I had a pleasant surprise when I looked over my numbers for the past year and discovered that my page views had increased by 78%. As a “niche blogger” my biggest question is whether anyone is reading what I write and I am happy to report you are. Thank you!
My “Tastes of a decade” posts are so popular that I decided to make them easier to find by gathering them together on a special page. Now my mission is to fill in missing decades, starting with 1910-1920 and 1970-1980.
Just like last year, readers continue to be attracted to the well-loved restaurants of the past, the London Chop House, Schrafft’s, and Maxwell’s Plum. But even they were outdone. A new TV show set in Miami Beach in 1959 called “Magic City” propelled my 2011 post on Wolfie’s into the rank of second most visited post of 2012! Taste of a decade: 1920s restaurants, written way back in 2008, continued as no. 1.
Holding its own quite nicely is one of my favorites — “You want cheese with that?” – written over three years ago.
Two posts I wrote in 2012 made it into this year’s Top 20. One of them surprised me: Miss Hulling’s cafeteria in St. Louis. Maybe the traffic it attracted is accounted for by someone linking to it but so far I haven’t detected any evidence of that. Ice cream parlors, published in August, was the other top new post. The popularity of this one is easy to explain: it was chosen as a featured post by WordPress.
I am constantly adding to my list of ideas for future posts, so much so that it never seems to get any shorter. Some topics in the pipeline are: Greek-American restaurants, Nick’s Nest (a hotdog stand in Holyoke MA), sawdust floors, frozen entrées, menu design, chains of theme restaurants, and lunch wagons. If I can find enough material I’d love to write about the Kahiki in Columbus OH, which was perhaps the most exuberant example of a Polynesian restaurant in this country. A reader has suggested writing about Bookbinder’s in Philadelphia. So, as usual I expect to be working on many topics simultaneously.
Best wishes to everyone for a happy new year!
It's great to hear from readers and I take time to answer queries. I can't always find what you are looking for, but I do appreciate getting thank yous no matter what the outcome.
Restaurant-ing through history 