Happy holidays, eat well

No matter whether you prefer Roast Goose, Chicken Tiki Masala, or Chinese, don’t forget to visit your favorite restaurants over the holidays. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. Upcoming posts in the works include James Beard (launching a “good eaters” theme), the 19th-century Downing family of black restaurateurs, the spectacular Maxwell’s Plum, famous [...]

Department store restaurants: Marshall Field’s

In 1890 Harry Gordon Selfridge, manager of Field’s in Chicago, took the then-unusual step of persuading a middle-class woman to help with a new project at the store. Her name was Sarah Haring (pictured) and she was the wife of a businessman and a mother. In the parlance of the day, she was needed to [...]

Anatomy of a restaurateur: Don Dickerman

Don Dickerman was obsessed with pirates. He took every opportunity to portray himself as one, beginning with a high school pirate band. As an art student in the teens he dressed in pirate garb for Greenwich Village costume balls. Throughout his life he collected antique pirate maps, cutlasses, blunderbuses, and cannon. His Greenwich Village [...]

Blue plate specials

During the 1920s and 1930s the blue plate lunch and dinner thrived. The first blue plate reference I have found is in 1917. A traveler on a railroad running between Atlanta and Birmingham tells of a “Blue Plate Special” consisting of meat and vegetables served together on a divided plate for 60 cents.
The blue plate [...]