July 24, 2008 · 4:22 pm

Roadside restaurants: tea shops

Tea shops were among the earliest restaurants that built their business around customers arriving by car. In the densely populated Northeast in particular, roadways were thick with the small eating places which specialized in lunches and afternoon teas for vacationers. They also made up box lunches for automobile parties and rented out rooms to overnight guests. In hot weather many offered an amenity now vanished, sleeping porches. People who traveled by car in those days tended to be well-off. City tea rooms had already established an upscale cachet and this association no doubt served the roadside places well.

One of the first roadside tea shops was the Tiffin Shop in White Plains, New York, which was in business by 1906. A story in Town and Country magazine titled “A Tiffin Shop for Motorists” noted it featured “cool green tints and Japanese prints, mission furniture, nasturtiums on the tables, a tinkly wind-harp,” as well as sandwiches, salads and “cake served on an embroidered doily.”

MAAuntTempy's3 (2)Most of the tea rooms and shops in outlying areas were run by women in their own homes. Letters to advice columns such as the following from “Flora” in 1909 show how eager many were to earn money using their housewifely skills: “I am thinking of starting a wayside inn or tearoom for ‘autoists’ this summer, and would ask you to give me some ideas if you will. I have thought it best to serve some ‘specialties.’ We have a grand empty front room and a beautiful, wide, grassy front yard for resting. Any suggestions as to furnishing room, menu, and way of serving would be a great help.” Included in the column’s advice was to use the finest ingredients and hang a sign featuring a teakettle.

© Jan Whitaker, 2008

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July 22, 2008 · 1:21 pm

Tipping in restaurants

Until I found this card I was convinced that the custom of waiters disclosing their first name started in the 1970s. The Village Barn was a Greenwich Village restaurant and night club. I’d guess this card dates from the 1950s. Many people dislike having servers tell them their names because they feel it’s a smarmy way to wangle a bigger tip.

The first mention of tips (originally known as fees or douceurs) I’ve found was in 1840: “The renumeration [sic] of the eating-house waiter, though based on the voluntary system, is yet a fixed one, like a physician’s fee. His honorarium is the moderate sum of one penny.” Keep in mind that an average dinner at this time usually cost 25 to 50 cents.

Today we pretty much accept tipping as an inevitable part of eating out but that wasn’t always so. One hundred years ago there were many people who wanted to eradicate tipping, which had only become commonplace around 1890. They were convinced the custom was a foreign one that didn’t belong in a democratic society. They felt it created an unhealthy master-servant relationship in which the server either groveled or tried to manipulate the customer.

One of the things critics hated most were snooty waiters in upscale restaurants who made guests anxious by subtly hinting they were low-class pretenders who didn’t belong in a fine restaurant. This worked like a charm with insecure folks who compensated by leaving a generous tip to prove they were legit.

More recently, other waiters revealed that the snooty method produces better tips than the friendly approach. Maybe servers should say, “Hello, my name is . . . none of your business.”

© Jan Whitaker, 2008

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July 21, 2008 · 2:11 pm

Rewriting restaurant history

In this 1965 guide to places to eat in Colorado, the following notice appeared for the tiny town of Fairplay, north of Denver: “Fairplay Hotel Miner’s Grub Shack. Serve yourself at the Miner’s Grub Shack in the dining area of historic Fairplay Hotel. Fifteen feet of delicious food. Eat as much as you want. Fixin’s for young’uns.”

Well, sure, that’s where old-timey miners ate, right? In a grub shack. After all they were unsophisticated fellers who just wanted chow and lots of it. Actually that idea might better apply to 1965, when restaurants in outlying areas such as the Fairplay Hotel’s loaded up their all-you-can-eat buffets with warmed-up trays of frozen prepared foods which were good enough for vacationers mainly interested in getting the children fed without too much fuss.

The diners of 1965 were no doubt flattered to think they lived in the most progressive of times, at a much higher standard than in mining days. But could the Fairplay Hotel of 1965 have competed with the Christmas feast the same hotel presented to miners in 1888? Included in the array of dishes served that day were blue points, salmon with parsley sauce, curried duck, quail smothered in claret sauce, plum pudding, and imported sherry. I’d call that quite an upgrade from chicken legs and gelatin salad!

© Jan Whitaker, 2008

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July 20, 2008 · 4:43 pm

Basic fare: ham sandwiches

Because cured ham keeps for months at room temperature, it was always on hand in colonial and early American taverns. At any time of day and much of the night a hungry person could get the host to slice off a “cold cut” of ham. Ham and eggs was such a popular dish in eating places everywhere and at all times that many people have nominated it as America’s national dish.

Ham sandwiches were on tap at porter houses and went well with the dark brew as well as with ale (but what didn’t in those heavy-drinking days?). At New York’s Ring of Bells, host John Spencer advertised in 1807 that he furnished first-rate liquors, soups, and “Sandwiches, Anchovies and Relishes of every description.” Later many drinking places put out ham sandwiches as part of their free lunch spread.

Serve-yourself lunch counters of the 1880s were loaded with ham sandwiches, beef sandwiches, and pies. Customers grabbed what they wanted, often ate standing, and washed it all down with water or a hot beverage. At non-alcoholic dairy lunch bars, which featured fresh milk, coffee, and simple dishes such as beans, ham sandwiches cost 5 cents apiece. Wyman’s Sandwich Depot was famous throughout Boston for hefty sandwiches but a competitor in the 1890s claimed his sandwiches, on rolls 7 inches long and 5 inches wide, were larger. Also up and coming at the time were the lunch wagons that rolled onto city streets at night, vanishing in the daytime. They too specialized in ham sandwiches. But signs of change were on the horizon. Another lunch wagon specialty was the hamburger sandwich, destined eventually to trim the humble snack of ham between bread down to size.

© Jan Whitaker, 2008

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July 19, 2008 · 5:36 pm

America’s first restaurant

It’s always risky to declare that anything is a first. In some ways Julien’s Restorator, newly opened in July of 1793, may have been similar to the taverns that had been in business in Boston for ages. Almost any kind of eating place at this time would have taken in boarders who not only regularly ate their meals on the premises but slept there as well.

What set Julien’s apart was that he modeled his restorator on the restaurants of Paris. Like them, he emphasized the healthful attributes of his dishes (intended to restore health — thus “restorator” and the French “restaurant”), presented diners with a written menu from which they could choose, and charged them only for what they ordered rather than following the prevailing custom of providing a buffet-type meal at a set price. The newspaper advertisement of which this is a part states that he will furnish soups, broths, pastry, beef, bacon, poultry, wines, and cordials. He later added oysters, green turtle soup, and coffee.

Julien’s full name was Jean Gilbert Julien and he had previously worked as a private cook. At the bottom of the advertisement he states he was “Late Steward to the Honorable Monsieur Letombe, Consul of the French Republic.” He was successful at the Leverett’s Lane site and soon moved up to a substantial house on Milk Street where he remained in business until his untimely death in 1805, whereupon his widow Hannah ran the restaurant for ten years and then sold it to another Frenchman.

© Jan Whitaker, 2008

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July 17, 2008 · 6:45 pm

Joel’s bohemian refreshery

Joel Rinaldo’s was one of the all-night eating and drinking places that thrived around Times Square in New York before the First World War. “Refreshery” was an unusual term that probably related more to drinking than to eating since saloon owners often referred to their offerings as “refreshments.”

Exactly when Joel’s opened is unclear but chances are it was in the late 1890s. The real estate parcel at 206 West 41st Street that became Joel’s was part of his father’s estate when he died in 1895.

Looking at these 1910-ish postcards of Joel’s you might be misled into thinking it was an elegant after-theatre spot. It attracted all kinds of late-night visitors but was mainly famous as a hangout for musicians, artists, writers, heavy drinkers, “hop-heads,” and Mexican revolutionaries. In 1910 the restaurant was the headquarters of the Mexican Liberal Party opposed to the presidency of General Porfirio Diaz. The short story writer O. Henry was a regular also, though he may have spent more time drinking in the first-floor bar than eating in the café on the second floor. It is likely that El Refugio, a café described in O. Henry’s short story “The Gold That Glittered,” was based on Joel’s.

One of the most popular dishes at Joel’s was chili con carne, a dish not easily found in New York in the early 20th century. He also served tamales and “frijoles colorado.” In addition to Mexican dishes, Joel concocted a drink that became famous – or, more likely, notorious — called a Blue Moon. Only one to a customer but that was enough reportedly to “keep the patron pleasantly mellow the rest of the evening.”

Joel’s walls were filled with drawings, which can be seen on in the image above. Some were by caricaturist Carlo de Fornaro who spent time in jail after being successfully sued by a Mexican official in NY courts for libelous statements Fornaro made in his book, Diaz, Czar of Mexico. Joel, born in NYC around 1870, also had intellectual ambitions, was attracted to psychology and philosophy, and wrote an obscure treatise against Darwin’s account of evolution called Rinaldo’s Polygeneric Theory.

Joel took a paternalistic role toward many of his patrons, keeping prices low and announcing on a gilt sign that touring actors and musicians (he was near the Metropolitan Opera House) could send him their money and he would keep it safe for them. It is said that many took him up on the offer. Perhaps his motive for keeping a bank was to insure that eventually he would get paid, to offset all the bad checks he took from his erratic patrons.

The interesting thing about bohemian places like Joel’s was how they loosened up a middle class still under the spell of Victorian correctness. After a few hours in a heady atmosphere like this and they’d be talking to strangers (without even being introduced!), singing out loud, and ordering drinks all around.

Joel’s closed in 1925, a casualty of Prohibition.

© Jan Whitaker, 2008

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