restauranthistorian

[restauranthistorian]

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,…

[restauranthistorian]

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…

[restauranthistorian]

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…

[restauranthistorian]

Postscript: Don the Beachcomber

A new book has come out about Don ‘s wife, Sunny Sund, who took over the Beachcomber chain and made it a success. Its author is Sunny’s daughter Karen, working with Cindi Neisinger. It is largely a personal account filled with anecdotes, a view of a mother/daughter relationship, celebrity mentions, and some of the harsh realities that shaped Sunny’s life. A drink recipe ends each chapter.

[restauranthistorian]

Free birthday cake!

A trip to Maine to celebrate two birthdays (not mine) got me thinking about how restaurants observe these events with customers. [above: at Wolfie’s, Miami, 1986] The custom of restaurants recognizing birthdays with songs, cakes, fancy drinks, free dinners, and serenades took hold in the 1960s. It’s unclear whether it had anything to do with an IRS decision ca. 1959 not to charge a cabaret tax…

[restauranthistorian]

Beer & barbecue at the fair

The 19th century was the century of world’s fairs, but the United States did not have a fair to call its own until 1876 when Philadelphia celebrated the 100th anniversary of U.S. independence. After Philadelphia, Chicago’s, in 1893, was the largest in this country. [above, outdoor beer garden at the Tyrolean Alps] So . . . for St. Louis organizers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904,…

[restauranthistorian]

Summertime restaurant-ing

Here are some of my blog posts from the past that were about visiting restaurants when it’s hot outside. Restaurant-ing al fresco See also “Dining in a garden.” Americans living in cities enjoyed spending hours in tea gardens in the 18th century and beer gardens in the 19th and early 20th. One example of such a pleasure garden was a grassy Philadelphia spot outfitted with “tables, benches,…

[restauranthistorian]

The Boos brothers of cafeterialand

It was an orphaned family that had gone through some difficult times that developed one of the early, very successful chains of cafeterias in California. The chain of Boos Brothers cafeterias was one of the first in Los Angeles, contributing to the flood of cafeterias that soon appeared in that city and elsewhere in Southern California. Californians to the north ridiculed the trend, referring to…

[restauranthistorian]

In the kitchen at Sardi’s

The 1950s cookbook from Sardi's restaurant is a blend of complex and greatly simplified recipes for home cooks.

To gather recipes for the Sardi’s cookbook Curtain Up at Sardi’s [1957], co-author Helen Bryson spent two and half weeks, six days each week, in Sardi’s restaurant kitchen. She asked a lot of questions about the food preparation. It was the only way to put together a cookbook, something that she said had never been done before in the restaurant’s long history that dated back to the 1920s. [The…

[restauranthistorian]

Happy birthday to a salad?

This morning I heard a story on the radio about Caesar salad that claimed today was the salad’s 100th birthday. I can understand that it becomes difficult to come up with holiday stories that are novel and of general interest. But I have my doubts about the accuracy of that anniversary date. Still, I will take advantage of it to recommend a story about Caesar salad that I wrote in 2019, at a…

[restauranthistorian]

Behind the scenes at Gonfarone’s

This restaurant's owner believed in allowing waiters to do a bit of stealing as a way to keep up their morale.

There is nothing as interesting (to me) as a memoir about a restaurant from an insider who reveals its workings not usually known to customers. Papa’s Table d’Hôte by Maria Sermolino is such a memoir, published in 1952, decades after her father’s ownership of the New York City restaurant, Gonfarone’s. Maria’s career as an editor and writer was extensive. After graduating from the Columbia School…

[restauranthistorian]

Playboy on the town, 1850s style

A tale of long-ago the super rich of New York City that makes them sound strangely contemporary. They ate out a lot.

Quite by accident I discovered a book called Fresh Leaves from the Diary of a Broadway Dandy, a moral tract that conceals its true purpose by enticing the reader with details from the wild life of a roguish playboy in New York city. It was published in 1852. [Except for one Thompson’s advertisement, also from 1852, the images in this blog are from the book.] The book was promoted with the…

[restauranthistorian]

Finds of the day

Two little menus and one business card from restaurants run by women.

Slim pickings for a restaurant ephemera collector at the giant Brimfield flea market recently, but at least I turned up a few finds. Among them were two small menus and a business card, all from eating places run mainly by women. The size of the two menus makes me wonder if male-owned restaurants ever employed any this tiny. The Henniker Tea Room The oldest of the three finds was a menu from…

[restauranthistorian]

The ‘bohemian’ restaurant in fiction

There was a time when many Americans considered inexpensive French or Italian restaurants naturally bohemian – wild and crazy, not too clean, filled with oddball characters, and offering menus of unfamiliar and dubious dishes. But nonetheless fascinating. Novelists liked to use them as settings, so they turned up in fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the excerpts below…

[restauranthistorian]

The ‘bohemian’ restaurant in fiction

Small French and Italian restaurants of the turn of the century were popular with artists, opera singers, and people watchers.

There was a time when many Americans considered inexpensive French or Italian restaurants naturally bohemian – wild and crazy, not too clean, filled with oddball characters, and offering menus of unfamiliar and dubious dishes. But nonetheless fascinating. Novelists liked to use them as settings, so they turned up in fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the excerpts below…

[restauranthistorian]

California coffee shops

A vivid style of modern restaurant architecture in Southern California carried vibrations from WWII and the atom bomb.

With the end of World War II, the United States became the undisputed world power as well as the leading economy, producing the largest share of the world’s goods. Many changes took place in American society as the soldiers returned. Suburbs sprang up with housing for growing families, shopping centers appeared, and many workers enjoyed prosperity. And a new type of eating place came into being,…

[restauranthistorian]

Advice to diners, 1815

In early American eating places the rule tended to be "every man for himself."

What follows are “Useful Directions to Epicures,” published in the (New York) Weekly Museum. The publication’s motto was: “Here Justice with her balance sits, and weighs impartially the deeds of men.” (The word “Museum” was sometimes used to mean a publication. Another example was the Farmers’ Museum, a New Hampshire newspaper of the early 1800s.) At the time of publication New York city had a…