Carpenter’s served corned beef on rye and chicken a la king on toast. This menu, though somehow foreboding, is dramatic.

The Hungry I, San Francisco, ca. 1955
The Hungry I, a comedy and music club, was founded around 1950, then sold and relocated to 599 Jackson street in 1954 where this menu was in use. Among those appearing there were Mort Sahl and The Kingston Trio. This menu offers entrees such as steak, lamb chops, chicken, and shish kabob. In ways that are hard to pinpoint, the cover design captures the spirit of the 1950s beatnik counterculture.

Huddle Restaurants, Southern California, 1956
The Huddle’s menu borrows the lettering of the chain’s exterior signage as well as the style of its architecture by Louis Armét and Eldon Davis. Probably their firm also handled the design of this menu, either in-house or by commission. Not all the restaurants in the chain featured futuristic “googie” design, but you can view images of many of those that did.

According to Heimann, the golden age of menu cover design in America ran from the 1920s through the 1950s. The 1960s in his judgement was mostly “a monotonous era” for menu design. Sadly, to me, in recent years printed menus with covers have almost completely vanished, along with postcards, matchbooks, and business cards. Digital photographs, if preserved, may become the sole visual record of most restaurants.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

Note: Fans of menu cover art would enjoy Menu Design in America (2011) and May I Take Your Order (1998). Reproductions of menus suitable for framing are available from Cool Culinaria, which also provides links to samples from the collections of Lou Greenstein, Henry Voigt, and the Culinary Institute of America. Also, beginning April 25, over 200 menus from the 19th and 20th centuries selected from Henry Voigt’s collection will be on display at New York’s Grolier Club. More about that later.

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March 12, 2023 · 11:57 am

Irish restaurants & pubs

Opening an eating place or a tavern was popular with immigrants – especially the Irish — for much of the later 19th century and into the 20th. They served as waiters, waitresses, kitchen workers, and proprietors.

And before World War II, when it was easy and inexpensive to open an eating and drinking place, they started many a restaurant, becoming the leading nationality in the business according to restaurant insider J. O. Dahl. Although he had no established figures to go by, judging from “numerous interviews and personal observation over a period of twenty-five years,” he estimated in his 1935 National Handbook of Restaurant Data that the Irish made up 18% of restaurant keepers.

The restaurants run by Irish immigrants were not usually identified as Irish, nor were they particularly appealing. Many fell into the category of “hash house,” generally viewed as the lowliest sort of eating place. Neither hash house proprietors nor those who ran finer spots made any mention of being from Ireland.

There were also numerous restaurants in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, run by well-known men of Irish birth, that were bigger and more prosperous. Typically they were oyster or chop houses that drew tourists and theater-goers. Among them was the prominent Shanley’s, established by Shanley brothers in the 1890s, and Dinty Moore’s, begun by James Moore whose name and fame were due to a comic strip. [above: Life with Father, 1923, by Jim McManus] Like many of the others, Shanley’s was put out of business by Prohibition, while Dinty Moore’s survived despite being “busted” time and time again.

In 1887 a journalist noted that “there is not an Irish restaurant in all these blessed United States.” He was wrong, but could his error have been due to the reticence of Irish businesses outside of New York’s entertainment districts regarding their heritage? He called on someone to explain why this was, “for of course it is significant of something.” Many immigrants sought to shed their difficult pasts and become “American,” but it’s hard not to wonder if the absence of overt ethnic identification also had something to do with the nativist “Know Nothing” movement of the 1850s that was based on fear that Catholic priests conspired to undermine Protestant values.

Whatever the reason, most Irish restaurant proprietors continued to keep a low profile in the 20th century. The resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, now targeting Irish and Jewish citizens as well as Black Americans, may also have been a factor. An Irish-born family that opened a tavern in Indianapolis in the 1930s called the Golden Ace Inn later revealed that they had avoided choosing a name that would reflect their ethnicity because of its unpopularity. In 1937 they had tried out the name Erin Go Bragh but changed it back after they lost customers.

Most early Irish-run eating places had very little in common with the Irish pub type of eating place that would begin to appear in the 1960s, when the term “ethnic restaurant” came into use. But even then, they were often snubbed in guide books, not out of prejudice against the Irish so much as dislike of their cuisine. The Underground Gourmet series, for instance, did not recommend or “discover” Irish eateries or cuisine. Rather, the books’ alphabetical indexes typically jumped from Indian to Jewish. The author of New Orleans’ Underground Gourmet, Richard Collin, said in a no-star review of Molly’s Irish Pub that “Irish food at its best has a somewhat limited appeal.” As late as 1990 a columnist in Columbus OH included in his St. Patrick’s day restaurant survey several jokes about how bad Irish food was, adding that restaurant reviewers and food editors shared the opinion among themselves that there was no such thing as a good Irish restaurant.

Corned beef and cabbage? That was a dish that appeared on a variety of 19th-century menus before it was widely defined as Irish. For one thing, corned beef, or any meat that was preserved in barrels with salt, had been available throughout the 19th century (and earlier), and was not identified with any particular nationality. [above advertisement from 1788] And in 1850 McKenzie’s Exchange in New Orleans offered corned beef and cabbage, right along with curried frog and barbecued gopher. Hudson’s department store in Detroit put corned beef and cabbage on an 1896 summer menu. [see below]

Even the Irish did not universally love corned beef and cabbage. Many Irish women worked as domestic servants and one of them reported in 1902 that servants got better food if they worked for millionaires with few rather than many servants. In those cases, she said, you ate the same food the rich did, such as chicken, rib roasts, strawberries, and ice cream. But in households with a large number of servants you would be eating inferior dishes such as corned beef and cabbage.

Yet corned beef and cabbage grew in popularity in the later 20th century, at least for one day out of the year, and became strongly identified as Irish. But the real winner in Irish restaurants, or what might in many cases be called Irish-themed restaurants, was the pub concept that gave restaurants the ability to stay open later with drinks and light fare, generate male appeal, and build upon the popularity of “good cheer” that had come to be associated with Irishness. Some featured Irish folk singing [above advertisement, Charleston SC, 1986], while the Irishness of others rested entirely on decor and market-tested names.

Although corned beef and cabbage remained on the menu of Irish restaurants – especially on St. Patrick’s day — fare tended toward hamburgers and steak. In more recent years, reflecting changes in Irish restaurants and new approaches to traditional fare, some restaurants have emerged in the U.S. that explore what is considered authentic Irish cuisine. An Irish cuisine ambassador noted in 1998 that, “Chefs coming from Ireland to the United States are melding the finest provisions into such nouveau recipes as Irish smoked salmon salad with citrus dressing, Gaelic potatoes, and Irish oatmeal apple crumble with Irish whiskey cream.”

Sláinte!

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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March 5, 2023 · 10:46 am

Dining . . . and wining?

Americans have not been big wine drinkers historically, so sommeliers (aka wine stewards) have not been commonplace. There were French sommeliers in New York in the 1870s and later, but it’s likely they were wine merchants and specialists in maintaining wine cellars rather than part of restaurant staffs.

Nevertheless the fine restaurants of the 19th century, such as Delmonico’s and some hotels, made a point to offer wine and almost certainly had someone on their staff capable of ordering, storing, and recommending wines to diners.

But, however many or few wine experts worked in American restaurants, they were put out of business by the advance of Prohibition. Their numbers gradually grew after Prohibition ended in December, 1933. By that time the restaurant industry was hanging by a thread and eager to get back into profitable business with the sale of wine and spirituous liquors.

Articles from the 1930s reveal just how unfamiliar the American dining public was with wine. A columnist mentioned that the Fred Harvey company was busily creating a wine list for its deluxe restaurant in Chicago’s Straus building in the months leading up to Repeal. The story ran through a few basic pairing suggestions such as whites with fish and reds with beef, adding, “One never drinks beer at a swank dinner.”

Restaurants that planned to serve wine, such as Karl Eitel’s in Chicago, were furiously stocking their cellars then. Two days after Repeal, Eitel’s waiters scrambled to catch up with customers who ordered wines that were out of stock. They were instructed to offer orange juice as a substitute for the missing vermouth. Eitel himself expressed annoyance at the waiters’ lack of knowledge about how to chill wine properly (ice has to melt a little before it will cool a bottle).

At Repeal, French wine shippers had hopes that the U.S. would expand their market, but according to one insider, the ambassadors they sent to this country came back full of pessimism, convinced that Americans much preferred liquor and soft drinks.

The relatively few restaurants wanting sommeliers usually had to hire Europeans, as they were the ones with the finest training, or any training at all. The Vendome in Los Angeles, for instance, brought a sommelier from Monte Carlo’s Hotel de Paris in 1934. But even a couple of years later there were said to be fewer than a dozen professional sommeliers in this country.

And it was already evident that the popular attitude toward them was less than worshipful. For a start the word sommelier was a barrier which, in the words of one wit, “can’t be correctly pronounced unless you’re either drunk or French.” [See Word of the Day cartoon below for a guide] And the chain worn around the neck suspending an oversize key and tasting cup was often ridiculed – except as jewelry for women, who were said to make off with them. Their attractiveness inspired the jewelry maker Monet to produce a simplified sommelier-style necklace and matching bracelet in the 1930s, which remained popular into the 1950s.

The happy sommelier in this country was one who managed to get a dedicated tip from guests who truly appreciated his (rarely her) recommendations. Few newspaper columnists showed respect for them, excepting O. O. McIntosh. In 1938 he explained that he loved the rituals associated with the sommelier’s work, such as twirling bottles in an ice bucket, displaying labels, wrapping bottles with napkins, and extracting and sniffing corks. He declared it “a magnificent ritual and one the gallop of American life should not trample.”

It was more typical for commentators to make fun of it all. One made suggestions on how to respond to a sommelier’s proud display of a bottle: “. . . it is good to respond by fitting a monocle to the eye, studying the label and issuing appropriate clucks and ‘hmmms.’ This has become an obligatory art form in certain restaurants . . .”

The sommelier’s primary role in the view of the restaurant industry was to get people to buy wine by the bottle. Behind the scenes, in industry journals and books, the depiction of wine sales could be crudely oriented toward profits, with the sommelier’s skill directed toward an estimation of the diner’s insecurity or wish to celebrate. A 1968 book on wine merchandising in restaurants saw a skilled sommelier as “merchandising in motion” and useful for “giv[ing] class to your restaurant.” And a trade magazine article on how to merchandise wine in restaurants carried the tagline, “A Meal Without Wine is a Meal With Less Profit.” As was demonstrated by comparing two checks (shown above), wine drinkers were said to be fond of pre-dinner cocktails also.

One of the strongest motives for restaurant guests to value advice about wine was, and undoubtedly still is, not to look foolish in the eyes of others. A Napa Valley winery owner reported that an experimental wine tasting he held for his Harvard Business School classmates in the 1960s revealed that “They weren’t particularly interested in learning anything about wine, except for how to order it without being embarrassed.”

In 1940s NYC, sommeliers were still rare and could mostly be found at luxury restaurants such as Jack & Charlie’s 21 Club, The Colony, Chambord, Pierre’s, and El Morocco.

Their numbers likely increased in the 1950s, but were there really any golden years for sommeliers? Not if you asked NYT food critic Craig Claiborne. He declared in 1961 that sommeliers had lost their status, and were no longer involved in buying wine and supervising restaurant wine cellars. “The number of old school sommeliers in New York can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” he declared.

Some sommeliers, perhaps in reaction to ridicule, tried to avoid being showy. The French sommelier at Maxim’s in Paris (in Chicago), despite the honors he had won, stayed in the background and rejected wearing the long chain with a key because he found the custom pretentious. Judging from her 1972 advertisement, Georgette of Baton Rouge LA also departed from the traditional sommelier costume.

In the 1970s waitstaff captains at New York’s Four Seasons took over the role of sommelier. They were trained by one of the restaurant’s knowledgeable owners and given wine at their meals so they would be familiar with it. This would have satisfied critics who complained that many sommeliers had never tasted the wines they recommended.

Today, Las Vegas may have the most sommeliers in this country, however I’d guess that most restaurants elsewhere have done away with the costuming and ritual, relying instead on trained servers to make wine recommendations.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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February 19, 2023 · 11:34 am

Trash, garbage, and waste

Running a restaurant is messy. Dealing with garbage, trash, grease, unsold food, and food left on patrons’ plates is unpleasant, expensive, and depressing. [above: toy dumpster]

This topic has been haunting me ever since I read the following sentence in an 1877 newspaper: “The harbor of New-York is made unhealthy by the decaying food of hotels.”

That was still the era of American-plan hotels where meals were included with lodging. It cost nothing extra if a hotel guest ordered everything available, saying, “Bring me some oysters on the half-shell, green turtle soup, some clam chowder, some halibut steak, green goose and apple sauce, lambs’ fries, sweet potatoes, egg-plant, succotash, stewed tomatoes, Roquefort cheese, lemon pudding, cranberry pie, cakes, watermelon, and French bread.” Most of the dishes ended up sampled but otherwise uneaten and were thrown out. European visitors were invariably horrified.

The notable exception to the American waste of food was the Chinese cook, commonly found in restaurant kitchens throughout the West in the 19th century. He was hailed for being “the most economical buyer imaginable,” one who “uses up what he has and wastes almost nothing.” When he was in the kitchen, little garbage resulted.

But there was not always a clear definition of garbage, revealing another, less savory way of reducing its output. Some lowly restaurants, even as late as the 1930s, considered food left on patrons’ plates perfectly okay to serve to guests once again, though possibly in a different format such as soup or hash. This practice led discriminating guests to avoid ordering hash unless it was on the menu of a first-class, shiny modern restaurant.

Over time, it became a violation of sanitary codes to serve anything left anywhere on a guest’s table, which would include untouched baskets of bread. And, increasingly, the practice of feeding kitchen scraps and plate scrapings to pigs or – in the case of unordered entrees – donating them to churches and centers providing charity meals, was ruled out.

The prevention of edible food waste in restaurants has become a goal at various times in past history. Both of the 20th-century’s world wars, when food and restaurant prices rose, brought attention to food waste in homes and eating places. Another decade of concern was the 1970s when rapid inflation caused consumer prices to soar at the same time Americans became aware of the problem of hunger here and around the world. [above: Cathy comic strip]

Most of the time, though, everything went into trash cans, or dumpsters. They arrived on the scene thanks to the Dempster brothers who developed their Dempster Dumpster in the 1930s. But note the fish hanging out of the toy dumpster shown above. That would cause problems for a restaurant manager who would be certain to get complaints from neighbors about the stench if the lid wasn’t kept firmly closed. In 1968 a Chicago neighbor of Chances R begged a newspaper’s help column to “use your magic wand” to deal with the eatery’s “fetid” smelling garbage cans that were “overflowing and left uncovered.”

Another problem restaurants – and municipalities — had to deal with was kitchen grease building up and clogging drain pipes. As early as 1883, some cities took action to keep grease out of city systems. That year St. Paul MN adopted a requirement that a grease trap “be constructed under the sink of every hotel, eating house, restaurant or other public cooking establishment.”

Traps are designed to separate water from a sink from the grease floating in it, permitting the grease to build up into a semi-solid block that can be removed periodically by a service that disposes of it. Disposal, though, could be a thorny problem of its own at times as town dumps closed down. Also, fly-by-night collectors sometimes deposited grease along roadsides.

Eventually, slowly, other states, cities, and towns enacted grease trap ordinances similar to St. Paul’s. And yet trapless restaurants continued to exist. It was only in the 1980s, after years of official pressure, that half a dozen restaurants in Hingham MA installed grease traps. The harbor was too handy! About that same time restaurant grease threatened operation of the sewage treatment plant in Fort Myers FL. [restaurant at the Hingham Yacht Club shown above]

Fortunately, getting rid of cooking oil turned out to be easier since the contents of an outdoor rendering can may be recycled and used for fuel. [above: grease and oil containers]

In the 1960s throwaway paper bags, napkins, cups, and straws, as well as plastic lids and small servings of sugar and condiments proliferated, especially with the spread of fast food outlets that eliminated dish washing and laundry. Even table-service restaurants got into the act with custom printed placemats and individual packets of crackers and breadsticks. [below, Sardi’s, NYC, 1962]

Litter at drive-in restaurants was a chronic problem that led neighbors to complain. Towns drafted ordinances to control the problem, such as one in Michigan in 1965 that targeted “paper cups, straws, napkins, garbage, beverages and all other waste matter intended for disposal which, if not placed in a proper receptacle, tends to create a nuisance by rendering property unclean, unsafe and unsightly.”

Although single-serve packages caused waste, they were advertised as a solution to waste in that they prevented restaurants from having to throw out leftover or mishandled condiments, crackers, etc. That was also a frequent claim made by companies that produced frozen entrees for restaurants that would not be taken out of the freezer until ordered by a patron, preventing the restaurant from preparing food that no one wanted.

What is fascinating is industry’s response to restaurants’ problems with waste, smells, and general ickiness. There was no end of advertisements in trade magazines promising to do away with all the problems. One that made me laugh with its slogan “Smash Your Trash” was the Can-O-Rid Can and Bottle Crusher that reduced trash volume and hauling charges by crushing jugs and bottles “to bits.”

The Stomach, a 1970s counterculture vegetarian restaurant in Portland OR, found a different kind of solution to handling garbage. They composted it and suggested customers who were organic gardeners should feel free to “raid the restaurant’s garbage pail.” In 1973 a grease hauling company in Houston adopted the slogan “Recycling for a Better Tomorrow for the Benefit of Mankind”.

Alas, today restaurants still struggle with waste, trash, grease, and garbage.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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February 5, 2023 · 11:29 am

America’s literary chef

One way or another Othello Pollard found ways to make a big impression in Cambridge MA in his relatively short tenure there as a caterer and restaurateur.

In 1794 he was listed as a member of The African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, in Philadelphia, said to be the first “African” church in America. A short time later he came to the Boston area, marrying a woman in 1799 who kept a boarding house there.

Although I couldn’t find anything about where he was born, I suspect he may have been a freed slave from Haiti, then known as Saint Dominigue.

In 1801 he and his wife moved to a site on Tremont Street in Cambridge MA across from “the mall,” a shaded walk. They were near the Columbian Museum, which housed wax figures and advertised “curiosities” that included an elephant that drank liquor.

Othello knew how to get attention, for instance by wearing a diamond pinkie ring. In 1802, about six months before he established his eating place “for ladies and gentlemen,” he advertised an attraction perhaps inspired by the Museum: a live leopard.

Maybe the leopard was not as big a draw as he had hoped, though, because in August 1802 he placed an elaborate advertisement for his “Attic Bower” supplied with “epicurean dainties” such as bread, butter, cheese, ham, tongue, ice cream, custards, “whip syllabubs,” pies, jellies, olives, pickles and all kinds of fruit, along with wine, brandy, gin, ice punch, cordials, spirits, bitters, and porter.

His advertisement was peppered with classical allusions and Latin phrases, such as in the above excerpt, roughly translated, “Where are you taking me, Bacchus?” According to The Wine Bible, ancient Falernian wine was so sought after in its time that “you practically had to be the emperor of Rome to get a taste,” so his claim to have some might have been a gimmick.

A short time later, he ran a longer advertisement with an expanded bill of fare [shown above] that included heartier food – introduced under intriguing headings – and indicated to patrons what kinds of money he would take in exchange.

No one could quite decide if he had composed his unusual advertisements himself, or whether the author was one of his regular visitors from Harvard who, perhaps, offered his writing skills as payment while short of funds.

When a fire wiped out his Attic Bower in 1803 he moved farther along Tremont, next door to a tavern, and appealed once again to “gentlemen of delicate taste, and well educated appetites.”

A little more than a year later, he moved again in the same general vicinity. In 1805 he notified Harvard students that he would not be able to entertain graduates as he had done for the past four years because he did not have enough space.

His last location seemed to be in Boston, where I found an advertisement for his coffee house in 1805. He simply mentioned having turtle soup, worded with what could be read as a resigned tone. Then he just seemed to disappear. He still remains a mystery, even though articles recalling him continued to appear as late as 1908.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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January 22, 2023 · 12:09 pm

The smörgåsbord saga

Swedes began immigrating from rural Sweden to the United States in significant numbers in the 1870s, but it took a while before Swedish smörgåsbords were introduced to the American public. The earliest ones opened in cities in the 1910s, but even in the 1930s proprietors still found it necessary to explain the concept to Americans who were not of Swedish ancestry.

In 1912 a self-proclaimed high-class Swedish restaurant called Henry’s opened in New York City [advertisement 1918]. There had been earlier Swedish restaurants in the city but they appeared to serve workers and were unlikely to have offered smörgåsbord. In 1915 another first-class restaurant opened in New York, Scandia, headed by Gerda Simonson. It was the first known restaurant of its kind run by a woman.

It is somewhat surprising that these early examples were in New York City since both Chicago and Minneapolis had larger populations of Swedish immigrants. But it’s likely that at that time NYC restaurants were better able to attract travelers from abroad as well as Swedes living there.

Despite the presence of a Swedish restaurant with a smörgåsbord at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, there do not seem to have been many such restaurants in Chicago until the 1920s. They were also evident in Rockford IL. As was true of tea rooms, many were run by women. The Bit of Sweden in Chicago, opened in 1925, billed itself as a tea room, but of course Prohibition was in effect, ruling out the smörgåsbord’s classic accompaniment to herring, a shot of Aquavit. The number of smörgåsbord restaurants increased during the 1930s, particularly after Prohibition ended. [pictured:Rococo House, run by the same woman who introduced Bit of Sweden]

At first it seemed that Swedish restaurants in the U.S. relied heavily on patrons of Swedish ancestry who enjoyed them on Sunday evenings. [above Rockford IL, 1928; kropkokn is a cake] Gradually they drew a non-Swedish clientele, many of whom had as much trouble with the concept of smörgåsbord as they did with its pronunciation.

At their finest, smörgåsbord restaurants achieved a high level of artistic beauty in food presentation as is evident in the above photograph of a New York restaurant in 1939.

Newspaper stories had appeared in the late 19th century explaining that Swedish steamships and hotels furnished smörgåsbord as appetizers before a meal. Patrons took a small plate with a slice of bread and then selected a few items to eat while standing, accompanied with a strong drink and beer. They might have seconds but they did not eat so much that they spoiled their appetite for a full meal which they would soon order from their table.

Non-Swedish Americans, however, tended to see the smörgåsbord as a meal in itself, piling their plates high and often returning for more. Soon restaurants adapted by pricing the smörgåsbord separately. For a higher price, patrons could precede a dinner with smörgåsbord if they chose to. In the 1930s the Bit of Sweden restaurant in Los Angeles went to some trouble to explain how it all worked, devoting a page of its menu to this, and instructing patrons that the correct pronunciation was SMIR-GOES-BOORD (rather than SMAR-GUS-BORD). The restaurant charged $1.50 for smörgåsbord with dinner, or $1.00 without, and included a warning on its instructions page that customers had better eat all they took or they would be charged extra.

Other stories also appeared in the 1930s with instructions on how to handle smörgåsbords. In 1948 well known food journalist Clementine Paddleford explained what she learned from the daughter of the manager of NY’s Three Crowns Restaurant — which made its debut at the 1939 NY World’s Fair. She was told there was a system to choosing from its famed 100 items. First, she wrote, take pickled herring and a bit of herring salad along with a boiled potato with sour cream. On the second visit, more fish – maybe shrimp, sardines, smoked salmon, and a marinated mussel. Trip three might be hot dishes, but alternatively could be cold meats, salads, and cheeses if the diner was planning a fourth trip for hot food.

Decades later, smörgåsbord restaurants could still be found, but it seems that the idea of freely choosing food from a spread was being taken over by low-price, no-frills, all-you-can-eat buffets. Some, such as the Sir George’s chain called themselves smörgåsbords, but others named themselves “smorgies.” I doubt many, if any, were owned or operated by Swedish-Americans. [above, Sir George’s in Hemet CA]

As for authenticity, Tracy Nicole Poe explained in her 1999 dissertation that even the early examples of smörgåsbords in the U.S. represented an “invented tradition.” She wrote: “Like other elements of Swedish-American ethnicity . . . the smorgasbord’s origins are more a product of the National Romantic Ideal, and its rituals more concocted from the imagination of community leaders, than they are manifestations of rural immigrant culture. The fact is, most Scandinavian immigrants would probably never have attended an actual smörgåsbord in the classic nineteenth century European sense.”

On the other hand, I think the all-you-can-eat smörgåsbord derivative, though invented, is a genuine representation of American culture.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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January 8, 2023 · 11:29 am

Meals along the way

On Monday, October 6, 1834, Charles Shipman and his two teenage daughters, Joanna and Betsey, left Athens, Ohio, for Philadelphia. Charles went there twice a year to buy goods for his general store. They traveled in their two-horse carriage and would not return until November 15, by which time they had been through the mountains, traveled by steamship, visited Washington and Baltimore, and met with President Andrew Jackson.

Their usual plan was to get up early, travel for a while and then stop for breakfast and dinner at an inn or tavern. Their main meal was mid-day dinner. They ate “supper” wherever they were staying for the night. They stayed at inns, hotels, and for their longest stay, in Philadelphia, at a boarding house where their meals were supplied.

The meals in taverns and inns in small towns were surely humble. Joanna kept a record of their travels, more of a log of times and distances than a diary of subjective impressions and descriptive details. It’s disappointing that she was not inclined to record much about what they ate on their travels, but there are some interesting bits.

On their fourth day of travel they stopped in Morristown OH for breakfast at 9 a.m. Joanna writes: “Found some tomato preserves on the table, at first thought they were very good, but after tasting again concluded to the contrary.” On Joanna’s initial recommendation, Betsey ate some of the preserves but later told her sister that they made her feel sick.

That evening they arrived in Wheeling – now in West Virginia, but then Virginia – and stayed in a “very good country tavern” where Joanna reported she “Ate too much supper, and that with rainy weather and miserable roads makes me feel a little homesick.”

In the journal it becomes clear that the sisters were prone to feeling homesick and anxious – about traveling through the mountains, staying in cities, meeting people, and being on steamboats. Joanna found Smithfield VA, and then Petersburg VA where they stayed overnight, depressing: “Have had the horrors all day.” Seeing a fire from their window in Philadelphia, Joanna recorded that she and Betsey were “frightened out of our wits.”

Did anything thrill the sisters on what was probably their first trip outside Ohio? Joanna certainly shows no excitement about meeting “Old Hickory,” the President, and simply records that after shaking hands, and “looking at him as long as we cared to, we left his August presence and went into the yard.”

Joanna writes with a restrained tone, yet it’s clear she has a sense of humor. The Shipmans met with various people along the way. After one of them, a man who “ogled his eyes” when he looked at the sisters, told them he planned a future visit to Ohio, Joanna writes, “So now look sharp, Miss Betsey.”

On the way to Fredericktown MD, they stayed overnight at an inn. Joanna recorded her simple breakfast the next morning as “a piece of bread, strong [i.e, rancid] butter, peach sauce and a cup of milk.”

At that point they were about to reach that part of their trip that took them to larger cities. But I feel certain that they had no interest in exploring urban dining as itemized on the 1834 bill of fare of the Adelphi Coffee House in Philadelphia [shown above]. It gives a good idea of choice dishes of that time, but since the coffee house was also a drinking place it would have been forbidden territory for this family. Charles Shipman was a dedicated temperance follower who refused to handle alcohol in his store.

Upon reaching Baltimore the next evening, they had trouble finding a hotel that was not full, but on the third try discovered a new place called Page’s that had just opened. Joanna described it as “the most splendid house my little eyes ever beheld.” They had a private parlor and meals brought to their room. But despite these positive aspects, she wrote “It nearly frightens us out of our wits to go all through [the hotel]. Betsey says she never thought she was raised in the woods to be scared at an owl, but she has found tonight that she was.”

Their 11-day stay in Philadelphia included some strange-sounding entertainments. At the Hall of Independence they viewed dogs powering cloth making, and an automaton that wrote. The next day they went to Washington Hall where they saw speaking and dancing puppets and “the exhibition of the burning of Moscow.”

Their father offered Joanna and Betsey a trip to New York City, but they turned it down, preferring to head for home.

Leaving Philadelphia they returned to Washington, beginning their journey homeward. They stayed in a large hotel, Brown’s Indian Queen Inn, but did not record anything about it. Traveling through Virginia they stopped at Warm Springs, where they were weighed so they could see how much they gained at dinner. Charles (119½), Betsey (109), and Joanna, (118½) each added from 1 to 1½ pounds to their slight frames. They stayed overnight in the springs region, eating “a real country breakfast” the next morning. Then, for dinner at White Sulphur Springs, they “were treated to some fresh pork fried, some fresh beef fried, some light bread and some milk, rather tough this, as I look at it,” recorded Joanna.

Only two days from home, they stopped at Wilson’s Hotel in Charleston for dinner. She reported “the way dinner was served was a ‘touch above the vulgar.’” I would not think that was a resounding compliment.

Joanna was more than thrilled to get back home to her mother and brother.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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December 25, 2022 · 10:58 am

Dinner in Miami, Dec. 25, 1936

Judging from the number of restaurants and hotel dining rooms advertising Christmas or Xmas dinner that year, there must have been quite a few prospective diners around. It was still the Depression but prohibition had ended several years earlier, tourism was well underway, and Art Deco buildings were going up all over.

The not-at-all modernistic Old Heidelberg shown above – which had opened in the unfortunate year of 1929 — gave no details about its offerings that day, other than to characterize it as an “Old-Fashioned Dinner.” That’s a fairly meaningless description if you ask me. Given that Germany had withdrawn citizenship from Jews in 1935, this probably was not a restaurant popular with Miami’s Jewish community.

Most of the advertisements mentioned price, not surprising since most people had to watch their spending. They ranged from a low of 50¢ per person to a high of $2.00 at a place called the Rose Bowl, a restaurant specializing in Southern dishes, with a woman serving bread dressed as a “mammy.” Like the Heidelberg, the Rose Bowl made no effort in its Christmas advertisements to tout its dinner or whatever other attractions it might have possessed.

Others went to great length to attract diners. The Big And Little Grill had no end of attractions, including music, “gifts to all,” free parking, a chef who had formerly worked at a New Hampshire resort hotel, and a Santa Claus who once appeared in Charlie Chaplin’s movie “Circus.” All dinners were 75¢. The list of comestibles filled ten wide lines of text. It contained 35 separate items, among them a “Big and Little Salad,” Boiled Lobster Stuffed with Oysters, Supreme of Sole Florentine, Sizzling Steak with Wine, and numerous vegetables and desserts.

The Big and Little offered an equally good deal for its New Year’s celebration, with a return performance of Charlie Little, now in the role of clown. As for its advertisement, as a New Englander I’m obligated to point out that there is no Dixieville in New Hampshire – it’s Dixville.

Attraction-wise, the Big and Little was hard to top. But George’s Restaurant tried hard, with even more inches of advertising, not to mention wine and bottled beer. Its 75¢ dinner comprised six courses: Cocktail (tomato juice, half grapefruit, etc.); a soup accompanied by olives and hearts of celery; a choice of five entrees that included Whole Broiled Lobster, Maitre d’Hotel (chances are these were clawless Florida lobsters, considered inferior to Maine’s); a salad; eight vegetables; choice of many desserts (six kinds of pie, a cake, a sundae, ice creams, jello, or stewed prunes). For those who didn’t have big appetites there was George’s Special 50¢ Dinner, which of course offered fewer choices and only half a lobster, but still looked like a bargain.

The Studio Grill’s turkey dinner included wine, which may have accounted for the $1.00 charge. Shortly after it opened a few years earlier, the suburban Miami curb service eatery had advertised for “Girls with Blonde Hair” who were 5’6″ tall, weighed 118 lbs., and had “striking” personalities. Undoubtedly reflecting Depression conditions, 800 showed up. The grill was owned by a magazine cover illustrator and was filled with his paintings of nude women.

The Laura Jacobsen Café, a high-class Chicago transplant, was located in a residential apartment hotel. Her Christmas dinner in the ritzy-looking Colonial Towers accommodating snowbirds from the North was $1.25.

Wherever and whatever you may eat, I hope you will enjoy your holiday dinner.

© Jan Whitaker, 2022

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