March 2, 2025 · 12:10 pm

Famous in its day: Fanny’s

Lately I’ve been browsing through The Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Eating Places published in 1950. [illustration from Ford Treasury]

Among the 245 restaurants featured in the book, one stood out. Only Fanny’s gave no recipe. Instead, the ingredients of its salad dressing were simply listed. They were oil, tarragon vinegar, chutney, brown sugar, salt & pepper, mustard, fresh tomatoes, tomato paste, orange juice, ground pecans, garlic, onions, celery, and parsley.

The reason given was that the recipe was a valuable asset for which the owner Fanny Lazzar had been offered as much as $10,000. It was a “secret” recipe which, along with the restaurant’s spaghetti sauce, was closely guarded. The trademark had been registered in 1946.

Through the years the amounts said to be offered for the recipe increased mightily. In 1958 it was up to $250,000 according to the book Who’s Who — Dining and Lodging. (Oh, and it just happened that Fanny Lazzar was on the Advisory Board of Directors of the Who’s Who Historical Society that published the book.)

Fanny Lazzar of Fanny’s Restaurant serving her customers, A. Victor Abnee Jr. and Col. Robert Heuck, October 23, 1962 in Evanston, Illinois.

The more I learned about Fanny Lazzar and her restaurant, the more I began to realize how much effort she put into promotion. She admitted that she needed to have a full house regularly since she had no bar. Evanston was a dry town until 1972, although patrons brought alcohol to Fanny’s with no fear of a police raid. [Note wine glasses on the table in the illustration]

Fanny had started the restaurant in an industrial area in Evanston, Illinois, in 1946. She was a divorced mother of two boys facing the challenge of creating an upscale restaurant in a downscale neighborhood. She approached the local newspaper, the Evanston Review, asking if she could start a weekly column. She was told that restaurateurs did not have columns, so she bought a want ad instead. Almost accidentally, that provided a tremendous boost to her business.

Her Evanston Review advertisement was sent on to The New Yorker magazine by a professor at Northwestern University. The magazine included the entire, lengthy classified ad under the heading “Anticlimax Department (Fried Chicken and Violets Division).” It began with a quotation from John Milton (“‘They eat, they drink and in communion sweet, Quaff sweet immortality and joy”) and then told a story about visiting her uncle and aunt in Italy when she was 6. She spent time lying in the grass and smelling violets. Her aunt called her in to eat, and insisted that she do so even though she said she wasn’t hungry. Her uncle intervened and said she could go back and enjoy the violets. Next her classified ad launched into promoting dinner at her restaurant, suggesting that her “fine spaghetti” with its “rich meat and all butter sauce” would restore “SOMETHING that seemed lost.” Then it gave the restaurant’s hours on Sundays and the prices per various pieces of chicken, for example one chicken leg, 75c.

Marshall Field III, grandson of the department store’s founder, saw the New Yorker’s teasing putdown (did he recognize it as such?) and decided to give the restaurant a try. After his visit he introduced wealthy friends to it, including J. L. Kraft, Oscar Mayer, Richard Sears, and the presidents of Montgomery Ward and the First National Bank of Chicago. Fanny’s was well on its way to becoming a society restaurant. Although her first year in business had ended in the red, she was beginning to build a following.

Over the 40 years she ran the restaurant, Fanny invested in many, many advertisements, as well as producing 40 years worth of weekly promotional columns in the Evanston Review and the Chicago Tribune. Her paid advertisements appeared monthly for years in the Rotarian magazine. Despite being on the so-called wrong side of the tracks, Fanny’s location was not entirely a bad one. The Rotarian’s headquarters were only six blocks from the restaurant and it was close to Northwestern University and not so far from Ravinia’s summer music festivals. [above, an enlarged view of the restaurant, possibly in the 1960s]

She endlessly boosted the restaurant, repeating over and over that it had been honored by foreign governments and the Butter Institute of America, visited by famous celebrities, and written about in more than 165 newspapers and magazines. In her first column in the Tribune in 1955, she reiterated her triumphant claims: written up in 15 national magazines in the first two years; recommended by three of Europe’s finest restaurants in her fifth year, including the Tour d’Argent in Paris; and that she personally still prepared a garlic bread so fine that nobody had ever succeeded in copying it.

It’s likely that all her patrons and many others in the Chicago area, the country, maybe even the world knew Fanny’s saga: spending the first year serving industrial workers in the neighborhood, shoveling her own coal, and sleeping fewer than four hours a night. How she spent a full year each developing her salad dressing and her spaghetti sauce. And how she hired chef Bobby Jordan to fry chicken after he told her he had been “sent by the Lord.” And how she met her second husband, Ray Lazzar, while dining at the Pump Room where he was captain of the waitstaff.

Her success enabled her to live well and to become a local philanthropist. But she seemed to reveal her continuing insecurity after a student at Northwestern University gave the restaurant a poor review in the student newspaper in 1980. He wrote that Fanny’s was “overrated,” decorated to “look like it’s a rich man’s garage sale,” and that the spaghetti sauce was “just a tinge above Ragu,” while the salad dressing tasted “just above vinegar and oil with food coloring in it.” [above: a latter day match cover]

She responded by taking out a full-page ad in the student paper in which she reiterated her success, even going so far as to list in capital letters two columns with names of “GREATS” who had patronized her restaurant. She called her critic a “gross ignoramus” and concluded the long letter saying, “your bungling efforts at reporting a WORLD FAMOUS RESTAURANT WERE NOT ONLY WITHOUT TRUTH, BUT ODIOUS AND ABSURD.”

Two years later the school’s new restaurant columnist decided to give the restaurant another test. He was in agreement with the 1980 review and complained about soggy iceberg lettuce, greasy “orange-flavored” salad dressing and chicken that wasn’t “nearly as crisp as the Colonel’s.”

It’s hard to know if the restaurant had declined or if the student critics were poor judges of quality.
Ray Lazzar died in 1984, which was surely a blow, and the restaurant closed as of the end of July in 1987 at which time Fanny was 81 years old.

© Jan Whitaker, 2025

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February 9, 2025 · 12:35 pm

Mobsters & racketeering

This post was inspired by a 1959 Life Magazine feature story on the Chicago underworld. The magazine created a fictitious café to show the goods and services that actual mobsters forcibly provided to restaurants. The illustration above indicates those areas of mob involvement commonly found in restaurants then – and probably now to some extent.

In the magazine, a brief description of some of the real life gangsters who had invaded restaurants was linked to the illustration, complete with headshots of them (not shown here).

Here is a summary of who furnished what:
1 Former Capone lieutenant operates in laundry (and produce) unions. (See my earlier post about gangsters in the restaurant laundry business.)
2 Hit man handles steam cleaning of beer tap coils.
3 Slot machine operator also gets a cut of juke box revenues.
4 Former Capone gunman is boss of bartenders.
5 & 8 Two gangsters push Fox Head beer and get a cut.
6 Another juke box boss also handles vending machine merchandise.
7 A third juke box boss runs 15 Teamster locals and handles delivery drivers.
9 Meat supplies are furnished by the syndicate nightclub controller.
10 Man who handles syndicate bookkeeping also sells glass-washing machines through a front.
11 Former Prohibition-era bootlegger handles liquor distribution.
12 Glassware and glass-washing boss handles machines that happen to break glassware, stimulating his business.

The movement of mobsters into these fields began at the end of Prohibition, when bootlegging became obsolete. The mob had infiltrated the Teamsters Union in Chicago, and used it to their own advantage, doing little if anything for the workers, who saw little benefit and in many cases did not even know they were members.

Strangely enough, Life seems to have left out mobsters in the trash removal business.

As the story explains, if the restaurant owner “balks, the syndicate can harass him by ordering pickets to scare off customers. If this fails, the mob, which controls waiters and bartender union locals, can call members out. Since the mobsters also control Teamster locals who deliver, they can put the owner out of business by cutting of his supply of beer or by stopping his garbage pick-up.”

The next step would be violence such as burning down the restaurant, dramatically so in the case of suburban Chicago’s Allgauer’s Fireside Restaurant in 1958, whose owner was being punished for testifying at a Senate hearing on organized crime. The “workers’ union” at Allgauer’s was under the control of a local underworld leader. The crime was never solved. I would say “curiously unsolved” except that was always the case.

© Jan Whitaker, 2025

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January 26, 2025 · 11:52 am

The short life of the Roboshef

In 1940 the restaurant trade magazine Restaurant Management ran a story about a new San Francisco restaurant called Roboshef where one presumably unskilled cook could turn out 120 meals an hour. The feat was accomplished by using an automatic cooker that rapidly cooked steaks, fish, potatoes, and biscuits in hot oil. (Opening 1939 announcement below.)

The counter-sized cooker (shown above), the Roboshef, was patented by Walter Scharsch, a chef who had previously run his own restaurant.

The Roboshef menu also included juices, salads, vegetables, soup, and desserts, all prepared conventionally. On the menu, a half chicken with French fries and hot rolls was priced at 60c.

In 1935, prior to opening the San Francisco location, Scharsch had spent some time demonstrating his invention in Portland OR. A story that ran in the local paper described him demonstrating the invention in a local auditorium (shown above). Local production of the machine, said the story, had begun that same day. It said the plan was to open the machine to distribution in Oregon, Washington, and California before going national. I could find no evidence that Roboshef restaurants ever opened in Washington or Oregon.

The invention had appeared first in Tiny’s Waffle Shop in San Francisco in early 1938. Next came the Roboshef restaurant described in Restaurant Management, with its grand opening in July of 1939. According to the trade magazine’s story, the business planned to dedicate the upper two floors of the Van Ness location to a commissary and an office.

And then what happened after 1939?

Nothing, nothing at all. The Restaurant Management story was the last trace of Roboshef.

Except for this, which appeared months before Restaurant Management’s 1940 story – on Nov. 26, 1939:

It does not list any restaurant equipment, but seems to be referring to what would have been in the upstairs office. However the restaurant must have closed then or not much later, because by April, 1940, two months before the Restaurant Management story, a Persian rug store had moved into the space formerly occupied by the restaurant.

So it seems that Restaurant Management had presented a new restaurant – that had already failed!

Why did the San Francisco Roboshef go out of business so quickly? I could not find any explanation. My guess is that the invention did not work properly. That might explain why Scharsch submitted a new design for a similar yet different “Food Cooking Unit” to the U.S. patent office in 1941.

The new version of the Roboshef was acquired by Cogrisch Products which christened it the “Cogrisch Chicken Fryer.” Two advertisements from 1941 exclaimed about using it to cook chicken, one at the Nip & Tuck Chicken Inn in San Diego and the other at Earl’s Tavern & Chicken Shack in Tulare CA. There may have been others. Both the Nip & Tuck and an unknown place in Tracy CA advertised their used Cogrisch fryers for sale in 1950.

Meanwhile, Walter Scharsch had gone on to work for a shipbuilding corporation and to invent a Butter Slicing and Dispensing Machine around 1945.

© Jan Whitaker, 2025

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January 13, 2025 · 11:42 am

Notable restaurant mottos

In 1925 a restaurant industry publication presented advice on crafting a slogan that would draw customers. The article advised against simply saying “Where to Dine” because that really didn’t signify anything special to the public. The author then gave better examples of slogans that were “clever and appropriate.”

As a negative example, the article might have pointed to Teck’s Quick Lunch in Kansas City [shown above]. This card showing “A Place to Eat” dates from 1907. I can’t help but wonder what about it was “So Different.”

Most of the article’s examples were not especially convincing as model slogans. For instance, the list included a Buffalo restaurant with the motto “Is Different.” The author also approved of the slogan of the Everest Lunch in Newark: “If You Eat the Best, Eat Here.” To me this cried out for a rewrite. Clearly, a better version would have been “If You Want the Best, Eat at Everest.”

The article inspired me to look at old postcards for examples of mottoes. Usually the restaurants that used them were not elegant and sophisticated, but rather everyday lunch counters, cafeterias, and roadside places.

Superlatives dominated. One of the most popular was the word “unique,” or even better (and more ridiculous), “most unique.” Those that merely claimed to be the most unique in a limited area, such as “Most Unique Terrace Between New York & Buffalo” (Camillos Spiedi Bar in Endicott NY), were surpassed by those that were the most unique in the entire country or beyond. For example, the Bank Café in San Pedro CA declared itself “The most unique café in the world.”

Sometimes I wondered if a slogan was a joke – for instance, when the Coffee Cup in Wolcott NY claimed it was “Known from Coast to Coast.”

Parking arrangements were a feature that often merited acclaim. Morrison’s Cafeteria in Ocala FL said for some unexplained reason that they had “America’s most unique parking lot.” Earlier Rhode Island’s Stork Club — the “Most Popular Night Club in New England” – asserted it was “The only club with bell hop parkers.”

Other very specific claims were made with regard to air. Chicago’s North American Restaurant of the 1920s was, it said, “The Best Ventilated Restaurant in Chicago.” Later, air conditioning came to be notable, but some places made a big deal of it, such as Hap Miller’s Truck Town Restaurant in York PA which was “Scientifically Air Conditioned,” while the Studio Club in Westchester NY was “Delightfully Air Conditioned.”

As was true of the 1925 examples, some sent an ambiguous message. The 1920s list included a Montana mining town eatery that claimed “Our Prices Encourage Thrift.” Although they surely meant that they had low prices, it could easily be taken to mean the opposite. Likewise, the motto of the Square Shooters Eating House in Wyoming, “An unusual restaurant for respectable people,” is puzzling. Unlikely place for them to patronize? Or, if the motto was meant to attract respectable people, what about it was so unusual that they would like it?

Other mysterious or odd slogans included:
– a Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant in PA that claimed “State Tested Water 100%.”
– Coleman’s Restaurant in North Carolina with “Chicken in the Easy Way.”
– Granger’s in Texas with its “Fish That’s Different.”
– Houston’s Weldon Cafeteria that announced it was “The South’s newest and most modern Two line Cafeteria.”
– Columbus Ohio’s Jai Lai Restaurant, with its slogan “In All the World . . . There’s Only One!” evidently referring to its kitchen costing half a million.

Many of the restaurant mottos of the 20th century bordered on the absurd. Today they seem comical.

In a land of superlatives, my favorite was New York City’s Penguin Restaurant with the slogan “The Second Most Charming Restaurant in the Whole World.”

© Jan Whitaker, 2025

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December 29, 2024 · 11:47 am

Famous in its day: Well of the Sea

A short time ago I had a chance to visit the fascinating second floor of the Fishs Eddy store in New York. It is piled high with not-for-sale dishware of all kinds, collected by the store’s owner Julie Gaines. The collection includes restaurant ware from the golden past when this country still produced such things. (Tours of the collection, hosted by Julie, are given periodically and booked by the New York Adventure Club.)

The Fishs Eddy collection also includes records from china producers that show pattern designs. A page from Shenango China in Newcastle PA — closed in the 1970s — depicted the design for a plate made for use at the Well of the Sea restaurant in the former Hotel Sherman in Chicago. (A ca. 1950 painting of the restaurant by Cal Dunn is shown at the top of this page. Below is a plate using the above Shenango design.)

The restaurant opened late in 1948 in the hotel’s basement, which no doubt suggested an underwater theme to the hotel’s owner, the colorful and theatrical Ernie Byfield. He had also originated the over-the-top glamour restaurant, the Pump Room in the Ambassador Hotel.

A number of abstract murals of underwater scenes by Richard Koppe, Chicago painter and student of the German Bauhaus, decorated the walls of the restaurant. One of them was used for the menu’s cover shown below. The room was further enhanced by darkness and other-worldly ultraviolet lighting.

In addition to the murals, Koppe also contributed wire fish and light sculptures somewhat visible in the black and white advertisement of unknown date. The color menu depicted one of the murals.

Needless to say, the restaurant specialized in fish, with frequent shipments coming in by air. It was especially known for what was called Black Clam Chowder made with Madeira wine, clams, and many herbs and spices. A portion of a menu is shown above.

Another unusual feature of the Well of the Sea was the attached art gallery in which the work of Koppe and other Chicago artists was displayed. The exhibit of Richard Koppe’s work took place in December, 1949, one year after the restaurant’s opening.

In 1968 the Sherman’s general manager explained that the ultraviolet light used in Well of the Sea was glamorous when it illuminated jewelry and white shirts but not when it lighted false teeth. But the customers liked it anyway despite the room being so dark that waiters had to assist them with flashlights in order to read menus. In 1968 a glow-in-the-dark menu was introduced to make reading easier.

Exactly when the dishware inspired by Koppe’s murals and designed by Shenango Potteries’ Paul Cook came into use in the restaurant is not known with certainty. According to Margaret Carney, whose International Museum of Dinnerware Design in Kingston NY features many pieces of dinnerware from the Well of the Sea, the design shown on the Shenango file page above was probably not used until 1954. What preceded it is unknown.

The Well of the Sea was popular from the start and stayed in business until 1972, a year before the Sherman itself closed.

© Jan Whitaker, 2024

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December 15, 2024 · 10:38 am

Continental cuisine comes to Orange County

In the mid 1950s Geril and Gosta Muller arrived on the west coast. They were born in Denmark and had graduated from a Hotel and Restaurant School in Copenhagen in 1943. Following that Geril had served royalty at a Royal Gun Club. [Gosta (left of then-president Nixon) and Geril, 1971, at Chez Cary]

After a few years in Reno NV, they would swiftly work their way to the top of the emerging luxury restaurant pyramid in Southern California, managing and eventually owning award-winning restaurants there.

In Reno, the brothers worked at a motel restaurant called The Bundox (meaning boondocks). After a few years Geril went on to San Francisco to work as manager of the Pink Chateau restaurant in the Continental Motel. It may be significant that the Pink Chateau featured steak cooked on a “flaming dagger,” because flaming food would be a featured attraction at their next engagement in Orange CA. There the brothers firmly established their reputations for creating and running fine restaurants. [above: River House Motel, home of The Bundox]

In 1965 the Mullers helped establish Chez Cary, named for owner Cary Sinclair. The Chez, as it became known, set a model for an exquisitely posh and precious style of “continental” restaurant-ing not found much outside San Francisco and Los Angeles at that time. Orange’s residents may have been well off but they were not used to dressing up for dinner. A suit and tie was a requirement at Chez Cary where princely male waiters threatened to outdress their wealthy customers. [1967 cartoon of Geril wearing tuxedo]

The brothers decorated the restaurant lavishly with red velvet upholstered swivel chairs, crystal chandeliers, silver candlesticks, fine china, and old world decorative objects. Geril rounded up a talented kitchen and dining room staff. And, of course, there was quite a lot of tableside theatrics, with salads tossed and dressed, sauces poured, and meats and desserts flamed.

There was a ladies’ menu – i.e., one with no prices — since madame couldn’t possibly be the one paying the bill. And there were ladies’ footstools under the tables. Why the footstools? I don’t know, but they seemed to impress reviewers.

In 1966 the restaurant reviewer from the Long Beach newspaper observed that the bill for a dinner with his wife came to $18 plus tip. But, he wrote, it was the sort of restaurant where guests were not supposed to care what the total came to. He gave it his highest rating: AAAA. While the brothers were at Chez Cary, acting as managers and maitre d’s, the restaurant won four Holiday Magazine Awards, an accomplishment generally attributed to the Mullers.

The Mullers remained at Chez Cary until 1973 when they opened their own restaurant, Ambrosia, in a Newport Beach location formerly occupied by a restaurant called Karam’s [shown above]. Their ability to win awards continued at Ambrosia [below: cartoon of Geril with a Holiday award, 1975].

Ambrosia strongly resembled Chez Cary in luxurious decor and smooth operation. According to one report the restaurant “served so many flaming dishes that at one point it had to get special permits from the town’s fire department.”

Evidently patrons found Ambrosia very comfortable. Five-hour-long meals were not unheard of. By the 1980s the typical tab for two had risen to $150. [Above, Ambrosia in Newport Beach]

But, alas, ten years after opening Ambrosia the building’s owner threatened to double the rent. The brothers hatched a plan to relocate Ambrosia to an elaborate and expensive new restaurant complex they built in Costa Mesa called Le Premier. But Ambrosia didn’t succeed in its new location, closing a mere two years after opening in 1983. Geril bitterly observed that Costa Mesa was not a good location for a first-class restaurant, saying there weren’t “enough well-traveled people in Costa Mesa” and “Anything exclusive will not work there.”

Despite declaring bankruptcy, the Mullers did not give up the struggle to revive Ambrosia. Another restaurateur had adopted the name Ambrosia and the type style the brothers had used. They sued him, hoping to get back the name. Then they bought the restaurant in Newport Beach that had taken over their former location there – 30th Street Bistro — planning to open a new Ambrosia once they won the suit. Sadly for them, they did not succeed.

© Jan Whitaker, 2024

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November 26, 2024 · 12:11 pm

Goodbye, Alice

Last week Alice Brock of Alice’s Restaurant made her exit from Earth. I wrote a post about her long ago, but thought I’d add a bit more about her life, including more of her colorful quotations. She didn’t find running restaurants easy and made that clear in interviews and in her 1975 book My Life As a Restaurant. [photos by Jane McWhorter, from Alice’s book]

In addition to opening and running three different restaurants in Western Massachusetts over a number of years, she worked with a franchise that was to create nationwide string of restaurants, not surprisingly named Alice’s Restaurant. In 1969 announcements were made that the first four would be located in Boston, New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles. The goal for the first three years was 500! Just how many of them materialized is difficult to determine, but it’s certain the total fell far short.

Alice derived some income from her association with the enterprise. She was paid to be a menu consultant, promoter, and for “just being Alice.” She fulfilled the third goal when she quit the job less than a year after the launch. Once she sampled the food at the New York pilot location she declared, “The food was no good. It wasn’t honest. It was like the movie – a lot of gravy but no meat.”

She spoke her mind, as her quotations make clear.

About her first restaurant in Stockbridge MA:
“. . . a year after I had opened the restaurant, I dragged my body in through the door and freaked out. I felt that instead of owning it, it owned me. . . . I had a terrible urge to smash everything. I telephoned Eastern Airlines and booked myself on the midnight flight to Puerto Rico. I emptied the cash box, gave away all the food.”

Working in a restaurant kitchen:
“. . . if you open the kitchen door, it’s like the door to Hell – everyone’s screaming and crying and cursing, and pots are being slammed around, sweat is pouring off everyone, and it’s a hundred and thirty degrees.”

Running a restaurant:
“Running a restaurant isn’t really satisfying. In fact, next to running a hospital emergency ward, I think this is the worst thing you can do.”

© Jan Whitaker, 2024

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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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October 27, 2024 · 11:13 am

An early health food empire

It’s rare to find business documents from long-gone restaurants, but last weekend I stumbled upon two letters to investors from the Physical Culture Restaurant Company headed by fitness and health food advocate Bernarr Macfadden [shown above, age 42].

Macfadden was a body-builder, natural food proponent, and entrepreneur who decided to spread the gospel by opening inexpensive, largely plant-based restaurants at the turn of the last century. He attributed his strength and energy to this special diet.

The 1904 end-of-year letter reported that four new restaurants had been added to the ten already in business, and that they had done business totaling over $243,000, with a net gain of $2,637. Five restaurants had been judged failures and closed, four of them in NYC and one in Jersey City. He and his board of directors believed in rapidly shutting down locations that did not draw crowds. The letter blamed a “business depression” and the normally slow start of new locations for the smaller-than-hoped-for profits.

Although he wanted the restaurants to succeed, his personal income was not dependent upon them. Macfadden’s primary business was publishing periodicals, beginning in 1899 with Physical Culture, which discussed diet and health, followed by True Story, Liberty and then, increasingly, a large number of detective and romance magazines with titles such as Dream World, True Ghost Stories, and Photoplay. In addition he authored scores of books on fitness, sex, and health, and established a tabloid newspaper, The New York Evening Graphic. His publications earned him a fortune.

The total number of Macfadden restaurants open at the same time never seemed to exceed sixteen or so. The first ones were in New York City, of which there were nine at one point. Others were spread across the East and Midwest, including Boston, Newark, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis. There was also one in Toronto. [above: 1906 advertisement and 1906 restaurant at 106 E. 23rd, NYC]

In the 1907 letter to stockholders shown above he floated the idea that the restaurant holdings might grow to 40 or 50 units if stockholders invested in more stock. This never happened.

Despite the growing popularity of the restaurants, it seems that for Macfadden they served primarily as a way to spread the gospel of a healthful diet. He could not be described as a restaurateur. No doubt he helped to conceptualize the restaurants and make up the early menus, but he did not manage them except in his role as corporate executive.

Prices were low in his early restaurants. A bowl of thick pea soup was 1c, as was a bowl of steamed hominy or oats or barley. Whole wheat bread and butter, however, cost 5c as did creamed beans or whole wheat date pudding. He sold loaves of whole wheat bread for 10c. [shown above]

A Macfadden menu shown in a 1919 British book reveals a wealth of choices then but also higher prices that reflect post WWI inflation. Five cents now bought less. Mushrooms on Toast cost 20c, as did meat substitutes Nuttose and Protose. A Macaroni Cutlet or Lentil Croquettes cost 25c, while omelets such as Mushroom, Walnut and Pecan, Orange, or Protose and Jelly were 30c.

In 1931, at which point only three Physical Culture restaurants remained, Macfadden gave up his fortune, said to be $5,000,000, and created the Bernarr Macfadden Foundation. In a radio broadcast he said: “It is a source of indescribable relief to feel like a free man again. Too much money unwisely used makes people greedy and ungrateful, destroys the home, steals your happiness, enslaves, enthralls you, lowers your vitality, and enfeebles your will.”

Yet his personal life continued to be full of numerous wives, affairs, and lawsuits. And, despite being “freed” of his fortune in 1931, he continued to spend money lavishly, taking it from the treasury of the Physical Culture Publishing Company after he turned that into a public corporation. Stockholders accused him of using nearly a million dollars for his own private interests, which included failed attempts to become a presidential candidate, governor of Florida, or mayor of New York.

In 1931 the Foundation opened the first of several Depression-era penny restaurants, no doubt modeled on Macfadden’s first restaurant at the beginning of the century where most dishes cost only one or a few cents. The initial Depression “pennyteria,” run by the Foundation, was located in midtown NYC. Drawing a crowd of about 6,000 a day, it quickly became self-supporting.

At a penny restaurant run by the Foundation, one cent would buy any of the following: coffee, split pea soup, navy bean soup, lentil soup, green pea soup, creamed cod fish on toast, raisin coffee, honey milk tea, cabbage and carrot salad, steamed cracked wheat, hominy grits, raisins and prunes, bread pudding, whole wheat doughnuts, whole wheat bread, or whole wheat raisin bread.

As the operator of the 1930s restaurants, the Foundation proved more flexible than Macfadden about dietary standards, but evidently he still had some say over what was served. According to one account he agreed to let meat appear on the menu as well as dairy products. Meat took the form of beef cakes, beef stew, and chicken fricassee. But he stood firm about bread, insisting only whole wheat be served.

I found no trace of the Macfadden restaurants nor the Foundation’s penny restaurants in the 1940s. Macfadden largely faded from the headlines, dying in 1955 and leaving an estate valued at only $5,000.

© Jan Whitaker, 2024

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October 13, 2024 · 12:12 pm

Sell by smell

Through much of U.S. restaurant history, smells were a problem. Partly this was because of a lack of ventilation that caused the build up of odors of all kinds blended together in a miasma. Then there was also the ideal of the smell-free middle-class dining room where even delicious kitchen aromas were frowned upon. All this kept numbers of people out of restaurants.

Eventually this began to change. Better ventilation was achieved and restaurants learned to use good smells to their advantage, even as a kind of advertising. Today a restaurant owner might even hire an aroma consultant so that they may begin “profiting from pungency”!

Clearly that was exactly what a small Wisconsin drive-in did when the owners developed the “pizza-burger” following the end of World War II. Of course they didn’t hire a consultant, but their new type of hamburger was deliciously smelly in a way that attracted customers.

The sandwich was launched sometime around 1951 by veterans who had returned from the war, got a VA loan and opened a small roadside stand in Muskego WI selling burgers, hot dogs, and frozen custard. Soon it became a drive-in named Big 3 from which the partners launched the pizza-burger. Served on a toasted bun, it was made of ground pork and beef, cheese, chopped onion, and pizza sauce, the latter being the special, secret ingredient.

By 1956 franchises had been sold in every state in the U.S. As with Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken and “Chicken in the Rough,” franchisees bought the right to advertise with the product’s logo – the boy with the freaky nose – and a guarantee that the company would not license competing sellers within a delineated territory. It was not long before the inventors found food producers who bought rights to sell the pizza sauce and the frozen patties, greatly simplifying production for drive-in operators. [above: 1956 advertisement, Washington PA — note “Not a Gimmick”]

Despite the licensing, however, I have no doubt that many eating places around the country that claimed to offer pizza-burgers were not authorized and used their own guesswork recipes. One that I saw incorporated black olives.

The basic sandwich was so popular with teens that a similar one was soon adopted by school cafeterias, although recipes may have varied – greatly. For example, one I found used ground bologna and beef, and substituted spaghetti sauce for the carefully spiced pizza sauce.

The Muskego drive-in, later turned into a full-scale restaurant, is gone. But as of 2004 when the founder’s son was interviewed there were still a couple of places producing pizza-burgers under franchise.

Remarkably, the pizza-burger has been memorialized with a roadside marker.

© Jan Whitaker, 2024

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