Although it is a footnote to restaurant history, the notion that restaurants could provide a solution to social and domestic problems is one that has cropped up quite a few times in American history, beginning in the 1840s, continuing into the 1970s, and not totally extinct even today.
The idea of community dining began with Frenchman Charles Fourier’s plan for a society organized into communes (phalanxes) where people both lived and worked. Several were established in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, in Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, New York, and New Jersey. The North American Phalanx in Red Bank NJ, which continued for 12 years, may have been the longest lasting. Its phalanstery, a kind of hotel or apartment building, had 85 rooms and a “refectory” where members gathered at long tables and chose their meals from a bill of fare with prices.
The Fourier-inspired communes did not survive, but the idea of collective dining did. From the 1870s until World War I feminists saw commercial restaurants as the next, virtually inevitable, step in evolutionary progress that would liberate women from kitchens. Suffragist Tennessee Claflin observed in 1871 that women’s chores such as teaching children and making clothes were leaving the home and becoming special trades. Noting that men were becoming accustomed to eating their midday meal in restaurants, she expected food preparation to be next.
Others observed the same thing, especially with the growing popularity of kitchenless apartments. An 1876 article in The American Socialist viewed NYC apartment buildings where meals were served in ground floor dining rooms as an outgrowth of Fourier’s ideals. Although limited to fairly affluent families then, apartment living was regarded as a step toward universal cooperative housekeeping.
A goal of some futurists and feminists, such as Edward Bellamy and Helen Starrett, was to have complete meals delivered to the home ready to eat. Starrett wrote in 1889 that the solution need not be a non-profit enterprise. Rather, just as butter and soap making had been commercialized, she expected that the business world would find a way to do this profitably. Indeed, in Knoxville, Tennessee, a woman started a meal delivery service as early as 1896, sending out “steaming hot” food to families. The idea got a boost during World War I when a surging war economy drew hired cooks out of affluent households (e.g., Florence Hulling).
Author and social thinker Charlotte Perkins Gilman knew of three cooked food companies in operation, in New Haven, Pittsburgh, and Boston. She fully expected efficient restaurants and food services to replace the home as a site of production, which, she wrote in 1903, “lingers on inert and blind, like a clam in a horse-race.” In her 1909 novel What Diantha Did, the enterprising heroine not only runs a hotel for working women, she also operates a lunchroom for business men, a cooked food delivery service, and a mini-maid service.
Other than supporting utopian societies and liberating women from household chores, the goals of “public service” style restaurants in the 19th and 20th centuries also variously encompassed providing inexpensive lunches for young working women, luring alcoholics away from saloons, resolving labor strife, reducing the cost of living, and promoting healthy diets.
Social motives often lay behind the start of commercial restaurants also, such as the Dennett’s chain whose funding came in part from missionary societies. And some eating places that had their starts as community co-operatives developed into commercial ventures, such as the Hollister Cooperative Coffee Club or the Mission Cafeteria in Long Beach [shown], both in California.
A curious outgrowth of the interest in communal dining occurred in Cleveland OH, where Richard Finley established Finley’s Phalansterie shortly after the turn of the century [pictured above]. Eventually he presided over six eating places in Cleveland and grew rich. Although he chose the generally unfamiliar name to pique interest in his restaurant, it turned out that he did in fact have communitarian motives in mind. His plan, reminiscent of Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft in East Aurora NY, was to establish a colony in California where workers would live and produce arts and crafts furniture and objects. I was unable to discover how far he succeeded beyond building a hotel and cottages in La Canyada and publishing a magazine called Everyman.
The story of restaurants and eating places with social motives is not complete without mentioning the hippie and communal restaurants of the 1960s and 1970s – but that will be another chapter.
© Jan Whitaker, 2012
What could be more starkly different from the somber coffee shops of today with their earnest and wired denizens than the beatnik coffeehouses of the 1950s? Could Starbucks be anything but square to the beat generation?
Although the word beatnik came into usage around 1958 (inspired partly by Sputnik), the phenomenon of dropping out of the “rat race” to lead an existentialist, non-consumerist life was part of the aftermath of World War II akin to the “Lost Generation” after World War I. The first coffeehouses sprang up in Greenwich Village in the late 1940s, but the beats weren’t averse to hanging out in cafeterias either — their “Paris sidewalk restaurant thing of the time.” When coffeehouses began levying cover charges for performances, beatniks tended to drop out of them too.
The heyday of the coffeehouse was the late 1950s into the early 1960s. Few did much cooking so they weren’t restaurants in the true sense, but many of them offered light food such as salami sandwiches (on exotic Italian bread) and cheesecake, along with “Espresso Romano,” the most expensive coffee ever seen in the U.S. up til then. Of course the charge for coffee was more a rent payment than anything else since patrons sat around for hours while consuming very little. Other then-unfamiliar food offerings included cannolis at La Gabbia (The Birdcage) in Queens, Swiss cuisine at Alberto’s in Westwood CA, Irish stew at Coffee ’n’ Confusion in D.C., les fromages at Café Oblique in Chicago, “Suffering Bastard Sundaes” at The Bizarre in Greenwich Village, and snacks such as chocolate-covered ants and caterpillars at the Green Spider in Denver.
After passing up Bamboo Isle (“Strictly Kosher Turkey Sandwiches, Fifteen Cents”), he heads to what was probably Mother Goose. “Finally, in an eatery built in the shape of an old boot I was able to procure a satisfying meal of barbecued pork fritters and orangeade for seventy-five cents. Charming platinum-haired hostesses in red pajamas and peaked caps added a note of color to the scene, and a gypsy orchestra played Victor Herbert on musical saws.”
In a 1936 photo series called “Chamber of American Horrors” for which he wrote captions he describes Mother Goose as a place where “Inside, kiddies from six to sixty, most of whom are indistinguishable from each other, gnaw sizzling steaks and discuss their movie favorites.” Other eating places included in the Chamber were the Toed Inn (“tasty combinations of avocado and bacon, pimento and peanut butter”), the Laughing Pig Barbecue Pit (“Etched in red and blue neon lights against the velvety southern California night, it can be seen and avoided for miles.”), and the Pup (“The most ravenous appetite fades before this elaborate cheese dream.”).
Don Dickerman was obsessed with pirates. He took every opportunity to portray himself as one, beginning with a high school pirate band. As an art student in the teens he dressed in pirate garb for Greenwich Village costume balls. Throughout his life he collected antique pirate maps, cutlasses, blunderbuses, and cannon. His Greenwich Village nightclub restaurant, The Pirates’ Den, where colorfully outfitted servers staged mock battles for guests, became nationally known and made him a minor celebrity.
Over time he ran five clubs and restaurants in New York City. After failing to make a living as a toy designer and children’s book illustrator, he opened a tea room in the Village primarily as a place to display his hand-painted toys. It became popular, expanded, and around 1917 he transformed it into a make-believe pirates’ lair where guests entered through a dark, moldy basement. Its fame began to grow, particularly after 1921 when Douglas Fairbanks recreated its atmospheric interior for his movie The Nut. He also ran the Blue Horse (pictured), the Heigh-Ho (where Rudy Vallee got his start), Daffydill (financed by Vallee), and the County Fair.
On a Blue Horse menu of the 1920s Don’s mother is listed as manager. Among the dishes featured at this jazz club restaurant were Golden Buck, Chicken a la King, Tomato Wiggle, and Tomato Caprice. Drinks (non-alcoholic) included Pink Goat’s Delight and Blue Horse’s Neck. Ice cream specials also bore whimsical names such as Green Goose Island and Mr. Bogg’s Castle. At The Pirates’ Den a beefsteak dinner cost a hefty $1.25. Also on the menu were chicken salad, sandwiches, hot dogs, and an ice cream concoction called Bozo’s Delight. A critic in 1921 concluded that, based on the sky-high menu tariffs and the “punk food,” customers there really were at the mercy of genuine pirates.
In interviews and in her two books Alice espoused the value of fresh ingredients, garlic, meals with friends, and an experimental approach to cooking. Her words convey a free-wheeling, irreverent outlook. Some examples:
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.
