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

12 Comments

Filed under patrons, popular restaurants, restaurant issues

Tagged as , , ,

June 27, 2023 · 10:44 am

On the town with O. O. McIntyre

When he died in 1938 Oscar Odd McIntyre – also known as Double O McIntyre or simply Odd – was the country’s highest paid, most widely read columnist. Not only did he make New York City, particularly Broadway, familiar to newspaper readers across America, but he also informed them of the attractions of the city’s restaurants.

Considering that his success brought him a princely income, a Park Avenue address, a custom wardrobe by Lanvin, trips to Paris, and a chauffeured Rolls Royce, his writing conveyed a humble perspective. It left the impression that he was a regular small-town guy and that life in New York, when deconstructed, was less glamorous than it might seem at first, yet still captivating.

From the start of his newspaper career in Ohio he aimed at New York. As he put it, “When I was ‘the’ reporter on the daily in a small Ohio town reporting how John Hawkins spent the day in town and how Mrs. John Spivens Tuesdayed in Addison I was always dumb with admiration when I came across a guest at the Park Central Hotel who had the magic letters ‘N. Y.’ after his name.” In 1912 he landed a job as associate editor of a magazine in New York and made his big move.

His column’s target readers were, in fact, John Hawkins and Mrs. Spivens, and he relied heavily on Ohio newspapers to buy his early columns. He assumed that, like him, readers would proclaim “This is the life!” after a visit to a café in New York such as Bustanoby’s Beaux Arts. And that, like him, they would have a fascination as well with the other side of town, exemplified by the liveliness of Hester Street and the grittiness of the Bowery. He presented the city’s dark side in scenes such as one where he witnessed a patron at a nearby table in a “semi-respectable” restaurant inject morphine into his arm and then calmly resume reading his newspaper.

He revealed in a number of stories he wrote for various publications that he had a breakdown shortly after coming to New York to work for a magazine that failed three months later. He couldn’t find another job, and spent a year without leaving his sick room. He also suffered from hypochondria, claustrophobia, and agoraphobia, and depended upon his wife Maybelle to handle the business end of his writing. After seven years in which he self-syndicated, she took over and successfully negotiated a contract with a major syndicator for twice what he had been getting.

His columns were built on the notion that he spent time strolling the sidewalks of New York, but some critics suggested he actually viewed the sidewalks from the back of his limo. Another version claimed he was a recluse who rarely left his apartment and who wrote columns from memory. I’ve begun to wonder if it was Maybelle who rambled the city collecting material for him.

Whatever was the case, he entranced the nation with his observations. When they visited New York for the first time, even readers from small towns might feel they already knew the city because of what he wrote. The columnist who succeeded him recalled that when his outlander cousin came to NY, he said that because of O. O.’s columns he would need no guidance. He declared: “I’m starting at the Battery tomorrow morning, and I’ll have grilled pigs’ feet and German beer at Lüchow’s [shown above]. I’ll just glance in at Fraunces’ Tavern, but I might take a snack at the Brevoort or the Lafayette, and maybe get up to Louis & Armand’s in time for chicken Tetrazzini or a steak at Sardi’s.”

In his columns O. O. not only painted fascinating scenes of fine living in New York, but also popped bubbles about its glamor. In a similar vein he reminisced about the simple life in his old home in Gallipolis OH, but never returned there even for a short visit. He presented charming portraits of Greenwich Village, but also produced a column about its fake Bohemians and artistic pretenders. He acknowledged that there were some genuine artists living there too, adding, “they are not on display nightly in the Purple Pup, Mauve Moon and Cerise Cat restaurants.” [He did not include the Pepper Pot, shown above, but might have.]

He was also critical of New York night clubs, which he called sucker joints, as well as places with trick names such as the ones he ran into on a Los Angeles visit – the Fly Inn, Monkey Den, Hamtree, Mammy’s Shack, Quick and Dirty, and Hamburger Hank’s.

Although he frequented New York’s top restaurants, he was no gourmet. He wanted to consume the high life, but it seems mainly for its aura of princeliness rather than its culinary excellence. Although the McIntyres had a French cook, his favorite meal was said to be steak, potatoes, and chocolate cake.

His personal food preferences didn’t keep him from feeling qualified to identify the world’s best restaurants. In 1931 he named six, with The Colony at the top, then New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel (where he and Maybelle lived for 13 years), three in Paris: the Ritz, Foyot’s, and the Tour d’Argent, and Horcher’s in Berlin.”

He hailed New York as “the Epicurean center of America,” but he believed it was non-New Yorkers who kept the elite restaurants in business, while the typical New Yorker followed “the eat-and-run plan of gastronomics.” So, for out-of-town visitors, he recommended the following dishes, claiming few New Yorkers even knew of them. They included caviar on a “pancake” at the Colony; noisette of venison, Grand Veneur at the Crillon; French pastry at Voisin’s; and for those preferring an unpretentious meal, doughnuts and malted milk at Liggett’s and hamburgers with chopped onions at the Owl lunch in Herald Square.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

14 Comments

Filed under elite restaurants, food, patrons

Tagged as , , ,

June 13, 2023 · 10:25 am

Caves, caverns, and grottos

I would have said that restaurants made to resemble caves represented a proprietor’s desperate attempt to rescue a windowless, underground space. Except . . . many restaurants of the early 20th century, when these sorts of restaurants became popular, had few or no windows yet they were not rigged up to resemble caves.

But it seems that the American public was discovering a fascination with caves and cave men in the early decades of the 20th century. In 1915 the Peter Pan, in the college town of Eugene OR, did seem to appeal to wannabe cave men, and possibly cave women too.

Perhaps the cave restaurants were spiritually related to beefsteak dungeons of a similar era where men sat on crates and ate steaks with their claws, er, hands.

I suspect another reason that cave-themed restaurants and clubs appeared in the teens was as a way to attract patrons during a time when drinking was becoming less popular. Prohibition of alcohol was not yet national law but many localities had banned it.

Or, if I wanted to get psychoanalytical about it, I might think that locating these night-clubby spots underground revealed a degree of shame in a culture once ruled by Puritanism.

Close to the turn of the century two hotels already had cave-like grottos built underground. In 1900 architect W. E. Loyer of Philadelphia designed a grotto for the Hotel Rudolph in Atlantic City. Five years later his grotto for a Boston hotel, the Revere House, opened. Like the Rudolph, it featured an all-women orchestra. According to Revere House advertising, light bulbs in the grotto sparkled “like jewels in an Aladin [sic] cave” where dining was “both weird and entrancing.” Even in August, cool breezes were said to “sweep across the room” where its “jagged sides” resembled “what might be found in some large underground cavern.”

Other hotels with caves and grottos for dining and entertainment in the teens and 1920s included the Ambassador in Atlantic City with its underground Neptune and Dolphin Grills, the latter filled with marble, cut glass, sea-green furniture, fish nets, life belts, shells, and more.

The Grunewald in New Orleans [shown here], the Mt. Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods NH, and the Redwoods Hotel in Grants Pass OR carried on the cave tradition.

New York City was a little short on cave/grotto restaurants but it did at least have one. According to The Grotto’s advertising it was a “romantic cave.”

Of course there were also eating stations in genuine caves designated as National Parks. I am hesitant to refer to some of their facilities as restaurants – particularly that of Carlsbad Caverns with its accommodations for 1,000 lunchers at a time, pictured here ca. 1962.

The whole idea of a cave-themed restaurant seems strange enough to me that I might have imagined they went out of fashion long ago. But of course they did not, and undoubtedly can be found today. In 1928 columnist O. O. McIntyre declared that Los Angeles was the foremost city for “stunt cafes and trick eating places . . . built in every fantastical and baroque shape imaginable.” However, since then cave-like eateries, though always sparse, showed up in a variety of cities and towns.

In the early 1930s, for instance, Binghamton NY had a restaurant called The Barn, which encompassed a Shell Room and a Chinese Grotto. The Grotto, whose special effects were the creation of its originator, David Stewart, offered the only Chinese food in Binghamton — accompanied by organ playing. I was surprised to discover that the restaurant’s cooking was applauded by a number of 1940s guidebooks.

The 1960s and 1970s saw restaurants such as The Cave in Cleveland which declared itself “a cave to end all caves.” An article revealed that its conversion from a pool hall involved the application of 16 tons of gray plaster accompanied by a poured Polyrock floor speckled with gold. The total effect, said the account, was “somewhat eerie and fascinating.”

In Fort Lauderdale FL, The Caves restaurant was designed to encourage diners to “journey to prehistoric days via the stone-age decor and hearty feasting.” But, they were assured, they would be made comfortable with “luxurious pillows” and “soft lighting,” two things seriously lacking in nature’s version.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

7 Comments

Filed under alternative restaurants, atmosphere, decor, Offbeat places, theme restaurants

May 28, 2023 · 12:50 pm

Image gallery: restaurant matchcovers

Colorful matchbooks advertising restaurants became popular in the 1930s and remained commonplace into the 1950s. Every time customers lit a match they were reminded of the restaurant. As a catalog of the Match Corporation of America put it in referring to matchbooks with 20 matches: “20 Lights, 20 Reader-exposures . . . twice that if inside printing is used.”

Usually matchcover collectors remove matches from their covers, but the exceptions are the feature matchbooks. In that case, the printed matches are as much of an attraction as the covers, as the above examples show.

Many feature matchbooks were a product of the Lion Match Co. in Philadelphia. The company also made contour matchcovers which incorporate die cuts as shown here.

This batch shows the simple type of matchcover. The two taller ones are salesman’s samples — which are considered worthless by serious collectors. However, I value them just as highly as others because I am primarily interested in graphics.

These full-length matchcovers were perfect for horizontal restaurants, particularly for diners and Western roadside places.

Stock matchcovers such as these would have cost restaurant proprietors less since they involved no original artwork on the part of the manufacturer. It’s likely that they were used mainly by cafes and basic eateries. Though I know nothing about The Patio in St. Louis, I somehow doubt that waiters there wore tuxedos.

While I was investigating the subject of restaurant matches, I happened upon an amusing incident involving a restaurant’s matchcover design and the Secret Service. In 1977, shortly after the opening of George’s-on-Washington, a Houston TX barbecue place, the Secret Service showed up and confiscated 15,000 matchbooks bearing an image similar to that on the $1 bill. The grounds were that they violated federal counterfeiting laws. However when the owners challenged the seizure in court a U.S. District Judge ruled that the logo did not violate federal law and ordered the matches returned.

In the 1980s numerous American match-producers, which had been doing less and less business with restaurants and in general, failed. One exception was Universal Match that did a big business with Las Vegas hotels and eating places.

Although some restaurants use matchbooks today, designs are usually simple and (sigh) tasteful. Michael Greer, a home decorator who published a 1962 book called Inside Design, would be relieved. He was very particular about small items around the house such as a pink toothbrush in a fancy gold bathroom or an “antagonistically colored soap.” And he laid down the following rule regarding matchbooks: “Restaurant matchbooks are name droppy to leave around if the restaurant is elegant or in another country, demeaning if it is not.” For your own good, do be careful!

If you are interested in viewing more restaurant matchcovers, you might find this site’s 11,278 examples entertaining.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

5 Comments

Filed under restaurant advertising

Tagged as , ,

May 15, 2023 · 10:11 am

Kibbitz & Nosh, the book

Today is launch day for Kibbitz & Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, a book of black and white photography by Marcia Halperin. In the 1970s she began dropping by Dubrow’s on King’s Highway in Brooklyn and in Manhattan’s garment district. The cafeterias from what may seem like a long-gone past were as unpretentious as their customers.

The images she captured are reminiscent of street photography at its best, showing aspects of everyday life in the city. The book also includes essays by playwright Donald Margulies and Deborah Dash Moore, historian of Jewish-American life, including Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (2017).

There is an interview podcast with Halperin by Street Photography Magazine, and a selection of her photographs from the book can be viewed at the Edward Hopper House Museum in Nyack, NY, until June 25.

Kibbitz & Nosh is available from independent booksellers, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, as well as its publisher, Cornell University Press.

UPDATE of coming events

Signup for June 8 at Launch Photobooks – In Person

Signup for June 11 at Nyack Library — In Person

Sign up for June 29 at Yiddish Book Center – Virtual

4 Comments

Filed under cafeterias, patrons, popular restaurants

Tagged as

May 14, 2023 · 11:55 am

Glamming in Booth One

Before non-stop coast-to-coast air travel became common, actors and performers relied on the railroad to cover long distances. Usually this involved changing trains in Chicago. Arriving there, weary celebrities were more than happy to be scooped up and whooshed off for lunch or dinner at the Pump Room.

Top celebrities were escorted to Booth One, a cushy white leather nest where their job was to field calls from gossip columnists and smile as the flashbulbs went off. Their lunch may have been on the house, but they earned it. [It’s likely Judy Garland is talking with a columnist in the above Life magazine photo, 1943] Of course both the stars and the restaurant got publicity out of the deal.

The Pump Room stood out as a notable publicity mill in part because it was in the middle of the country. On the coasts there were plenty of such venues – the Stork Club and El Morocco in New York, and Chasen’s and Romanoff’s in Los Angeles to name but a few.

But the Pump Room had a vibe all its own. [Life magazine photo showing a very crowded room, 1943]

In addition to being swanky — with dark blue walls, white leather upholstery and crystal chandeliers — and well connected to the gossip pipeline, the Pump Room drew attention for its culinary burlesque shows featuring costumed staff, flames, and choreography. Waiters – all white men – wore scarlet jackets and black satin knee pants, while the “coffee boys” – all young black men – wore emerald green or white uniforms with giant ostrich plumes seeming to spring from their foreheads. [see grotesque caricature shown below, 1957] There were also “curry boys” dressed in gold. Food was served from wagons except for that skewered on flaming swords.

The coffee servers took it upon themselves to compete in the art of coffee pouring. Competition involved seeing how far they could hold the pot and still manage to pour the coffee neatly into the cups. Management did not approve and stopped the contest, but not before the winner set a record of 5 feet. He said customers asked him to do it. Not unbelievable since it was, after all, in keeping with the spirit of the place. According to one observer, customers watching servers with flaming swords make their entrance secretly hoped “the adroit waiter will slip and ignite one of the highly combustible hats being worn this season.” This never happened.

In 1943, Life magazine visited the Pump Room, photographing a number of spectacular scenes, some of which were undoubtedly contrived for the sake of the story. The crowning photo was certainly that of the procession of waiters holding flaming swords. A flaming-sword dinner cost $3.50 at the time of the story, going up to $4.50 or $5.00 by 1949 according to the menu shown below.

The Pump Room emblemized the sardonic humor of its creator, Ernie Byfield, who also owned its home, the Ambassador East Hotel. Its 1938 creation may have been a desperation attempt to survive during the Depression, but Byfield had long been in the habit of befriending show business stars back when he headed the Sherman Hotel. In the Sherman’s night clubby College Inn, he had entertained actors, musicians, and others on “theatrical nights.” Through the years Byfield made friends with an extensive roster of Hollywood stars that included James Cagney, Bette Davis, and William Powell in the 1930s and Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and a long list of others in earlier times.

Ernie Byfield’s death in 1950 seemed to mark the beginning of a long decline. The Ambassador East and the two other hotels Byfield owned changed hands repeatedly while the Pump Room sagged. A few months after Byfield died, columnist Lucius Beebe noted in a Holiday magazine story that Ernie had always said, “I don’t want grim gourmets around my place. I want laughing eaters.” Beebe’s story made it clear that the Pump Room was meant to be amusing, even moderately ridiculous. Without its creator at the helm, it became difficult to set the tone while maintaining quality.

In 1962 a reviewer for the Michelin Guide visited the Pump Room and, according to a devastating Life magazine account, had a miserable dinner described as deviled turkey breast accompanied by “canned peas and what looked exactly like potato chips.” Equally horrid, Life reported, was the incompetent waiter who recommended a red wine that “not only foamed but tasted as though it were composed of a second-grade detergent.” Learning of the story, an Ambassador Hotel executive dug through that day’s food checks and found, according to a rapidly produced account in a Chicago newspaper, that the reviewer and his Life magazine companion (the story’s author) had each consumed a cocktail and then shared two bottles of wine. He also insisted that the turkey steak on the menu was never served with anything but grilled sweet potatoes and wild rice.

But the damage was done and the restaurant’s reputation continued to crumble. Not much after the Michelin bomb dropped, Irv “Kup” Kupcinet, its number one gossip columnist, who had created a version of the Pump Room in his own dining room, admitted that it wasn’t what it used to be. Cross-country airplane flights were becoming commonplace, eliminating Chicago stopovers and reducing the flow of celebrities into town. Even though the room was remodeled in the mid-sixties by new managers, it was unable to recapture the past glory.

Although loyal Chicagoans continued to support it, the Pump Room closed in 1976, after some years of low ratings and, it was said, grease-spotted menus and chipped glassware. Everything was auctioned, included Booth One. Then came a new owner, Rich Melman, of the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant group which included Jonathan Livingston Seafood, Lawrence of Oregano, and others. He remodeled it in glamorous fashion and ran it for 22 years. After that it had various owners, including Melman once more who ran it as Booth One.

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

3 Comments

Filed under atmosphere, decor, elite restaurants, Offbeat places, uniforms & costumes, waiters/waitresses/servers

May 1, 2023 · 10:13 am

A note

After reading several stories about AI-generated writing today, I decided to add this note to my page titled “My Project.”

My blog is written entirely by a human, me, and is meant for human readers, you. AI bots are not welcome. It is based on books and articles written by humans. I do not merely try to report facts accurately. I also evaluate and interpret facts, opinions, errors, lies, motives, and all the other messy aspects involved in human communication. Plus, being human, I have my own point of view shaped by my experiences, my values, and my blindspots. Welcome, humans!

[painting by Juan Gris, 1917]

14 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

April 30, 2023 · 12:46 pm

The dessert course

Not only have American’s favorite desserts changed over the course of history, but so has the meaning of the word dessert as used on menus.

In a series of articles in 1879, Lorenzo Delmonico explained the meaning of courses as presented in a proper French dinner. For a start, he explained, “when people believe that each dish served separately is a course in itself they have got the whole matter dreadfully mixed up.” There were only three courses, he stated. The first two comprised the “whole dinner” and the third, he wrote, “contains only the dessert.” Just how many dishes were presented in each course was entirely up to the host.

Sounds simple, but here’s where it gets confusing: the second course is accompanied by “Entremets” that are “the smaller dishes of the second course, including such puddings and pastries as may be served . . .” The third course – Dessert — comes last and “consists of ices, fruits, nuts, coffee, etc.” Today, we would consider the Entremets as Dessert.

Under Charles Ranhofer, Delmonico’s chef for most of the years from 1862 to 1896, Sweet Entremets continued to be presented with the Roast course, followed by Desserts as laid out by Lorenzo. At Delmonico’s Beaver Street location in 1899, for instance, an a la carte menu listed Entremets consisting of such things as Charlotte Russe, Peach Pie, and puddings, while Desserts included the subheadings Fancy Creams, Creams, Water Ices, Sorbets, Fresh Fruit, and Cheese.

Not surprisingly, cheap eating places had completely done away with courses decades earlier. For instance, at Milliken’s Beefsteak & Coffee Room in New York in 1849, there were only two categories: Dinner (i.e., meat) and Dessert. Dessert consisted of a choice of one custard and seven pies — Cocoa Nut, Plum, Mince, Peach, Apple, Indian, and Rice.

But even in far-off San Francisco end-of-meal choices reflected something like a formal menu, but with a different organization. In 1887, the ever-busy Royal Dining Saloon presented five categories of sweets in this order: Fruit, Puddings, Pies, Cakes – and then Desserts! Desserts included Peaches and Cream, Cranberry Sauce, Apple Sauce, New Comb Honey, Hot Mince Pie, various stewed and baked fruits, and Ice Cream. So, Mince Pie was a Dessert but other Pies were not?

Across the land there were other logic-defying variations. But probably no one really cared about logic. They saw what they wanted, ordered it, and that was that.

Overall, it would be cheap eateries such as Milliken’s that prefigured a 20th-century in which all the end-of-meal categories would be boiled down into one: Desserts. Not only that – the offerings in that category at popular eateries, as at Milliken’s, would remain primarily Pie and Pudding for decades.

But it seems that women preferred cake. As more unescorted women patronized restaurants in the 20th century, and tea rooms catering especially to them opened, this difference in their dessert preferences made itself known. Tea rooms began to specialize in cakes, selling them whole to take away as well as portioned for meals. For example, a pop-up Suffrage kitchen opened in Chicago’s Loop in 1914 offered a 35-cent lunch of salad, sandwich, and beverage, plus a dessert of cake and ice cream for an extra 15 cents. A notice read, “if the luncheon is served to men pie a la mode.”

Of course tea rooms did serve pie, and other desserts too, but it is striking that many lunchroom menus did not include cake. Perhaps for the average eating place layer cake was too difficult to frost, slice, or keep moist when portioned in advance. My sense is that it was also considered a more refined dessert suited to female tastes, whereas pie was an older, heartier, basic food.

Tea room proprietors were well aware of women’s attraction to cake. As Fanny Evans of Mary Elizabeth’s in New York said in 1923, her tea room knew how to cater to American women’s love of unusual salads, creamed chicken, croquettes, and “delicious home-made cakes.” In 1933 the proprietor of the Ipswich Tea House in Massachusetts, a graduate of Miss [Fannie] Farmer’s School of Cooking, prepared special menus titled “A Meal for Men” and “A Ladies Luncheon.” The men’s meal ended with Ice Cream Pie and the women’s finished with Meringue Cake.

In the Depression Americans turned to desserts to cheer themselves up. According to a 1932 NYT story “the American’s Real Desire Is More Dessert,” driven by a wish for glamor, romance, and “the desire for escape from the standardization of the machine age.” Plus desserts yielded high profits. Schrafft’s was way ahead of the game. As early as 1929, the 181 Broadway location in New York offered 34 different desserts!

After WWII, returning soldiers as well as civilians were hungrier than ever for desserts. A 1946 manual advised restaurateurs that a winning menu formula was to have as many desserts as entrees, 7 to 9, but no more than 4 green vegetables.

In the average eating places, apple pie was crowned the favorite American dessert until the 1970s, while layer cakes tended to vanish from the restaurant scene. But pie would not do for luxury diners. As demonstrated on a 1951 menu from Ciro’s in Hollywood, expensive restaurants gravitated to less common, fancier desserts such as Parfaits, Crepes Suzettes, and Baked Alaska. Dessert trays and carts bearing French pastries also came into use, while a flaming dessert was always a possibility worth considering.

In 1996 a National Restaurant Association survey of restaurants found that the most popular desserts were cheesecake and pie. That is, cheesecake of the sort most commonly served today, made with cream cheese rather than cottage cheese. The latter was a very old sweet dish dating back to the early 1800s or earlier. Unlike some other factory-made desserts, cheesecake has the advantage of being regarded as genuine even when it comes frozen in a box. I am somewhat skeptical about this survey, though. How could it be possible that chocolate desserts weren’t mentioned when they had been advancing rapidly in popularity since the 1970s?

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

3 Comments

Filed under food, menus, restaurant customs, tea shops

Tagged as , , , ,

April 16, 2023 · 12:18 pm

In their own words

I’ve collected numerous provocative comments about restaurants over time. Most of the following samples are excerpts from diaries, others from newspaper interviews. I selected them mostly because they were informative about restaurant conditions and practices at various times in the past, as well as patrons’ experiences.

There are some recurring themes. A number of the comments reveal women’s opinions of restaurants and their roles in them. Others show how unfavorably foreign travelers tended to view American eating places during the 19th century. Several comments reveal the high prices and deteriorated conditions that prevailed in the South during the Civil War.

1825, a Boston portrait engraver: “In the evening, at 8 P.M. we called on Mr. Allston at Rouillard’s Restorator. Found him at dinner; we sent up our letters . . . ; after waiting a few minutes Mr. Allston entered the parlour, and received us very cordially. He took us up to his dining room (quite private) and invited us to partake of his wine and cigars.”

1850, daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, in Cooperstown: “Then, again, there are seven taverns in our village, four of them on quite a large scale. As for the eating-houses – independently of the taverns – their number is quite humiliating; it looks as though we must needs be a very gormandizing people: there are some dozen of them – Lunches, Recesses, Restaurants, etc., or whatever else they may be called . . .”

1861, a Confederate clerk, in Richmond VA: “Mr. Tyler then invited me to join him at breakfast at a neighboring restaurant, where we had each a loaf of bread, a cup of coffee with milk (but brown sugar), and three eggs. The bill was sixteen dollars!”

1861, an Irishman visiting Montgomery AL: “Then, as to food – nothing could be had in the hotel – but one of the waiters led us to a restaurant, where we selected from a choice bill of fare, which contained, I think, as many odd dishes as ever I saw, some unknown fishes, oyster-plants, ‘possums, racoons, frogs, and other delicacies, and, eschewing toads and the like, really made a good meal off dirty plates on a vile table-cloth . . .”

1861, and then the Irishman visited Washington: “I dined at a restaurant kept by one Boulanger, a Frenchman, who utilised the swarms of flies infesting his premises by combining masses of them with his soup and made dishes.” [To be fair, Joseph Boulanger was in ill health and had been trying to sell his restaurant for a while when the visitor from Ireland came along.]

1864, a visitor to New Orleans: “Charges for living were most exorbitant; a simple breakfast at a restaurant, one dollar; a frugal dinner, two dollars; two small slices of dry toast, fifteen cents; the same for a cup of tea or coffee; ten cents for ice and butter; sixty cents for one small mutton chop. The simplest fare cost six dollars a day.”

1883, a touring Englishman in San Francisco: “After dressing, we all went to the ‘Poodle Dog’ restaurant to dinner. Here my sister Sarah behaved in an extraordinary way, affecting a morality which appeared to me immoral, and questioning the propriety of dining at this place.”

1893, a woman attending the Chicago World’s Fair: “Then we went to Rector’s Marine Restaurant [shown here], and on its breezy gallery had the swellest sort of little dinner. (The first glimpse of the menu made me faint. All the salads were .60 & .75, the fish all .60 & .75, relishes .25 & .30, vegetables .30 & .40, ice cream .25 . . .)”

1921, a European woman visiting New York: “We ordered some steak for our dinner, and when the waiter brought enough for a school treat I exclaimed, and he said, ‘In Broadway they serve the dishes — here we serve the food!’ They did indeed; even sharing it with a starving cat I couldn’t get through with it. The restaurant was rather a good one and very clean. I reproached Kenneth for not having taken me somewhere with more local color. I hate being treated as a Bourgeoise.”

1951, a male peace activist traveling across the country: “Another group, two whites and a Negro, stopped for coffee at a lunch counter in Maryland. The counter woman brought two porcelain cups and one paper cup. When the white man gave the paper container to the white woman and not to the Negro, the counterwoman said, ‘We’re not allowed to serve colored, it’s against the law.’. . . On the wall, all red-white-and-blue, was a poster which read, ‘If you don’t like this country, there are boats leaving for Russia every hour.’”

1970, a New York book editor: “First we went to Chez Vito and all I had was spaghetti and wine and iced tea. And the check was $6. My God.”

1973, a group vice-president of Howard Johnson’s: “I think anybody who’s not using convenience foods is out of it. And some of the prepared food around today is top quality. You’d never know the difference. We’re going to open a restaurant a week this year, and where could we get cooks and chefs for this kind of expansion? Even if we could get them we couldn’t train them fast enough.”

1989, a woman chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America: “Interviewers tell me, ‘You don’t look like a chef. You look like a hostess. How can people work around you? Or they ask, ‘Do you mind getting dirty?’”

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

5 Comments

Filed under food, patrons, racism, restaurant prices

April 2, 2023 · 2:50 pm

Not-to-miss menu show

Later this month, beginning on April 26 and through July 29, the Grolier Club in New York will host an exhibition of menus from the collection of Henry Voigt entitled A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941. Admission is free, and there is a 124-page illustrated catalog for $35. [above: back of catalog]

Henry Voigt is also the author of a well-researched blog entitled The American Menu in which he provides background for the banquets, dinners, hotels, and restaurants associated with a variety of menus from his collection.

Selections from his collection to be exhibited at the Grolier Club include rare menus from the 19th century, such as one from Parker’s Restorant in Boston dated June 29, 1842. In the catalog Henry notes that Harvey Parker’s restaurant occupied a basement, and preceded the opening of his better-known Parker House in 1855. Most of the main dishes offered that day in June, such as Chicken with Oyster Sauce, cost 37½ cents. Half of the Restorant’s Bill of Fare is devoted to a wide range of wines, with Congress Water for the probably rare non-drinkers.

The majority of the menus to be shown are from the 19th century and cover a range of types of eating places and occasions. As is the case of menus for banquets held in honor of distinguished guests, many are from hotels which, after all, generally provided the finest facilities throughout the early period. But visitors will also appreciate seeing Bills of Fare from less grand “Eating Houses,” such as that operated in New York by Sandy Welsh.

Also of particular interest to me are two early 1860s menus from Taylor’s Saloon in New York, a place frequented by women patrons where it was fashionable to see and be seen. It was grand-iose in its decor and pretensions. In the catalog Henry quotes an 1859 travel book which describes its marble tile floor, ornamental bronze ceilings, profuse gilding, giant mirrors, and richly upholstered seating. Not surprisingly it was sometimes ridiculed, notably by the witty culture-critic who wrote under the pen-name Fanny Fern.

It’s hard to stop listing all the gems in the exhibit, but in the 20th century there are specimens from a quick lunch, a vegetarian restaurant, Delmonico’s in its fading years, Bernarr Macfadden’s One-Cent Restaurant of the Depression, and Smalls’ Paradise Cabaret in Harlem. These are only a small sampling.

Maybe I’ll see you there?

© Jan Whitaker, 2023

16 Comments

Filed under menus

Tagged as , , ,