Category Archives: patrons

October 6, 2025 · 11:25 am

Newspapers & restaurants

Newspaper workers, especially reporters and pressmen, made up a significant part of urban restaurant patrons in the 19th century and much of the 20th. Early on most of them were men, dropping in at all-night eateries of which there were many. Such eating places tended to choose locations close to the newspapers which were often grouped together in areas of a city referred to as “newspaper row.” [Above: advertisement for a Kansas City MO restaurant, 1940]

In his book Appetite City, about New York’s restaurant history, William Grimes notes the importance of newspapers in building nationwide interest in that city’s restaurants. He observes: “From the 1830s on, New York spawned so many papers and journals that their employees and writers constituted a sizable market, concentrated for the most part along Park Row. Moreover, journalists tended to regard oyster stands, saloons, food markets, and cafes as good copy. As the city grew and restaurants of every description proliferated, journalists turned out colorful slice-of-life stories for local and national consumption.” [Above: early 20th century postcards of newspaper rows in NY and San Francisco]

The restaurants that the newsmen patronized in the 19th century tended to be of two kinds. Either they were no frills, quick-eat places of the kinds newsboys favored, or they were places popular with artists, actors, and other free-wheeling sorts. For their evening meals, when newsmen were on their own time, they were said to enjoy the latter type of places where “there was no style, but plenty of ‘atmosphere’” such as the German “Kitty’s” on Park Place in New York with its Weiner Schnitzel and noodles.

One of New York’s best known hangouts was Bleeck’s [pronounced Blake’s] Artist and Writers, where reporters from the New York Herald were said to dominate. From its beginnings in 1925 until 1934, part of which time it was run as a so-called club in order to avoid the liquor ban, it barred women. Finally they were admitted, inspiring the unfunny comment from an old-time member, “There’ll be mayonnaise on the steak next week.” [Above: newspaper men play game to determine who will pay for drinks at Bleeck’s, 1945]

Another thriving New York restaurant with multiple locations, Crook & Duff, had a restaurant in the basement of the Times building for decades. Other magnets for newspaper folks included Jack’s, Hitchcock’s beanery, and Stewart’s in Sheridan Square. Childs’ in the Madison Square Garden building was a gathering spot for columnists, drama editors, critics, and press agents.

What might be called the Jewish newspaper row in New York was on the lower east side, which over time housed papers such as the Yiddish Daily Paper, Truth, The Day, Morning Journal, and The Forward. The Forward was located on East Broadway near the Garden Cafeteria, a gathering place for activists, intellectuals, and newspaper people, among others.

Of course New York was not the only city where newspapers, their employees, and restaurants were linked.

In Chicago, Schlogl’s, an old 19th-century restaurant, served as the newsmen’s club, watering hole, and dinner spot in the 20th century. Also known as Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Tavern of America, it was located near the Chicago Daily News where its big round table hosted Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Ben Hecht, Thornton Wilder and other writers who worked for papers. But there were numbers of other places feeding reporters and printers, such as King’s, run by Mary King in the old Herald building. One of her daughters became a newspaper editor.

Boston had Thompson’s Spa. But as early as the 1870s, the editor of the newly founded Boston Globe established a lunch table at a nearby restaurant that endured for decades, hosting judges, lawyers, journalists, and business men. By the 1880s, Boston’s newspaper row was filled with dairy lunches and “temperance lunch rooms.” Other favorite day and night spots with the newspaper crowd were the various locations over time of Mrs. Atkinson’s, where baked beans and brown bread, corned beef hash, pies, and doughnuts were in demand for nearly 40 years. From the 1880s until 1919 Vogelsang’s was not only an eating place for newspaper men, but also for Democrats, making it a source for contacts and stories as well as for meals. [Above: Gridley’s in Boston’s newspaper row, early 20th century]

For decades in the teens and 1920s, and probably the late 19th century as well, Washington D.C. newspaper men enjoyed the French restaurant run by Count Jean Marie Perreard. He was known for his Bastille Day parties, where a tall Bastille made of boxes would be built in a corner to be attacked by guests at midnight.

St. Louis had Thony’s, where 19th century newsmen mingled with merchants and bankers while enjoying oysters brought from New Orleans on steamboats. Other newspaper men such as Eugene Field, an editorial writer in the 1870s, enjoyed the Old Beanery.

In the 1870s, Philadelphia newspaper workers almost certainly would have been found at the Model, which fed about 2,300 a day, joining a crowd that included the “sons of toil.” In the 1890s the quick lunch places grouped around the city’s big stores and newspaper offices would also have drawn them and it’s almost certain that later they would have flocked to the Horn & Hardart Automat opening in 1902. But the anti-alcohol emphasis of the city may have discouraged clubbiness.

Frequent employee patronage of eating places was only one way that newspapers influenced the restaurant world. Not only did the papers report on restaurants and carry their advertising, over time their role in promoting, evaluating, and rating them grew. Eventually there were formal reviews, and also gossip columns whose one-sentence quip about a well-known celebrity spotted in a restaurant was often enough to build the restaurant’s desirability and familiarity with readers across the U.S.

In the mid-20th century food columnists gained prominence. In 1962 Craig Claiborne began regular restaurant reviews for the New York Times. New Yorker James Beard [above] covered not just his city but the nation, running columns in many papers. When columns featured recipes, they almost always praised the restaurants that supplied them. And as has been observed by others, newspapers across the country were inclined toward favorable reviews for restaurants that were regular advertisers.

Restaurants began to turn to newspaper advertising in the 1920s, considering that the best way to attract customers. Almost certainly the most frequent advertiser nationwide in that decade was the low-priced Waldorf System with 94 units spread across 28 cities. Waldorfs were not fancy, but according to their ads they were extremely clean, with each unit undergoing inspection four times every 24 hours.

With the diminishment of newspapers, restaurant gatherings also ended by the later 20th century as did men’s clubs generally.

© Jan Whitaker, 2025

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September 7, 2025 · 12:33 pm

Heroism at Lunch, cont’d.

I am republishing this post that I originally presented ten years ago, because of the September 4 death of Joseph McNeil, age 83. The Greensboro lunch counter has been on exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. since the 1990s when it was acquired from Woolworth’s. It will be one of 250 items featured in a show of “revolutionary objects” at the museum in 2026.

Actually there was no lunch. But there was plenty of heroism when four college students sat at a Greensboro NC lunch counter in February 1960. [Above photo: Joseph McNeil is seated on the left.]

The students were told to go to the segregated snack bar in the back of the Woolworth 5 & 10 cent store, but they refused. And although the Woolworth staff would not serve them, the students also refused to leave until closing time and pledged to come back every day until they won the right to eat there.

It was an honor to hear one of the organizers of the protest at the 9th Annual Northeast Regional Fair Housing and Civil Rights conference in Springfield MA. Joseph McNeil [shown above at the conference] told a room of 500 attendees how much had hung in the balance for him at the time. A first-year student at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, he feared that he could end up in jail and disastrously interrupt his college career. (Fortunately, his fears were not realized and he went on to graduate and eventually become a major general in the U.S. Air Force.)

McNeil related how the Greensboro protest grew as students from area schools joined with the initial four, then more student protests erupted at Woolworth stores around the South. In July 1960 Woolworth reversed its policy, which had been to let local managers decide whether or not to serve Black customers based on local customs.

He explained that the sit-down protests served as “a down payment on our manhood and womanhood” for him and his fellow students. The action, he said, was driven by their belief in the “dignity of men” and “the moral order of the universe.”

In the Q & A after his talk, a woman in the audience asked what his mother had thought about his decision to join a sit-in at the lunch counter. He said she had been uneasy about it but had to agree that it was the right thing to do based on the values she and his father had taught him.

McNeil received repeated standing ovations from conference goers. Everyone laughed when he said that he had always wanted to order coffee and apple pie at a Woolworth lunch counter but when he did, “The apple pie wasn’t very good.”

© Jan Whitaker, 2025

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August 25, 2025 · 3:37 pm

Restaurant psychology

My last post about a restaurant designer who applied psychology to his work inspired me to look further into this subject.

I discovered that when the restaurant world was experiencing hard times there was a turn toward psychology, though of course that wasn’t the only inspiration. In the 1920s, when liquor sales became illegal, expensive restaurants were inspired to look harder for ways to please their guests. A proprietor whose famous eating place had to close warned others that “What the restaurant loses in the revenue from wines and liquors it must make up in psychology.” Evidently in his case, this realization came too late.

Canny cafeteria operators, though never dependent upon liquor sales, were already using psychology on their guests in the 1920s. And as early as 1927 a psychology professor appeared at restaurant conventions to give attendees help in figuring out “What do people like and why?”

Psychology often veered into what I would call blatant manipulation, for instance in cafeterias. Cafeterias tried such things as enlarging trays so they looked empty unless the customer loaded up. They also placed desserts on eye-level shelves that were the first thing the hungry customer saw as they entered the cafeteria line.

In later years other manipulative ploys in everyday eating places would include uncomfortable seating and bright colors that shortened customers’ stays, as I have previously written about.

The Depression and WWII put a damper on psychology advising, but it returned in the 1950s. A strange example was a Hollywood therapist who made a practice of visiting a restaurant called The House of Murphy. He went table to table giving customers, many of them actors, his analyses of their psyches. I would not think they appreciated some of his insights, such as when he told Gary Cooper that he was a “withdrawn introvert.” As for dining, his verdict was that “A very large meal is an escape mechanism.” As he saw it, “The customer is gorging himself in order to have a sense of security and power.”

Other restaurant psychologists turned to writing columns for newspapers. Dr. George W. Crane, for instance, focused on sloppy waitresses who failed to meet his standards, that of a “glorified mother.” “And be sure to smile,” he advised them, “for this makes you a psychotherapist who helps the morale, appetite and even the digestion of lonely, moody and fearful souls.” All for 50 cents an hour?

By the 1970s restaurant psychology had taken leaps forward and was a tool of restaurant designers, beginning with interior and exterior design and assistance with restaurant concepts, naming, advertising, and public relations.

In 1977 David Stevens, then considered a leading restaurant designer, had a hand in the design of 100 restaurants, including fast food chains Hobo Jo, Humpty Dumpty, the Mediterranean in Honolulu, and a number of Bobby McGee’s, as well as the Mai Kai in Fort Lauderdale [shown below]. He believed a restaurant had to be in tune with the “emotional trend of the nation.” In 1977 he favored nature themes and booths to “give the public something to lean on” at a time of nationwide insecurity due to a weak economy. Though he declared that the rustic look was “out,” he admitted that heavy beams could sooth tension.

Another slant on booths came from a designing couple who proclaimed that they served as “a womb surrounding and hiding customers who don’t want to be seen, especially if they’re a little overweight.”

Plants were tricky according to some. In 1980, the part owners of Ruby Tuesday’s Emporium noted plants could be used very strategically. “If you’re aiming for college-age patrons,” they advised, “there should be floor plants.” On the other hand, young professionals liked hanging plants which they said, “denote a higher degree of sophistication.”

In 1983, restaurants had not recovered from the recession of the previous year. In Broward County, Florida, with its 2,600 restaurants, there was a high failure rate in the first year of the recession. Some restaurants sought help from an industrial psychologist who trained staffs in empathy with the customer, and taught them to how to handle uncomfortable situations.

The emphasis stayed on servers at the National Restaurant Association’s annual conference the following year. A psychology professor from Denver’s School of Hotel and Restaurant Management was on hand to instruct participants in their “real” business: not selling food and drink, but in fulfilling people’s needs. Servers were to smile, answer questions, and show interest in what the customer was ordering. They were to nod their heads, and say “I see“ and “uh-huh.”

Of course, by this time it was taken for granted that interior design was important. In 1984 some thought that the nation was “longing to return to simpler times.” In design this was frequently interpreted as early-American themes, barn siding, and huge beams.

But in Houston a design team had a very different interpretation. They preferred to give new restaurants a worn, slightly dirty, look. To achieve this they gave walls a few stains and planted handprints around light switch plates. Customers were to feel they didn’t have to be super careful, that spills were perfectly ok. The Atchafalaya River Café gave an aged look to the building formerly occupied by the Monument Inn. They covered part of the roof with battered tin, deliberately left paint splatters on the front window, and used old doors for the front, pasting them with bumper stickers, all in the belief “that tacky, comfortable design makes people happy.”

Why not a country theme? Well, as the designers of the Atchafalaya River Café liked to say: “Pastoral scenes are deadly to a good time in restaurants. Customers feel mother or grandmother is watching every move.”

Bringing another sense into play, noise became part of design in the 1980s. Designer Leonard Horowitz said in 1986 that at the Crab Shack in Miami, where diners smashed crabs with wooden paddles at their tables, “ear-splitting volume is one of the things that makes the Crab Shack so popular with many of its customers.” He thought it was because people “enjoy feeling like part of a party or performance.” He also noted that while noisy spaces felt festive they also encouraged quick turnover, which of course greatly enhanced profits in popular places.

By the late 1990s, and very likely before that, having a professional designer versed in restaurant psychology was common, particularly in the case of restaurant chains. That was especially true in restaurants that aimed to entertain as well as to provide food. The word for this is “eatertainment” in recognition that food is only one reason that people patronize restaurants.

© Jan Whitaker, 2025

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April 27, 2025 · 11:17 am

Music & food at Café Society

Café Society was the satirical name of a New York jazz club in the late 1930s and 1940s. The name was meant to make fun of people who wanted to be seen as sophisticated rather than merely rich. However, it’s likely that Café Society nevertheless proved to be an attraction to many of those same people.

By the second year there were two locations of Café Society, Downtown and Uptown. The clubs and their owner Barney Josephson have become well known for the number of jazz greats they introduced and nurtured, among them Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, and Teddy Wilson. And also for their full acceptance of Black customers.

Unlike other “café society” club owners such as the Stork Club’s, Josephson refused to accept the racial codes of that time. He was determined not to follow policies that featured Black performers but would not allow them to mingle with the patrons, and excluded Black guests. Even when these policies began to soften, it was common for Black patrons to be seated inconspicuously in the least desirable spots. [Above: 1939 sign at the Downtown club ridiculing prominent society figures]

When he opened the Downtown Greenwich Village club in late December 1938, Barney recruited three musicians who had been part of a Carnegie Hall Christmas Eve program called From Spirituals to Swing. Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, and Pete Johnson performed at the club a few days later. The club advertised that it featured “boogie-woogie,” which was largely unknown in New York City at the time. [Above: Downtown in 1939; William Gropper mural]

But what about the food? In general, jazz clubs’ culinary output has not been regarded as the finest. Barney claimed that when he started out, most jazz clubs were run by mobsters who didn’t even try to prepare good meals. He tried to do better, but it’s hard to judge how well he succeeded since I’ve found little commentary. Club cuisine wasn’t usually written about.

In a book based on recordings of his memories, published by his fourth wife after his death, Barney commented that in most nightclubs waiters were urged to push drinks not food. For the Uptown Café Society (on East 58th), opened about a year later than Downtown, he made an effort to provide good food by hiring a chef who had managed the Claremont Inn and had been head waiter at Sherry’s. Robert Dana, nightclub editor of the Herald Tribune, was of the opinion that “On its food alone, Café Society ranked with many fine restaurants,” singling out squab chicken casserole and cream of mushroom soup. [Above: Uptown, 1943; Below: Advertisement with the musical lineup on Uptown’s first anniversary, 1940]

By the end of 1947 Uptown was out of business, and Downtown closed in early March of 1949. The problem was that Barney’s brother Leon, an admitted Communist Party member, was part owner of the clubs, having advanced start-up money. In 1947 Leon was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, refused to testify, and spent a year in prison. Barney was seen as guilty by association, attendance at his clubs plummeted, and he lost all his money. It seemed his career as a jazz club owner was over.

After that he concentrated on the restaurant business. He opened three restaurants, all called The Cookery, with one on Lexington across from Bloomingdale’s, one on 52nd Street in the CBS building, and then in 1955 a third one in Greenwich Village on University Place and 8th Street. The first two did not stay open long, but the Greenwich Village site was successful. [Above: The Cookery on Lexington; wall art by Anton Refregier]

While the two Café Societies had featured jazz with food, his third Cookery was to become a purveyor of food with jazz.

The Village’s Cookery was far from glamorous, generally described as “a hamburger, ham-and-egg type restaurant.” For the first 15 years there was no music. And then one day Barney had a visit from pianist Mary Lou Williams — who had played at Café Society Downtown – looking for work. As he described it:

“. . . this lady, one of the greatest musicians of all times, composer, arranger, not working? It was all this wild, crazy rock. . . . I investigated and found out I didn’t need a cabaret license in my place if I only had three string instruments.” [Above: Mary Lou Williams, at the Cookery in the Village, 1970]

So he told her to go rent a piano and, presto!, he was back in the jazz club business as of 1970. She was a draw. As he put it, “Mary returned to The Cookery each year through 1976 for three-month gigs, always to critical acclaim and crowds.” Other musicians who played there included Teddy Wilson, Marian McPartland, and the elderly singer Alberta Hunter, who had been working as a nurse.

The Cookery stayed in business until 1984.

For those interested in reading more about Barney’s clubs, see the book based on his recorded memoir published by Terry Trilling-Josephson in 2009 (Café Society: The wrong place for the Right people).

© Jan Whitaker, 2025

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November 17, 2024 · 1:09 pm

Restaurant-ing in movieland

In 1916 a newly arrived New Yorker named Adolph “Eddie” Brandstatter and a partner opened a café in Los Angeles. Modeling it on an unnamed New York City restaurant, they named it Victor Hugo and designed it to introduce fine French cuisine and continental service to the cafeteria-loving city.

Four years after opening the Victor Hugo, Brandstatter turned his attention to a Santa Monica project, the Sunset Inn, buying it with a new partner and selling his share in the Victor Hugo. His short tenure at the Victor Hugo was an early sign of his seeming “love it and leave it” relationship to most of the restaurants he created. Despite that, he rapidly became a well-known and well-liked public figure.

Trying to track all his restaurant ventures is a dizzying job.

By June of 1920 the Sunset Inn, which had served as a Red Cross center during WWI, had been remodeled and outfitted with a jazz band. Wednesdays were devoted to performances by Hollywood actors. But in 1922, less than two years after its opening, and despite the Inn’s apparent success, Eddie sold his share and moved on.

That same year, only a few months after departing from the Sunset Inn, he bought a new restaurant, the Maison Marcell, remodeling and reopening it. A little more than a year later he remodeled it again, renaming it the Crillon Café. Meanwhile, shortly after opening the Marcell, he had advertised the sale of his home’s furnishings, including suites from the living room, dining room, and two bedrooms, along with curtains, draperies, oriental rugs, flatware, and tableware.

Presumably the sale was meant to raise funds for his next project, the Café Montmartre which he opened in January of 1923 on Hollywood Boulevard, with a coffee shop below it on street level. At the luxurious Café Montmartre he continued the method of luring customers that had been adopted at the Sunset Inn: linking the café to the movies, attracting stars and a gaping public. Reputedly this often involved subsidizing meals for actors short on funds. [photo: Los Angeles Public Library]

The Montmartre would become the restaurant most closely identified with him, and the longest lasting of his cafes, staying in business for nine years. He took an active role in it, greeting and mingling with guests from the film industry, as well as overall management. Yet that workload barely slowed him down. In May of 1923, the Los Angeles Examiner announced that Eddie, “Little Napoleon of the Cafes,” was planning to open “the exclusive Piccadilly Coffee House on West Seventh street between Hill and Broadway.”

1925 was a busy year of ups and downs. The Crillon closed, as did his newly opened cafeteria called Dreamland, not even open for a full year. It was the only cafeteria I’ve ever come across that had dancing!

He also began a catering company that furnished food to movie casts and crews. In the next few years, the catering company took on some big projects. In one case it provided meals for 2,500 in Yuma AZ when the Famous Players-Lasky studio was filming Beau Geste. [above photo] To do that it was necessary to build a plank road atop the sand and to drill wells. The company also catered to studios when they filmed in Hollywood at night, as was the custom. That could mean serving as many as 25 studios on some nights.

The Depression – and probably the end of silent film — took a toll. When Montmartre began to sag, he opened a swanky club next door for film people called the Embassy. It opened in 1929, closing three years later when his decision to open to the public failed to rescue it. [above: the public waits to get in] Also, in 1932 he was caught removing art objects and furnishings from the then-closed Montmartre, planning to use them in his next venture. At his trial it came out that the actual owner of the Montmartre was the realtor who had built the Montmartre and backed him by putting up capital, loaning him personal funds, and paying him a salary of $100 a week. He was found guilty and put on probation for two years.

In 1933 he opened a restaurant he called Sardi’s but in no way connected to New York’s Sardi’s. With booths, tables, and fountain service, and featuring his popular set-price buffet luncheon, it quickly became a success. Its success did not stop him, however, from launching another restaurant, a chop house called Lindy’s that he seemed to have no further link to. In 1936 Sardi’s was destroyed by fire. When it was rebuilt two years later he sold his share to a partner. [rebuilt Sardi’s shown above]

In 1939 he opened his final eating place, the Bohemia Grill, with prices as low as 35c for Pot Roast and Potato Pancakes. The following year he took his own life, apparently troubled by money worries. Among the honorary pall bearers at his funeral were Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix, Bing Crosby, and studio head Jack Warner.

© Jan Whitaker, 2024

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July 23, 2024 · 10:13 am

In the kitchen at Sardi’s

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

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June 9, 2024 · 11:35 am

Playboy on the town, 1850s style

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

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May 12, 2024 · 3:45 pm

The ‘bohemian’ restaurant in fiction

There was a time when many Americans considered inexpensive French or Italian restaurants naturally bohemian – wild and crazy, not too clean, filled with oddball characters, and offering menus of unfamiliar and dubious dishes. But nonetheless fascinating. Novelists liked to use them as settings, so they turned up in fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the excerpts below illustrate.

In the final sample presented here we meet up with a restaurant keeper who wishes his place was more bohemian because that would make it a better draw.

1886 The Midge, Henry C. Bunner – To celebrate the Midge’s 16th birthday, her guardian, a doctor, takes her out to dinner at a table d’hote in New York City’s French quarter.

It was a modest feast, only a plain table-d’hôte dinner, eaten in the heart of the quarter, at a cost of half-a-dollar apiece. They had tried more elaborate dinners, at the great hotels up-town; but they preferred the simpler joys of Charlemagne’s restaurant. They both possessed that element of Bohemianism which belongs to all good fellows; the Midge was a good fellow, as well as the Doctor.

Charlemagne’s is a thing of the past; but he was a jolly king of cheap eating-house keepers while he lasted. He gave a grand and wholesome dinner for fifty cents. The first items were the pot-au-feu and bouilli. If the pot-au-feu was thin, the bouilli was so much the richer. And if the bouilli was something woodeny, why, you had had all the better pot-au-feu before it. Then came an entrée, calves’ brains, perhaps, or the like; a rôti, a vegetable or so coming with it; a good salad, chicory or lettuce or plantain, a dessert of timely fruits, a choice of excellent cheese, and a cup of honest black coffee. And with all this you got bread ad libitum and a half bottle of drinkable wine, that had never paid duty, for it came from California, though it called itself Bordeaux.

1896 Some Modern Heretics: A Novel, Cora Maynard – About two women who adventurously move to Boston to live in a flat and do their own housework. But they don’t know how to cook.

And the alternative of tramping out to restaurants at all hours was a Bohemianism which, in spite of her late advancement, she could not contemplate serenely. It appeared positively disreputable. If her father knew of the actual circumstances of her situation a prompt withdrawal of his original consent would have cut short Vida’s visit on the spot; but she left him in tranquil ignorance . . .

By seven o’clock the girls realized that it was time to have dinner, and then came Vida’s great trial. It was too late to think of cooking anything themselves, so there was nothing to do but face the restaurant.
“Isn’t it a very – a very queer thing to do?” Vida ventured feebly. She would much rather have bought some crackers and eaten them at home in their unpalatable dryness.

“Why, no. It’s a little quiet place we’re going to. I’ve often been. You know we girls don’t believe in being restricted by senseless prejudices. Good gracious, one can’t be so dreadfully hampered in these days of rationality!”

Before long Vida got used to the restaurant, and even enjoyed it when they felt too tired or too lazy to struggle with the cookbook. She enjoyed the whole queer situation and got a taste of such freedom as she had never before dreamed of.

1910 Predestined, Stephen French Whitman – Featuring Benedetto’s, a favorite with artists in New York City.

On the north side of Eighth Street, close to Washington Square, an old, white dwelling-house had been converted into an Italian restaurant, called “Benedetto’s,” where a table d’hôte dinner was served for sixty cents. Some brown-stone steps, flanked by a pair of iron lanterns, gave entrance to a narrow corridor. There, to the right, immediately appeared the dining-room, extending through the house — linoleum underfoot, hat-racks and buffets of oak aligned against the brownish walls, and, everywhere, little tables, each covered with a scanty cloth, set close together.

Felix, at the most inconspicuous table, consumed a soup redeemed from tastelessness by grated parmesan, a sliver of fish and four slices of cucumber, spaghetti, a chicken leg, two cubic inches of ice cream, a fragment of roquefort cheese, and coffee in a small, evidently indestructible cup. Then, through tobacco smoke, he watched the patrons round him, their feet twisted behind chair-legs, their elbows on the table, all arguing with gesticulations. Sometimes, there floated to him such phrases as: “bad color scheme!” “sophomoric treatment!” “miserable drawing!” “no atmosphere!” Benedetto’s was a Bohemian resort.

1912 The Soul of a Tenor, W. J. Henderson – According to a review, “The reader is taken behind the scenes at performances and rehearsals and into the dressing rooms and boudoirs of the artistes; into the café, where foreign singers congregate.”

As for those women who figure in all animated chronicles of the present kind, some of them may have had husbands, but they have tried to forget them, and usually with success. Little Italian restaurants, with hot and opaque atmospheres, are in accord with their temperaments, for their part of the opera world is hot and opaque at all seasons of the year.

It was not a pretty place, that particular Italian restaurant. All the men in it seemed to require cigarette smoke as a condiment for food, and they chewed and puffed alternately. The room was filled with a wreathing blue fog, through which strange head-dresses and still stranger gowns could be seen, for the denizens of this world always garb themselves in streamers of splendor and look not unlike perambulating lamp shades.

They were not only singers. Some were impecunious painters and some were patrons of the arts, who were wont to shout “bravo” from the highest seats in the temple. It gave them a fine satisfaction to eat within reach of real singers. And they were not all Italians, for one feast of spaghetti makes the whole world of Bohemia kin.

1914 Our Mr. Wrenn; The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, Sinclair Lewis – Mr. Wrenn is a lonely lodger who timidly invites a neighbor, Theresa Zapp, to dinner at a restaurant run by Papa Gouroff. She is described as “forward” and “gold-digging.” Although she is not interested in Mr. Wrenn, she accepts his invitation, but fails to be impressed by the restaurant.

The Armenian restaurant is peculiar, for it has foreign food at low prices, and is below Thirtieth Street, yet it has not become Bohemian. Consequently it has no bad music and no crowd of persons from Missouri whose women risk salvation for an evening by smoking cigarettes. Here prosperous Oriental merchants, of mild natures and bandit faces, drink semi-liquid Turkish coffee and discuss rugs and revolutions.

In fact, the place seemed so unartificial that Theresa . . . was bored. And the menu was foreign without being Society viands. It suggested rats’ tails and birds’ nests, she was quite sure. She would gladly have experimented with pate de foie gras or alligator-pears, but what social prestige was there to be gained at the factory by remarking that she “always did like pahklava”?

Papa Gouroff was a Russian Jew who had been a police spy in Poland and a hotel proprietor in Mogador, where he called himself Turkish and married a renegade Armenian. . . . He hoped that the place would degenerate into a Bohemian restaurant where liberal clergymen would think they were slumming, and barbers would think they were entering society, so he always wore a fez and talked bad Arabic. He was local color, atmosphere, Bohemian flavor.

© Jan Whitaker, 2024

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July 25, 2023 · 10:19 am

Dining with the garment trade

At a recent used book sale I picked up a copy of a small book of humor published in 1919 called “We Need the Business” by Joseph Austrian. I was charmed by the illustrations by Stuart Hay, several of which related to the food habits of the men in the garment trade as portrayed in the book.

The book is a series of letters written by Philip Citron, owner of a company in New York City called Citron, Gumbiner & Co. that, made women’s waists (as blouses were known then). Austrian had long worked in the clothing trade, suspenders being his specialty.

In his letters to his partner and salesmen in the field, Philip Citron mostly complains about competitors who are stealing their business. He gives the impression that most contracts the salesmen get are later cancelled when buyers find a cheaper deal elsewhere. At the same time, he is unhappy that his salesmen don’t get higher prices on the sales they make!

In the illustration shown at the top, Moe Gabriel, an eager salesman from a competing manufacturer, is successfully selling a bill of goods to Ike Weinberg that will result in a cancelled contract for Citron & Gumbiner. Ike actually seems far more interested in his lunch than in getting a cheap deal.

One of Citron’s salesmen is his son Abe. Philip sends him a birthday letter in which he congratulates his son on wise conduct with “the ladies.” Mingling with them, he writes, is fine if they are the “right kind of nice ladies.” The illustration suggests that Abe has other ideas. Later the reader finds out that Abe is also keeping late hours with the company’s secretary under the guise of working. Philip has no idea of what is going on.

In another letter Philip describes a trip he and his wife took to Atlantic City. He suffers from digestive problems and the little vacation is meant to get him to relax. They go to a restaurant popular with the garment trade that he refers to as the “Flyswatte” where the cooking was “high grade.” His wife asks the chef for the recipe for “a new style of cold fish” that he enjoyed there. Later, when they get back home, she prepares the dish. It makes him ill.

Philip goes to Boston to meet with a buyer from Holyoke MA named Cyprian Stoneman, from Neill, Pray & Co. He describes Stoneman [shown above] looking more like “the designer of a book like ‘The Antique Furniture of New England’” who eats pie for breakfast than an “up-to-date model shirt waist buyer.” But he is determined to find a customer in Holyoke so he settles on Stoneman, meeting him for lunch at the Café Georgette which is popular with garment salesmen and buyers – and where portions are big. Stoneman is so thin that Philip can’t imagine “where he stored all the linzen [lentil] soup, brust deckel [fatty brisket], kohlrabi, deep dish blackberry pie a la mode, watermelon and ice tea he put away.” He proves to be “one of those lemon buyers de luxe,” buying very little and wanting numerous alterations.

Citron, Gumbiner & Co. designer, Miss Kopyem, goes to Haines Falls in the Catskills on vacation, where she finds “the streets and porches . . . full of operators, contractors and salesmen of the ready-to-wear trade.” She does not enjoy the crowds and noise. Philip likens the scene there to “Fifth Avenue at lunch time” where, in fact, he is part of the crowds. He is shown bottom right in the drawing above.

At his partner’s recommendation Philip opens a lunch room for employees and adds a suggestion box. He removes it after it instantly becomes stuffed with 25 letters asking for additional benefits such as massages, a barber shop, soda fountain, and movies. Employees also want American chop suey, Gorgonzola cheese, marinierte herring [herring in cream sauce], strudel, gefülte fish, caviar sandwiches, welsh rarebit, and chicken a la King.

In the book’s final letter to his partner Sol, Philip reveals that the company has had its best year ever and “will show a clean net profit of about $52,000.” His stomach, he writes, “feels fine to-day.”

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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July 11, 2023 · 12:05 pm

Restaurant brawls

All the discussion about guns in public places these days has me thinking about restaurant security, a subject that, as a patron, I never actually consider. Specifically, I began to wonder for the first time whether ordinary eating places all the way up to elite restaurants have armed employees or a gun stashed away somewhere. Or, might patrons be armed? [shown above is a 1946 Jiggs comic strip scene]

Given that the answer has been “yes” back into the 19th century, and that more Americans are armed now, it’s likely to still be true.

But a more common type of violent incident that occurs in restaurants is a brawl which, thankfully, hasn’t usually involved guns.

Of course restaurants have always had a certain number of problem patrons to deal with. According to one 19th-century account, even Delmonico’s had a man employed to handle difficult guests, such as those who arrived inebriated. He headed off trouble by not admitting them or by whispering a “word of advice” to patrons who drank too much while in the restaurant. Mainly, he said, his job was to recognize by sight the city’s “bunko steerers and confidence men”: “I just meet them at the door and tell them it won’t do, and they know it won’t, so they go away quietly. There is no bouncing or knocking out required.”

His genteel method was similar in tone to that of “The Foreigner’s Club” of Sorrento, Italy, where this card was used.

Alas, such methods were only available in certain restaurants. At others, there were no door keepers, subtle ushers, or “convertible waiter bouncers.” It seemed from time to time that nothing could stop patrons from fighting other patrons or a server or even instigating a mass brawl.

I started thinking about restaurant brawls when I read a story in this year’s January 29 issue of the NYTimes Magazine. It described the scene of a Waffle House in Texas where a melee erupted and was captured on video. It involved patrons standing on the counter, throwing dishes and chairs, and attacking workers who fought back in like manner. Other popular videos show similar scenes in Popeyes and sub shops.

The author, Niela Orr, expressed a degree of longing for the days of Edward Hopper’s famous 1942 painting Nighthawks, where patrons sit glumly in isolation from other sad sacks at the counter. Like the Waffle House patrons, they are alienated but unlike them they aren’t throwing crockery.

They could have been though. Restaurant customers were documented hurling dishes as early as the 1860s.

In 1920 movie patrons laughed at the subject of riots in restaurants.

Restaurant brawls are diverse. Undoubtedly many of the sites where they occurred were lowly eateries but others were mainstream chains, such as the International House of Pancakes, Child’s, and White Castle. And Googie’s – where comedian Lenny Bruce went through a plate glass window. [1957 photo]

Not even Grandma’s Family Restaurant and Pancake House in Rockford IL was safe from disruption. In a 1992 melee there, an estimated 30 patrons “went wild,” breaking out four plate glass windows, jumping over booths, and throwing whatever they could get their hands on.

Incidents sometimes involved brawlers you might not expect, such as students at elite colleges (Harvard vs. Dartmouth in one case), or men in tuxedos upset that a server refused to give them more sugar during WWII rationing. Generally participants have tended to be young, white, male, and intoxicated.

Few incidents could outdo the brawl in New York City’s Bryant Park Grill said to be a repeat of a similar event in DC three years earlier. To quote a 1998 story in the Jersey (City) Journal, 40 of NYC’s firemen celebrating Medal Day in their finest uniforms “annoyed patrons, exposed themselves, urinated in public and invaded a women’s restroom.” They also threw a policeman over a row of planters when he tried to break them up. And, as so often happens, no one was arrested.

Personally, I will try to push all this to the back of my mind when I’m visiting restaurants.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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