Dining with Duncan

In 1935 a Kentuckian named Duncan Hines compiled a list of his 167 favorite places to eat and slipped it inside his Christmas cards. It made quite a hit. The next year his list had grown to 475 and he put it in book form, calling it Adventures in Good Eating. By 1946 the book [...]

Basic fare: toast

Toast wasn’t really new on restaurant menus around 1914 but it was beginning to enjoy a bigger vogue. The soda fountain, often located in drug or department stores, was expanding into a lunch counter and as it did it added electric toasters to its battery of equipment. Most Americans still lacked electricity in their homes [...]

Department store restaurants

In small cities – and some large ones too – restaurants in department stores were frequently the best places to eat. Often they did their own baking and made desserts from scratch. It was not unusual for them to whip up mayonnaise and produce their own potato chips. Their kitchens were often directed and entirely [...]

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 [...]

America’s finest restaurant

In the 19th century and well into the 20th there was absolutely no doubt that Delmonico’s was the nation’s finest restaurant, the only one with a worldwide reputation. It was one of the few places in this country which European visitors compared favorably with the glittering restaurants of Paris’s “super mall” of the 19th century, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A footnote on pepper and un-hospitality

I should make it clear that when I write about “Americans” historically I mean “white Americans.” Although generally the application of pepper to the diner’s food suggests hospitality — this is true only in certain circumstances. In the 1920s — and no doubt much later as well — black Americans often experienced unwanted pepper (and [...]