Category Archives: restaurant fads

October 29, 2023 · 12:16 pm

Taste of a decade: the 1990s

The decade began in an economic slump, putting a damper on the expensive dining trends of the 1980s. Informal dining venues met the situation by crafting new “casual cuisine” menus featuring less expensive, quickly prepared pasta dishes and grilled meat, all tailored for the Baby Boomers who formed the prime market for dining out.

Although surveys showed that Americans want healthful food choices in restaurants, beef remained extremely popular, and sales at casual steakhouses rose.

In the early 1990s restaurant chain operations emphasized efficiency and speed with microwave ovens, automatic dishwashers, and computerized systems that integrated taking orders with food preparation, as well as managing accounts and inventory. Coordination of operations enabled customers at drive-up windows to order, pay, and pick up their food rapidly.

Unable to compete with fast-food chains’ quick service and low prices, old-style casual eateries such as Horn & Hardart automats, Woolworth lunch counters, and cafeterias were disappearing. New York’s last remaining Automat, at E. 42nd St. and Third Ave., closed in 1991.

As the economy improved it became clear that luxury restaurants hadn’t vanished. The December 1990 announcement that the James Beard Foundation was forming an awards program was a sign that top chefs were not to be forgotten. Yet, despite the boost to fine dining given by the awards, fine-dining establishments continued to struggle.

New, artsy trends in plating meals emerged, among them the brief but dramatic art of stacking food into towers that wowed the eye but proved difficult to eat gracefully.

Even as elite food fads came and went, one trend appeared unstoppable: the gathering up of thousands of chain restaurants by regional owners and giant food corporations. While the media focused on top chefs and their novel dishes created in landmark restaurants, huge corporations such as Tricon Global grew even larger with many venturing into worldwide operations.

Mexican immigration doubled, reaching a new high of 8.8 million by the end of the decade and furnishing a large number of restaurant kitchen workers. Small Mexican restaurants opened to supply traditional food to the new immigrants, but by 1999 Taco Bell’s 7,000 U.S. outlets had captured 90% of the thoroughly Americanized Mexican restaurant market, serving 55M customers a week, with sales of $5.1 billion annually.

Black restaurant workers and customers had their day in court in 1993 with successful discrimination suits against Shoney’s and Denny’s. Shoney’s was found liable of charges it had set a limit to the number of Black workers it would hire in some of its restaurants, as well as hiring all-Black staffs in Black communities and all-white staffs elsewhere. Denny’s faced multiple law suits.

Highlights

1991 Six men and one woman are the first regional chefs to be honored by the newly formed James Beard Awards: Jasper White (Boston), Jean-Louis Palladin (D.C.), Emeril Lagasse (New Orleans), Rick Bayless (Chicago), Stephan Pyles (Dallas), Joachim Splichal (Los Angeles), and Caprial Pence (Seattle).

1992 A U.S. Department of Labor report on technology announces that due to increases in productivity, chain-owned restaurants “for the first time . . . exceeded the number of independently owned restaurants.”

1993 Shoney’s, at the time the third-largest chain, is fined an unprecedented $105M for racial discrimination in hiring, while Denny’s pays $54M for refusing service to Black customers, insulting them, and overcharging them.

1993 The new Food Network spotlights restaurant chefs and methods of preparation. Viewers become interested in new restaurant dishes, while rising use of garlic at home is attributed to viewers watching Emeril. Despite the interest in inventive cuisine, 1991 James Beard winner Stephan Pyles feels forced to close his Routh Street Café in Dallas.

1994 Sensing that Black patrons may have been offended by revelations regarding Denny’s discriminatory behavior, the corporate owner hires a Black Chicago advertising firm to create an image of the restaurants’ friendliness to Black customers and workers.

1995 Stacked food – aka vertical or tall food – is reportedly now passé in New York’s trendy restaurants, replaced by layering food on the plate. However, a short time later vertical food is said to be “sweeping the country.”

1996 Taco Bell is the country’s leading Mexican restaurant, with 6,867 stores.

1997 PepsiCo.’s spinoff Tricon Global, based in Louisville KY, racks up more than $7 billion in sales with its major chains Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC.

1998 In a survey, Applebee’s and Cracker Barrel tie for 8th place as family favorites among the country’s 30 largest chain restaurants.

1999 The U.S. Department of Commerce declares this “The Year of the Restaurant” and the Beard award for Outstanding Restaurant goes to NYC’s Four Seasons.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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September 5, 2023 · 10:25 am

Image gallery: Redness!

The author of the book A Perfect Red identifies it as “the color of desire” and “the color of blood and fire.” She also notes that the color has often been associated with masculinity because it signifies power, prestige, and “heat and vitality.”

So it makes perfect sense that at one time it was popular as steak house decor. [above, Presto, Chicago, ca. 1970]

But it took a while to catch on. In the early 20th century the color red was strongly rejected by many Americans as inappropriate for clothing. Those who dared to wear red – or other strong, bright colors – were seen as low class and with questionable morals. The judgment was particularly harsh if the wearer was Black or an immigrant.

The use of red in home decor was also severely criticized. An elite Chicago woman’s club firmly rejected a trend toward Oriental-styled dens with red walls, piled-up cushions, and low lighting. One of the club’s members noted in 1903 that during a visit to a house with so-called “cozy corners” full of soft pillows she began to doubt that “the mistress of that home was a moral woman.”

Needless to say, though early women’s tea rooms sometimes adopted playful decorating themes, red was decidedly not a popular color scheme in them.

Despite its association with immorality (or maybe because of it?) red made a strong showing after World War II, especially in the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. It was often used in restaurant decor, especially for places that appealed primarily to men.

Red tended to be employed lavishly. It was variously used for carpets, painted wall and ceiling surfaces, columns, wallpaper, light fixtures, draperies, tablecloths and napkins, glassware, menus, upholstery for chairs and banquettes, and waiters’ uniforms. [above: That Steak Place, VA]

Sometimes an old-time theme was adopted, usually signaled by red-flocked wallpaper meant to conjure a bygone time of jollity that might suggest anything from the “gay ‘90s” to the “roaring ‘20s” to a brothel.

A 1955 book of decorating advice suggested that, in contrast to cool colors and bright lights, restaurants with warm colors and dim lights suggested luxury. The latter decor encouraged patrons to relax and was believed “to increase the size of his check.” Likewise, a bar decorated in red might encourage drink orders.

Of course red is more than warm, it’s hot! It can be difficult to imagine relaxing in some of the eating places that enveloped diners in redness. Such as, in particular, NYC’s Cattle Baron [shown above], which opened in 1967 in the Hotel Edison. If the red decor weren’t appealing enough, the restaurant’s owner seemed willing to revive an association with questionable respectability when he ran an advertisement picturing a nude female model marked with black lines indicating cuts of meat.

Whatever poshness and sense of luxury a red interior suggested, it began to wear off in the 1960s, and even more in the 1970s. In 1961, when a version of the NYC club known as Danny Segal’s Living Room opened in Chicago, a reviewer criticized the “engine red decor” with red light bulbs as “excessive” and amounting to “a satire on night club decor.” Also in the 1960s, an Oregon restaurant reviewer sneered at “that ubiquitous black and red decor which has almost become a stereotype of the snobbier bistros.”

Restaurants began ditching their red decor in the 1970s. The Colony Square Hotel in Atlanta installed a new restaurant called Trellises, causing a reviewer to applaud the disappearance of the “steakhouse/bordello gold and red decor.” The western Straw Hat Pizza chain decided in 1975 that Gay 90-style restaurants with red-flocked wallpaper were out of fashion. The Homestead in Greenwich CT hired NYC designers to come in and rip out their red carpets and red-flocked wallpaper for a country look with hanging plants, wood floors, and brick walls. [above, Harry’s Plaza Cafe, Santa Barbara]

Of course, the U.S. is a big country, full of diverse tastes and fashions, so it’s not a big surprise that there were (and are) some restaurants that kept their red decor.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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March 5, 2023 · 10:46 am

Dining . . . and wining?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

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May 8, 2022 · 10:59 am

The Mister chains

Sometimes I feel the need to focus on ridiculousness in restaurants, maybe because I run across so many instances of it when I’m meandering through old sources. Lately I’ve been exploring franchising and have encountered numerous silly concepts expressed in the names of chains. Many businesses across the country adopted “Mister” or “Mr.” as part of their names, and this seems to have been particularly true of restaurant chains. [For now, I’m calling all of them Mister.]

There are also scores of restaurants with names such as Mister Mike’s or Mister T’s, but those are usually not part of franchise chains and the letter or nickname refers to an actual person, usually the owner, who may be known by that name in real life. I’m not including those here.

I’m more interested in the Misters that are not named for actual humans. At least I’m hoping that there is no real-life Mister Beef, Bun, Burger, Chicken, Drumstick, Fifteen, Hambone, Hamwich, Hofbrau, Pancake, Quick, Sandwich, Sirloin, Softee, Steak, Swiss, or Taco.

There were also Sir chains, such as Sir Beef, plus Kings and Senors. Were they in their own way an expression of multiculturalism? Being “continental,” Sir Beef was classier than most of the Misters.

For quite a while I believed there could be no Mister Chicken. That seemed obvious to me – who wants to be called a chicken? But then it occurred to me that I should do a little more research. I was proven wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Surrounding the logo shown here were the words: Home of America’s Best Barbecue Chicken Since 1966!” Although there were restaurants by the same name in Rockford IL and Atlanta GA, I don’t know if they were related.

I find Mister Pancake’s face somehow threatening, but never mind that – he was a hit in his hometown of Indianapolis. He came into the world there in 1959, but I don’t know if he appeared anywhere else.

I especially like the logos that attempt to humanize food, particularly unlikely items such as hambones. Sadly for him and his girlfriend, Mister Hambone International – aka Hammy — really didn’t catch on. Starting out in Virginia in 1969, he opened at least one place in North Carolina, but nothing, I think, internationally.

Mister Softee with his natty bow tie, born in New Jersey, was mainly peddled out of ice cream trucks, but there were also restaurants of the same name that served hamburgers, steaks, hot dogs, fish, etc., along with the creamy guy. In 1967 a mobile franchise cost $2,500 while a restaurant was ten times that, which may account for why there were then 1,600 trucks — even as far off as the French West Indies — but only 5 restaurants. Overall, Mister Softee, like Mister Steak, had a more successful life than most of the Misters.

Mister Drumstick, born in Atlanta, offered the World’s Best Fried Chicken. I can’t help but wonder why he is holding a hamburger rather than a chicken leg. Maybe it was because his franchise was sold in connection with Mister Sirloin, a roast beefery, as well as Mister Hamwich, a ham sandwich purveyor. So far I’ve found four Mister Drumsticks in Atlanta and a few in Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri. Nino’s Mister Drumstick in Sandusky OH looks more athletic than Atlanta’s, but of course he has the advantage of legs. Was he a go-go dancer in an earlier phase of his career?

I like the Drumsticks, but my favorites are Mister Bun and Mister Sandwich (of New York City!). They are so versatile. They can handle anything that goes between two slices of bread. I don’t know what Mister Sandwich looked like but Mister Bun was a strange one, with his extremely short legs, his six-guns, and his 10-gallon hat. I can’t really figure him out. Is he trying to compensate for being nothing but bread?

The three Florida creators of Mister Bun had high hopes in 1968 when they opened their first location in Palm Beach, with plans to add more outlets in Florida as well as a number of other states where investors were interested. They advertised for franchisees by telling them that Mister Bun featured “the eight most popular food items in this nation.” It was true that Mister Bun could hold almost anything, so they settled on roast beef, cold cuts, roast pork, frankfurters and fish, accompanied by french fries and onion rings, and washed down with a range of beverages, including beer. Alas, Mister Bun had a rather unhappy life, experiencing little growth, abandonment by his primary creator, and time in court.

Females seemed to stay out of the game, so there are no Mrs. Buns, Mrs. Beefs, Mrs. Tacos . . . or Miss Steaks. Maybe theirs was the wiser course.

© Jan Whitaker, 2022

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May 2, 2021 · 4:34 pm

Tableside theater

Is tableside service the kind of glamour that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny? It may be a noble tradition in French restaurants, but in the United States it’s another story. Depending upon how you look at it, it can be fun — or it can be understood as a way to charge more for lower quality food.

I haven’t been able to determine how common tableside service was in 19th-century America. But clearly chafing dishes were employed long ago, especially where oysters were served. A widely circulated story from 1843 described a man staying at a fine hotel in New Orleans who was outraged that he should “cook his own victuals” when he ordered a venison steak and the waiter brought a chafing dish for him to prepare it in.

How times change! By the mid-20th century, restaurant guests were delighted to prepare food themselves with a hibachi or fondue pot.

One of the most flamboyant sorts of tableside service is the presentation of food on flaming swords. It represented the consummate display of tableside theatrics, particularly at Chicago’s Pump Room of the late 1930s and 1940s. Master of ceremonies Ernie Byfield asserted that he preferred to host “laughing eaters” rather than “grim gourmets.” He was quite frank about the degree of pretense involved with tableside service at the Pump Room, implicitly acknowledging that formal French service was out of step with mainstream American culture. [Pump Room flaming swords, 1943]

Tableside service as entertaining floorshow got a foothold in American restaurants in the 1930s. By then, according to an essay by A. J. Liebling, Prohibition speakeasies had introduced middle-class New Yorkers to “a pancake that burned with a wan flame,” a reference to Crepes Suzette.

The popularity of flames at the table and other forms of tableside food preparation grew in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The full show was described by the proprietor of the Bubble Bar in Akron OH in 1952: “Just as your Flaming Sword Dinner is about to be served, the Rajah (that’s my assistant) and I dim the house lights and approach your table, sword in hand aflame with choice morsels of lamb, beef tenderloin or chicken. . . . And of course, following such an adventure in dining, you wouldn’t think or dare to order any dessert but our Flaming Cherry Jubilee or Flaming Crepes Suzette.”

Alas, a look behind the scenes quickly dissolves whatever magic adheres to tableside drama. The 1974 how-to book Showmanship in the Dining Room leaves little doubt that tableside service in all its forms — whipping up sauces, tossing Caesar salads, serving beef from shiny rolling carts, flaming things — is all about money. The book builds upon the wisdom articulated in a July 1966 issue of Cooking for Profit that asserts that, for “the table-cloth operation,” service is the prime merchandiser. Tableside service, goes the thinking, makes customers feel important and willing to pay more for what is often food of lesser quality or quantity.

Here are some of the magic-dissolving points made in the Showmanship book:
– The rolling cart has a virtually unique benefit. It allows the restaurateur to sell items he could not otherwise sell.
– Wines on a cart allow the waiter to push particular bottles. Few people can resist when a bottle is held before them with the waiter’s recommendation.
– Coffee can be served by a specialist. For some inexplicable reason customers accept an individual dressed like an Indian maharajah much more readily than a native of a coffee-producing country.
– A casserole item with a low food cost, such as curry made from turkey thighs, which could not be readily sold otherwise, can be merchandised from a self-service chafing dish on the table.
– As a general rule, carving in the dining room gives the operation a better yield; The carver becomes proficient at making less meat look like more; the waiter can divide a piece of meat that is less than the sum of two individual orders.
– If flambéing is done properly, the customers enjoy it and willingly pay for it. In most instances, it does not harm the food very much at all.
– Any waiter who can light a match can flambé a dish.
– Nothing about the perennial flambé favorites, crepes Suzette and cherries Jubilee, is exciting except the showmanship.
– But people like sweet tastes, and people like flames. The combination is seemingly irresistible, as it sells at menu prices so exceeding the cost that they would make a desert water vendor blush.
– The matronly waitress might be able to flambé successfully . . . but she may look domestic making a steak tartare and resemble a washerwoman when tossing a Caesar salad.

Let the patron beware!

© Jan Whitaker, 2021

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January 13, 2019 · 7:38 pm

Tea rooms for students

College and high school students of the 20th century led many eating-out trends and customs. Not only did they help make certain foods popular, they also influenced meal habits and adopted frequent restaurant-going as part of their social lives.

Drive-ins, coffee houses, and vegetarian restaurants were some of the types of eating places heavily shaped by student patrons in the middle and later decades of the last century. But a bit earlier, in the early 20th century, the eating places of choice for many college students were tea rooms that attracted women students. Not that men students didn’t also like tea rooms. An example was The Cactus Tea Room, built in 1917 with weird carvings of university types adorning its eaves, and serving both male and female students at the University of Texas in Austin.

Although tea rooms were more likely to be found near residential colleges, high school students also enjoyed them for after-school stops. In the 1920s students at Decatur High School in Decatur GA hung out at the Elite Tea Room, while Haverling High School students in Bath NY gravitated to the Chat-A-Wile Tea Room.

Rather than being stuffy and proper, many tea rooms that catered to students were relaxed and informal. They carried on college traditions such as midnight “spreads,” at which foods pilfered from the school’s dining halls were remade into chafing dish repasts. The feasts were occasions for casual attire, sprawling on the floor, and high spirits at the thought of evading detection while breaking college rules. [shown here is an Oberlin College dorm room spread, 1905]

Tea rooms also carried on the tradition of college dining clubs, which involved groups of friends joining together to hire a local woman to prepare their meals. The clubs adopted humorous names such as Vassar College’s Nine Nimble Nibblers, Grubbers, and Gobbling Goops of the late 19th century.

For example, a popular spot for students from Smith College was the Copper Kettle, which played a role much like the coffee shops of today. Students hung out there, read, chatted, and snacked on popcorn, ice cream, and tea. Its decor was cosy, shabby-chic style with mismatched furniture, wicker lounge chairs, posters, and window seats. Smith students were also enamored of the Rose Tree Inn, where full meals were served in a Bohemian atmosphere created by the intriguing Madame Anna de Naucaze.

Some colleges were almost surrounded by tea rooms. That was true in Western Massachusetts where both Smith College and Mount Holyoke College are located. Northampton, home of Smith College, was described in 1922 as having “more tea-houses than churches.” Not so far away, Mount Holyoke College was also well supplied with tea rooms, among them The Croysdale Inn, The Mary-Elin Tea Shop, and The Art Nook. I find it interesting that the Mary-Elin advertised in 1921 that it would stay open until 10 p.m., which was quite late for a tea room.

Parents did not always approve of their free-wheeling daughters’ behavior. In 1912, a mother wrote a critical article titled “One Disintegrant of Our Home Life,” about the typical college girl who socialized constantly, ignored rules of proper dress, and loved going to “the Green Coffee Pot or the Carnation Tea Urn.” “I tell my husband that college doesn’t breed home-building girls,” she wrote.

Among the most notable changes that tea rooms brought was simply that of providing a welcoming and friendly place for unescorted women to gather. This, of course, encouraged women and girls to spend more time eating away from home.

As for food, apart from popularizing eating cake and ice cream at any time of day or night, tea room food was a departure from typical lunch rooms and restaurants of the early 20th century that served fairly heavy meals based around meat. Although meat was certainly served in tea rooms, patrons also had many other choices. A 1920s menu from The Quinby Inn (shown above) — popular with students at Goucher College near Baltimore — offers Tenderloin Steak and Roast Pork, but also many other choices, with quite a few of them revealing the popularity of sweet food. Among them are 12 desserts, 22 salads, many of which involved mixed fruits and whipped cream, and 22 sandwiches, including Olive & Egg and Sliced Pineapple (no, not together!).

The list of specials clipped onto a 1920s menu from The Mary-Elin Tea Shop near Mount Holyoke College also shows its patrons’ fondness for sweets [thanks to Donna Albino for scans of the menu from her Mount Holyoke College collection].

A number of college women opened tea rooms of their own either as a summer project or after graduation. But that will be another post.

© Jan Whitaker, 2019

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November 12, 2018 · 9:15 pm

Clown themes

Have you ever felt that clown themes, characters, and motifs in restaurants were a mistake? A good number of Americans – estimated as many as 12% of children and adults — experience fear that clowns are deranged maniacs in disguise.

But that wasn’t always true. The 1950s and 1960s were the era of jolly clowns. Several clowns, particularly Bozo, won a children’s audience on TV, redeeming a character that had a sometimes dark history in past centuries. In 1963 Ronald McDonald got his start on television, played by Willard Scott who became better known in subsequent years as a weather forecaster.

Scott’s Ronald, a character he claims to have created, was costumed differently than later and more familiar Ronalds. Ronald has, in fact, gone through numerous costume changes over the years — as have many corporate mascots.

Whether because of clowns’ popularity on TV or some other source of inspiration, quite a few drive-in restaurants (and some drive-in movies) of the 1950s and 1960s adopted clown names, signs, and motifs. Taking on a clown theme suggests a wish to attract children in hopes they might bring the whole family along. The drive-ins’ menus of hamburgers and ice cream were certainly in tune with children’s tastes.

As was true of drive-ins generally, clown-themed drive-ins got their start in the warmer climates of California and Texas. The original Jack In The Box, previously called Oscar’s, was one of the first, opening in 1951 in San Diego, California, with the Jack figure looming over a low roof.

Another early California drive-in of the 1950s was the Big Clown Drive-In, again describing itself as a “hamburger operation.” The Clown Burger, in Fort Worth TX, opened in 1959 serving what are now regarded as surprisingly small, thin burgers and fries.

The innocent appeal of clowns began to wane in the 1970s.

It was a blow to the clown image when juvenile and teen-age murder victims of John Wayne Gacy began to be discovered in 1978. Gacy sometimes wore a Bozo the Clown costume to aid in luring his victims. After his conviction he sold crude paintings of himself dressed as Bozo that he painted in prison.

The disclosure of Gacy’s crimes didn’t put a total end to the clown theme, but it may have accelerated its decline. A year earlier Jack In the Box had already simplified and stylized its clown logo which had been in use for nearly a decade (shown here as a charm).

Somehow, though, Ronald McDonald survived. In 2011 the chain’s mascot was criticized for peddling an unhealthy diet to children, but the company decided to keep him nonetheless.

In the 2000s, around two dozen movies with scary clowns were released. Then, in 2016 clown fears increased due to a number of incidents where knife wielding men wearing clown masks marauded in public. After that Ronald became less visible.

© Jan Whitaker, 2018

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January 14, 2018 · 5:17 pm

Crazy for crepes

The crepes craze, which began in the 1960s, became intense in the 1970s. By the late 1980s it had all but disappeared.

But before crepes achieved popularity, they were almost unknown in the U.S. The exception was Crepes Suzette, thin, delicate pancakes with an orange-butter sauce and liqueurs that were often dramatically lit aflame at the diners’ table. Like Cherries Jubilee, Crepes Suzette usually only appeared on high-priced menus, such as the Hotel Astor [1908 quotation].

Before 1960 even fewer restaurants served savory crepes, and those that did would also seem to have been expensive restaurants. In 1948 the Colony in New York City served Crepes Colony with a seafood filling. And in the late 1950s New York’s Quo Vadis offered Crepes Quo Vadis, filled with curried seafood and glazed with a white sauce, as hors d’oeuvres.

Although few Americans had ever eaten Crepes Suzette, it’s likely that the fame of this prized dish helped pave the way for the creperie craze, with restaurants primarily featuring crepes. Crepes were regarded as an exotic luxury dish that, by some miracle, was affordable to the average consumer, sometimes costing as little as 60 or 75 cents apiece around 1970.

Crepes enjoyed a mystique, offering a link to European culture and a break from the meat and potatoes that dominated most restaurant menus in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

At a time when America was seen as the world leader in modern ways of living – including industrially efficient food production — Europe was imagined as a romantically quaint Old World where traditional ways were preserved and many things were still handmade.

American creperies catered to their customers’ wish for a taste of Europe. With country French decor, servers in folk costumes, and names such as Old Brittany French Creperie and Maison des Crepes [pictured at top, Georgetown], diners were imaginatively transported to a delightfully foreign environment quite unlike the brand new shopping malls in which many creperies were located. Another exotic touch employed by quite a few creperies was to use the French circumflex mark in crêpes (which I have not done in this blogpost).

Filled with creamed chicken, ratatouille, or strawberries and whipped cream (etc.), crepes soon became a favorite lunch, dinner, and late-night supper for college students, dating couples, shoppers, and anyone seeking “something different.” Along with crepes, menus typically included a few soups, most likely including French onion soup, a spinach-y salad, and perhaps a carafe of wine.

San Francisco’s Magic Pan Creperie led the trend and, after being acquired by Quaker Oats in 1969, spread to cities across the country, with the chain eventually totaling about 112. The first Magic Pan, a tiny place on Fillmore Street, was opened in 1965 by Paulette and Laszlo Fono, who came to this country in 1956 after the failed anti-Communist uprising in their native Hungary. A few years later they opened another Magic Pan in Ghirardelli Square and Laszlo patented a 10-pan crepe-maker capable of turning out 600 perfectly cooked crepes per hour [pictured here].

As Quaker opened Magic Pans, they invariably received a warm welcome in newspaper food pages. It was as though each chosen city had been “awarded” one of the creperies, usually situated in upscale suburban shopping malls such as St. Louis’s Frontenac Plaza or Hartford’s West Farms Mall. When a Magic Pan opened in Dallas’ North Park shopping center in 1974, it was called “as delightful a restaurant as one is likely to find in Dallas.”

Among Magic Pan amenities (beyond moderate prices), reviewers were pleased by fresh flowers on each table, good service, delicious food, pleasant decor, and late hours. Many of the Magic Pans stayed open as late as midnight – as did many independent crepe restaurants. [Des Moines, 1974]

In hindsight it’s apparent that creperies responded to Americans’ aspirations to broaden their experiences and enjoy what a wider world had to offer. It was a grand adventure for a high school or college French class or club to visit a creperie, watch crepe-making demonstrations, and have lunch. [below: student at the Magic Pan, Tulsa, 1979] But what one Arizona creperie owner called the “highbrow taco” did not appeal to everyone. The operator of a booth selling crepes at Illinois county fairs reported that hardly anyone bought them and that some fairgoers referred to them as creeps or craps.

I would judge that crepes and creperies reached the pinnacle of popularity in 1976, the year that Oster came out with an electric crepe maker for the home. Soon the downward slide began.

Quaker sold the Magic Pans in 1982 after years of declining profits. The new owner declared he would rid the chain of its “old-lady” image, i.e., attract more male customers. Menus were expanded to include heartier meat and pasta dishes.

Even though new creperies continued to open here and there – Baton Rouge got its first one in 1983 – there were signs as early as 1980 that the crepe craze was fading. A visitor to a National Restaurant Association convention that year reported that crepes were “passé” and restaurants were looking instead for new low-cost dishes using minimal amounts of meat or fish. A restaurant reviewer in 1986 dismissed crepes as “forgotten food” served only in conservative restaurant markets. Magic Pans were closing all over, and by the time the 20-year old Magic Pan on Boston’s Newbury Street folded in 1993, very few, if any, remained.

© Jan Whitaker, 2018

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