Category Archives: miscellaneous

May 9, 2013 · 8:23 pm

Behind the kitchen door

behindthekitchendoor482Although restaurant patrons often question servers about the sources of the food on the menu – whether it’s organic, local, or fresh – they rarely think about the work life of their server or other restaurant personnel. In the words of Saru Jayaraman, author of Behind the Kitchen Door, most “are totally unaware of the horribly exploitative working conditions in restaurants, which affect the quality of our food and, ultimately, our health.”

They do not know, for instance, that many restaurant workers earn less than poverty-level incomes in jobs that are ranked among the nation’s worst paying, are often cheated out of their earnings, and often feel compelled to work when sick. Or that female restaurant workers and all workers of color face discrimination pushing them into the lowest ranks of restaurant jobs where their chances of rising are often blocked.

Jayaraman, one of the founders of the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) in 2002, wrote Behind the Kitchen Door to make the restaurant public as thoughtful about restaurant employees as they are about restaurant food, and to engage them in the movement to better workers’ pay and opportunities. The book intersperses facts about restaurant working conditions with moving stories of individuals.

If you read this book it’s true that you will probably not be quite as carefree about future restaurant experiences as you were before. You may become more selective about which restaurants you patronize. On the bright side, you may decide to help change things.

Consider the following, much of which is from surveys conducted by ROC:

● Restaurant workers made, on average, an annual income of $15,092 in 2009, one third of what other workers in the private sector made on average.

● The $2.13 federal minimum wage for tipped workers, originally calculated as one half the minimum wage (when it was $4.25), has not risen since 1991. (Restaurants are allowed to apply tips to workers’ hourly wages to meet the current $7.25 federal minimum wage.)

Waitstaff● The National Restaurant Association, “dominated by large multinational restaurant corporations that have a lot of money to spend on lobbyists,” such as the Darden group (Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and others) firmly opposes increases in the minimum tipped wage of $2.13.

● States can set a minimum wage for tipped workers, and seven (Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) have the same minimum wage for tipped as for non-tipped workers. The NRA claims raising the minimum wage for tipped workers would create a hardship, yet the seven states “all have thriving restaurant industries,” according to Jayaraman. Look at the Department of Labor’s 2013 table “Minimum wages for tipped workers” to see how states compare.

● ROC surveys of more than 4,000 restaurant workers found that 90% had no paid sick days and most could not afford to take off work when sick. According to Jayaraman, the National Restaurant Association “has spent years lobbying to prevent restaurant workers from winning paid sick days. In Washington, D.C., the NRA struck a closed-door deal with the city council to exempt all tipped workers from a local paid sick-leave law.”

● In ROC’s national survey, “three-quarters of all white workers held a position in the front of a restaurant, while less than half of all African American and about one-third of all Latino workers held a front of the house position.” When African Americans and Latinos do work in the dining room they are most likely to be bussers – and to find it hard to get promoted to server with the chance to multiply their earnings times five or more.

These are but a few of the revelations in Behind the Kitchen Door. If the book has a single message about what to do, it is, “Adopt a definition of ‘sustainable food’ that includes sustainable labor practices.”

ROC puts out an annual National Diners Guide. Although it contains relatively few restaurants, it is worth looking at.

© Jan Whitaker, 2013

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March 30, 2013 · 4:03 pm

Dining on the border: Tijuana

TijuanaGardenCafe1922Borderlands are fascinating social and cultural mixing bowls. Their restaurants exemplify how variable these places can be. Lacking tradition as well as a local clientele and culture, there is little shaping them other than market forces. In Tijuana prominent historical factors shaping the market were drinkers’ desire for alcohol and restaurant owners’ need to recoup lost business.

The history of restaurants and cafes in Tijuana is marked by all the instability and calamity that the restaurant business is known for – and then some! Partnerships shifted, scandals erupted, and fires swept through the main street, Avenida Revolucion.

When Prohibition became the law in the United States, a number of San Diego restaurant, café, and bar owners – Italians, Jews, Slavs, and others — set up shop a stone’s throw away, in Tijuana, then a village of little more than 1,000 people. American visitors who began to head there did not go to soak up Mexican culture, but to escape restraints [see 1922 advertisement above]. Tourist eating places, all furnishing drinks and often entertainment, had names like Johnny’s Place, Aloha [American teens in Aloha Cafe, 1940s, below] , and Alhambra. Few were run by Mexicans and Mexican food ranked low on the culinary scale.

From the point of view of San Diego’s anti-alcohol, cafeteria-loving reformers, the drinking, gambling, and prostitution that went on in Tijuana made it a hell hole. Tijuana’s reputation, of course, did not stop everyone from going there, even many respectable, well-off San Diegans and Los Angelenos, as well as civic organizations. Determined to limit vice, prohibitionists waged vigorous battle to restrict passage by shortening border crossing hours, finally succeeding in closing the border from 6 pm to 6 am in 1926.

TijuanaAlohaCafeca1949

Despite the curfew, San Diego’s hotel and restaurant industries protested in 1931 that the 6 pm closing “ha[d] not prevented one single person from going to Tijuana,” and had actually reduced their business by 25%. They alleged that visitors went for the whole day or stayed overnight, enabling them to engage in more drinking, gambling, or whatever than previously. Tijuana flourished, opening more cafes, clubs, and hotels.

The better restaurants specialized in “international cuisine” which consisted mainly of steaks and seafood along with Italian, French, German, and Mexican dishes. In this category were restaurants variously operated by Alex and Caesar Cardini of salad fame. Julia Child wrote in her 1975 book From Julia Child’s Kitchen that she remembered going to Caesar’s for lunch in 1925 or 1926 with her parents. They had heard of his special salad and were eager to taste it. “Caesar himself rolled the big cart up to the table, [and] tossed the romaine in a great wooden bowl,” she wrote.

The border curfew was relaxed in1932 and lifted entirely in 1933. But if that had an adverse impact on Tijuana tourist trade, it was nothing compared to the blows delivered by the repeal of U.S. Prohibition in 1933 and a Mexican gambling ban in 1935. Tijuana bartenders correctly predicted few bars and cafes would survive. Sure enough, proprietors headed back to the U.S. Caesar Cardini opened a place in San Diego in 1936.

TijuanaGermanrestaurant

The tourist economy waxed and waned thereafter, thanks to such things as the 18-year-old drinking age, the availability of marihuana, and incidents of violence. Mexican cuisine became more popular in Tijuana’s tourist district in the latter 20th century. Richard Nixon, then Vice President of the United States, ordered Mexican dishes and German beer in an informal visit to the Old Heidelberg there in 1960.

Today Tijuana is a large global city, yet Americans tend to stick to the main tourist avenue as of old. There is a diversity of restaurants, many with Hispanic names and owners. Caesar’s has continued, off and on, since the Cardinis departed. Yet, as much as I’d like to believe a recent comment about it on TripAdvisor.com (“nice place to feel the real culture and history of Tijuana”), I have to ask, “Real culture? Real history? What?”

© Jan Whitaker, 2013

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December 27, 2012 · 8:24 pm

2012, a recap

NewYearswithHats166

I had a pleasant surprise when I looked over my numbers for the past year and discovered that my page views had increased by 78%. As a “niche blogger” my biggest question is whether anyone is reading what I write and I am happy to report you are. Thank you!

My “Tastes of a decade” posts are so popular that I decided to make them easier to find by gathering them together on a special page. Now my mission is to fill in missing decades, starting with 1910-1920 and 1970-1980.

Just like last year, readers continue to be attracted to the well-loved restaurants of the past, the London Chop House, Schrafft’s, and Maxwell’s Plum. But even they were outdone. A new TV show set in Miami Beach in 1959 called “Magic City” propelled my 2011 post on Wolfie’s into the rank of second most visited post of 2012! Taste of a decade: 1920s restaurants, written way back in 2008, continued as no. 1.

NewYearsWoodbury's167Holding its own quite nicely is one of my favorites — “You want cheese with that?” – written over three years ago.

Two posts I wrote in 2012 made it into this year’s Top 20. One of them surprised me: Miss Hulling’s cafeteria in St. Louis. Maybe the traffic it attracted is accounted for by someone linking to it but so far I haven’t detected any evidence of that. Ice cream parlors, published in August, was the other top new post. The popularity of this one is easy to explain: it was chosen as a featured post by WordPress.

I am constantly adding to my list of ideas for future posts, so much so that it never seems to get any shorter. Some topics in the pipeline are: Greek-American restaurants, Nick’s Nest (a hotdog stand in Holyoke MA), sawdust floors, frozen entrées, menu design, chains of theme restaurants, and lunch wagons. If I can find enough material I’d love to write about the Kahiki in Columbus OH, which was perhaps the most exuberant example of a Polynesian restaurant in this country. A reader has suggested writing about Bookbinder’s in Philadelphia. So, as usual I expect to be working on many topics simultaneously.

Best wishes to everyone for a happy new year!

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September 16, 2012 · 3:14 pm

Taste of a decade: 1820s restaurants

Aside from roadside inns, most eating places are found in cities in this decade. With a population slightly over 150,000 New York is more than twice as big as its nearest rivals, Philadelphia and Baltimore, but most cities are considerably smaller. In 1820 only 12 have populations over 10,000, all of them along the East Coast with the exceptions of Albany NY and New Orleans LA.

Yet industrial development is underway. After a financial panic at the decade’s beginning, textile mills in Massachusetts begin large-scale production. The Erie Canal goes into operation with its completion in 1825, spurring commercial development in NYC. With the city’s expansion there is greater distance between work in lower Manhattan and places of residence, bringing more customers to oyster cellars and taverns. But New York still lags behind Boston in its supply of refined French restaurants.

Big hotels begin to be established, most notably Baltimore’s City Hotel (1826), Philadelphia’s United States Hotel (1827), Washington’s National Hotel (1827), and Boston’s Tremont Hotel (1829). In most hotel dining rooms it is still the custom to put all the food – soup, meat, vegetables, puddings — on the table at once. Except for the occasional banquet, menus are not printed. A list of available dishes is chanted by waiters or chalked on a board behind the bar.

Apart from eating in hotels while traveling, “respectable” women stay home. They avoid  public dining spots, especially oyster houses or cellars which are associated with heavy drinking and the burgeoning male “sporting life” of gambling and frequenting prostitutes.

The temperance movement begins. Since there is little separation between eating and drinking places, restaurants are targeted as sites of temptation and moral downfall. Religious publications warn readers that it’s a slippery slope from sipping “innocent soda water” in a pleasure garden to getting drunk in the oyster house or “the common grog shop.”

Highlights

1820 Aiming for well-off gentlemen, Dudley Bradstreet advertises fine venison, “a warm room and the best of wine” at his Phoenix Restorator in Boston.

1821 In summer wealthy New Yorkers vacation in Saratoga Springs and environs where they enjoy Wild Pigeons, Pike, and Bass “taken daily at the foot of the much celebrated Cohoes Falls” at S. Demarest’s Mansion House.

1823 A visiting Frenchman complains he cannot get French cooking in New York’s typical English-style chop houses. He pleads, “Will any body be kind enough to point out a veritable French coffee house or restaurateur in New-York, where ‘haricot mutton,’ ‘coutulettes a la maintenon,’ and sundry other dishes may be procured?”

1824 France’s marquis de Lafayette, friend of the American revolution, pays a return visit to the US and is feted with a dinner at Boston’s Exchange Coffee House which features an astonishing selection of American and French dishes.

1826 A teenager named Hawes Atwood opens an oyster saloon on Boston’s Union Lane which he will operate into the 1890s. (Still in business and now known as Ye Olde Union Oyster House, it is the nation’s oldest restaurant in continuous operation, looking very much the same as in its 1889 illustration above.)

1826 To the delight of a passerby who copies it in his notebook exactly as it appears, a sign at a Philadelphia oyster cellar captures the speed and energy of the spoken bill of fare: “OystersOPENED,ORINSHELLFriedorstuedBEER,PORtE,ALE”

1827 Swiss immigrants Giovanni and Pietro Del Monico arrive in New York and establish a small European-style confectioner’s shop serving pastries, coffee, wine, and liquor at 23 Williams Street.

1828 Black caterer Edward Haines opens a summertime Mead Garden on the corner of Front and Jay streets in Brooklyn NY.

1828 The editor of the Trumpet & Universalist Magazine applauds a Providence RI restaurant keeper who has “substituted at his Restorateur hot coffee in lieu of intoxicating alcohol.” “If a man must drink at 11 o’clock, he writes, “let him drink Hot Coffee.” (By the way, he is referring to 11 A.M.)

1829 Downtown in NYC patrons of the dark and dreary, but cheap, Plate House crowd into box-like seating and wolf down plates of beef and potatoes. Child waiters shout orders to the kitchen followed by the guests’ box numbers (Half plate beef, 4!). [Philadelphia oyster cellar pictured; note curtained booths]

© Jan Whitaker, 2012

Read about other decades: 1810 to 1820; 1860 to 1870; 1890 to 1900; 1900 to 1910; 1920 to 1930; 1930 to 1940; 1940 to 1950; 1950 to 1960; 1960 to 1970; 1970 to 1980

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September 3, 2012 · 8:56 pm

Cool culinaria is hot

Since I’m an incorrigible collector of restaurant ephemera of all kinds – menus, postcards, photos, business cards, Victorian trade cards, brochures, etc. – you can well imagine that I’ve adorned my kitchen walls with framed vintage menus. (Not too many, very tasteful!) I never tire of looking at them and guests always seem to find them interesting.

Searching out attractive and appealing menus to decorate with isn’t as easy as you might think. Personally I love “the hunt” but, hard as it is for me to realize, not everybody enjoys digging through musty boxes at flea markets or scrolling through pages and pages of e-Bay where you frequently find only the same mediocre items. Solution: Cool Culinaria’s offerings of digital prints of menus on premium paper ready to frame, or already framed if you prefer.

Cool Culinaria’s Charles Baum (formerly general manager and partner of The Rainbow Room and partner of Windows on the World) and writer/researcher/storyteller Barbara McMahon have done the hard work for you. I don’t allow advertisements on my blog and I hesitate to promote commercial enterprises or products, but I am convinced that Cool Culinaria is a quality operation.

For neatniks like me, it is also nice that CC’s menus are not folded, torn, or splattered with gravy as are so many old menus in the vintage paper marketplace.

I notice that since the business was launched, quite recently, new menus have been added regularly. Fans of all kinds of menus, ranging from drive-ins to swanky turn-of-the-century restaurants, will find something to like. Two of my favorites are a 1930s menu from the Blackhawk, decorated with dancers from the smart set (above), and, of course, drive-ins such as McDonnell’s.

Cool Culinaria also reprints diner signs (“We serve fresh eggs”), and imprints tee shirts, aprons, and throw pillows with restaurant logos and humorous phrases.

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July 29, 2012 · 2:31 pm

Restaurant-ing on Sunday

The Chick-fil-A controversy has arrived at my blog. A few days ago I heard from a reporter looking for restaurant history background on the subject of religion and restaurants.

Was there, she asked, ever a commercial restaurant chain similar to Chick-fil-A that took a strong religious stand evidenced by decisions such as closing on Sundays?

Why, yes, there was. It was the Dennett’s chain of the late 19th century. Founded in New York City by the crusading moralist Alfred W. Dennett, it sported religious slogans on the walls, held a mandatory daily prayer session for employees – and was closed on Sundays. Dennett failed in the Northeast in the 1890s but his successors followed his policies. Later, he made another attempt to run a chain of lunchrooms on the West Coast.

Chick-fil-A boasts of its personnel practices, but Dennett’s was scarcely a model employer as a waitress at a San Francisco Dennett’s discovered. Employees were fined so frequently for missing prayers or other minor infractions that most never took home a full pay envelope. She reported that she saw a placard on the wall that quoted Jeremiah: “Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his riches; but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercises loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth.” As she read, another waitress came up behind her and remarked wittily, “So now you know that four dollars a week is right, and kind, and just.”

From the patrons’ point of view Sunday closures were generally not pleasing. Sunday was a popular day to eat in a restaurant beginning in the late 19th century and continuing into the 1960s. Not only did thousands and thousands of people living in rented rooms absolutely need access to restaurants all week long, for decades Sunday was the only day off for most working people.

Back when drinking was the social issue of the day, some temperance reformers thought it was advisable to keep restaurants open on Sundays since eating a meal in a decent place was preferable to getting drunk in a saloon. Critics found it outrageous that in the 1870s New Hampshire law ordered all restaurants closed on Sundays unless they also rented rooms.

By the 20th century it was fashionable to eat Sunday dinner out and many patrons filled their Sunday afternoons with dining and dancing to a live orchestra. In the 1920s, when car ownership spread, it became a Sunday treat for families to drive to the “country” (i.e., the city outskirts) to go to a tea room for chicken dinner. Service often was “family style,” with all the food on platters or in bowls to pass around.

I recall as a child going to such a place outside St. Louis, in Valley Park, called Madame DeFoe’s. It was a cottage with many screened windows, in a wooded setting. I thought it was terribly quaint and that Madame was foreign and exotic. Only recently did I discover that her first name was Cora and that she was a farmer.

The reporter also asked me if I knew of any restaurants in the past that, after coming under criticism for a controversial stance such as rejecting homosexuality, had politicians rally the public to show support for it through mass patronage (as is intended to happen August 1 at Chick-fil-A locations).

That one had me stumped.

© Jan Whitaker 2012

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July 15, 2012 · 4:40 pm

That night at Maxim’s

A restaurant is an expression of its time and place. Except for fast food franchises which are based on an industrial mode of mass production detached from local particularity. So when a replica of an art nouveau turn-of-the-century culinary haunt of demimonde Paris shows up in the basement of a hotel on Lake Michigan’s gold coast in the mid-20th century – well, it’s a little strange.

In short, was the Paris-based Maxim’s franchise that arrived in Chicago in 1963, with its undulating woodwork, fleur-de-lis lights, red velvet banquettes, Soles Albert, and Poires Helene, the real thing?

I’ve been pondering this question as I’ve pored over the fascinating photograph above, which was taken by prize-winning photographer Gary Settle, probably for The Chicago Daily News.

What was the occasion? It’s not a casual shot. At least two floodlights are in evidence and there is something stagey about the scene. I suspect the couples were asked to leave their coffee and smokes and get up and dance. Unfortunately, in the process two napkins were flung aside in an unsightly manner. Elegance is so hard to achieve.

The Brylcreemed man leaning over the table must be Chef Pierre Orsi who had very recently arrived from Paris to take command of the kitchen. The man seated to the right of him looks as though he could be French, but the other men in the picture, apart from the musicians, appear to be of German ancestry. I wonder if they might be two sets of twins.

Which of the women owns the sable coat and elbow-length black gloves? I believe it is the blissful dancer on the left. She will carry home leftovers in a foil purse-shaped doggie bag — perhaps she is dieting or didn’t love her Calves Liver with Raisin and Grape Sauce so much.

The table has a center lamp with pink silk shades and coffee cups bearing Maxim’s curlicue M logo. A cigarillo rests in one of the souvenir ashtrays, while others have been used by the table’s two Winston smokers who prefer a fliptop box to a soft pack. Did these eight people really polish off four bottles of champagne? Did anyone use the replica antique telephone to check in with their babysitter?

I invite readers to create a scenario. Who are these people and what were they thinking at this moment in September, 1967?

© Jan Whitaker, 2012

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June 26, 2012 · 7:39 pm

Lunch Hour NYC

I am happy that I had a chance to see this fine exhibit at the New York Public Library while I was in the city for a conference. It showcases menus, pamphlets, manuscripts, and other materials from the library’s collections, and also features actual hardware from the Automat, particularly a reconstructed wall of Automat cubicles. Alas, they have no food in them.

The exhibit is divided into four themes: eating places that furnished quick lunches, eating places where “power lunches” took place, home lunches, and charitable lunches, a theme which includes soup kitchens and early school lunch programs.

Of course I was primarily interested in the first two themes since both are about restaurants. Other than the Horn & Hardart Automat, places such as Childs’ restaurants, Sardi’s, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, and Schrafft’s were profiled with displays of menus, drawings, photographs, and other memorabilia.

I was particularly fascinated by two large map sheets which presented mid-town Manhattan in great detail, showing the names of each of the businesses lining several streets. Published in the 1950s by Nirenstein’s Realty Map Company of Springfield MA, similar maps were made of many large cities in the U.S. I must see more of these!

It was delightful to see a photograph of Miss Frank E. Buttolph about the time she launched her menu collecting project whose results formed the basis for the library’s vast menu collection.

There are a few areas where I would have slanted things a bit differently or included additional material. As is often the case when the historical focus is on one city (or country), its uniqueness, greatness, or innovativeness tends to be overstated. For instance, New York was not alone in having early fast food lunch rooms – all big cities did. Nor was it a pioneer in the development of the cafeteria. Chicago and Los Angeles both played a greater role in the early days of the cafeteria.

I think too that I would have paid attention to the saloon lunch, since it was a very popular method of acquiring a quick lunch. Temperance advocates portrayed saloons as loathsome places but, as some anthropologically-minded reformers pointed out, saloons also functioned as welcoming community oases and cheap eating places for many low-income workers, men in particular.

But these are minor criticisms of a show that is well-researched and presented and will certainly delight hundreds of thousands of visitors as well as proving a valuable resource for teachers. The free show runs until mid-February 2013 at the main library. A promo for the exhibit is on youtube.

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June 8, 2012 · 5:46 pm

Conferencing: global gateways

I’m looking forward to being at the Global Gateways and Local Connections conference in New York later this month. The conference is for members of three organizations: the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society; the Society for Anthropology of Food and Nutrition; and the one I belong to which is the Association for the Study of Food and Society.

The conference hosts, New York University and the New School, have helped plan four days packed with fascinating panels as well as tours of markets, food producers, restaurants, and library collections. Not surprisingly given my interests, I’ll be joining a walking tour of the multi-faceted Eataly and another of library culinary collections at NYU and the New York Public Library.

I’m very eager to meet everyone on my panel and to hear their papers. I will talk about “How 20th-century Wars Shaped American Restaurants.” Andrew Haley (author of the James Beard prize winning book on the history of American restaurants, Turning the Tables) will present “From Prune Whip to Mac and Cheese: Children, Diet and the Restaurant in the Mid-20th Century. Nic Mink’s paper is “The Machine in the Culinary Garden: Technological Change and the Transformation of the Quick Service Restaurant Industry.” And Isil Celimli-Inaltong will talk about “The Increasing Significance of the Chef in the Culinary Field.”

Should be great!

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April 24, 2012 · 3:51 pm

Service with a smile . . . somehow

Recently I read a NYT story about a new documentary film “Booker’s Place,” about a Mississippi waiter named Booker Wright. While working at Lusco’s, then operating as a de facto all-white restaurant in Greenwood, Wright appeared in a 1966 documentary called “Mississippi: A Self Portrait” in which people were interviewed about the  status of race relations at that time.

In the 1966 film Booker Wright gave viewers a glimpse of the indignities he experienced serving Lusco’s patrons who sometimes demeaned him or left him no tips. Following the airing of the show on television he lost his job at the restaurant where he had worked since he was a teenager. Patrons no longer wanted him to wait on them – he had broken the bubble by revealing his misery in playing the role of a happy-go-lucky black waiter.

No doubt he realized beforehand that his interview would put an end to the charade. After leaving Lusco’s he operated a restaurant of his own called Booker’s Place at which both whites and blacks were welcome.

As I read about the new documentary I immediately thought of a book called The American Colored Waiter, published initially in 1903 and revised several times. It is a manual written by John B. Goins, an African-American waiter in Chicago. Along with instructions on how to set tables properly, carve meat, and even restore rancid salad oil, Goins dispensed some poignant advice on how to “take it.”

No doubt all servers can relate to his words, but I believe they had special meaning to African-Americans, who were being eased out of the profession in Northern cities at that time.

With the eighteen years’ experience I have had I have found, from the beginning until this present time, that I have been getting the worst of it at all times …; and, my dear sir, if you expect to climb the ladder of success, expect always to get the worst of it while you are a waiter …

I also recalled a scene in the 1953 novel by William Fisher called The Waiters in which the book’s main character Asher Brown, a waiter at “the Fishbowl” on the seashore near Manhattan. Brown serves a party of inebriated white people and has the following exchange with one of them:

“Bring us some lobsters,” the man snapped.
“How’d you like them, sir?” Asher ventured timidly.
“Fat and ___” The man flashed a broad grin at his companions who scowled at Asher. “Listen, boy! Are you on the ball or not?”
Asher tried again. “Would you like them boiled or broiled, sir?”
“Bring us four large broiled lobsters,” the man commanded, in a morose growl. “And bring us some bread an’ butter right away, some of them biscuits.”
Asher had moved only a few feet away from the table, preparing to go to the kitchen, when the man called him back. “Hey, George,” he said importantly. Asher turned to face him with a tight-lipped expression. George, he repeated to himself. He oughta drop dead right here.

To read more about the making of “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story” see the blog written by his granddaughter Yvette Johnson.

© Jan Whitaker, 2012

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