Restaurants (and their critics) have often shown concern with patrons’ health, but the focus of concern has varied widely in different eras.

In the 18th century the idea that restaurants had a mission to restore health came to this country from France. The legend spread that a Frenchman named Boulanger invented the first restaurant, hanging out a signboard stating “I will restore you.” Whether or not this actually occurred — or whether he was “the first” — it is true that early restaurants in France promised to provide healthful dishes. The mission migrated to America as chefs arrived after the French revolution. When Julien’s opened in Boston the proprietor vowed to supply the infirm, convalescent, and weak with “nourishing” soups and broths, including turtle soups which, he advertised, would purify the blood.

But the early French “restorators” were voices shouting in the wilderness. For most of the next two centuries Americans believed their health depended on eating meat and lots of it. In the latter 19th century and into the 20th, concern shifted to unsanitary conditions in restaurants as health departments were created, ordinances established, and inspectors dispatched.

The vegetarian restaurants of the early 20th century demonstrated a renewed interest in healthy diets. Meat substitutes produced by the Kelloggs of the Battle Creek Sanitarium appeared on their tables, although breakfast cereals, whose popularity was aided by restaurant promotions, were undoubtedly the most successful of all health food products.

The food conservation guidelines of World War I lightened diets, with less meat and more vegetables on restaurant menus, as well as spreading knowledge of nutrition. A few chains, such as J. R. Thompson and Childs, provided vitamin and calorie counts in the 1920s. But the public was not too receptive. Stockholders booted out William Childs after he gained control of the mighty lunchroom corporation and removed meat from its menus, causing sales to plunge drastically.

After a prolonged beef-eating revival following the end of WWII rationing, health-conscious restaurants made a comeback as part of a counterculture critique of industrialized food. The “holy war against adulterated foods and french-fried, frozen, super sugar wastelands,” reported Mary Reinholz in the Los Angeles Times in 1971, had produced at least 25 organic restaurants in southern California, including H.E.L.P., The Source, and Nucleus Nuance which served “evolution burgers,” “Virgo vege-loaves,” and carob mousse. One Los Angeles counterculture restaurant favorite, carrot cake, crossed over onto mainstream menus.

Natural food eating places, such as St. Louis’s Sunshine Inn, Long Island’s Shamballah Gardens, the Haven in Honolulu, Homeward Bound in Flagstaff, and Mary’s Natural Food Restaurant in Denton TX, to name but a few, soon spread throughout much of the country, laying the groundwork for the restaurant revival of the 1980s.

© Jan Whitaker, 2008

As early as the 1830s in the U.S. the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity espoused a regimen called “Nature’s Bill of Fare” which advocated eating meatless meals which contained no more than three different articles of food and no desserts, condiments, or beverages other than water. Diners were to chew very thoroughly and eat at precisely the same time each day. Needless to say, the anti-hedonistic “Grahamites” were very much at odds with the majority in this country who expected to eat meat three times a day. As far as I’ve been able to discover it wasn’t until the 1890s that vegetarian restaurants appeared.

The first may indeed have been the well-named “Vegetarian Restaurant No. 1″ opened in the Hotel Byron on West 23rd Street in New York City in 1895. It was sponsored by the New-York Vegetarian Society, which did not tolerate either taking life for food or drinking alcohol. A few years later Boston and Los Angeles got their first vegetarian restaurants. The nut and grain-based food products served in the new kinds of eating places – Granose, Nuttose, Wheatose, and others – were produced by the Battle Creek Sanitarium Health Food Company in Michigan. A dinner at the Sanitarium (shown above) in 1900 featured few familiar dishes. Innocent of all high-flown copywriting, the menu offered unappetizing sounding selections such as Gruel, Dry Gluten, Protose Salad, and a choice of Nuttose C., Nuttola, Nutta, or Nuttolene.

The vegetarian movement and its restaurants got a boost from rising meat prices as well as stockyard scandals as the 20th century began. New customers mobbed vegetarian restaurants and hotels and restaurants of all kinds added meatless dishes such as spaghetti and omelets to their fare, an exercise they would repeat under the austerity measures of World War I. Up to and during the war, vegetarian cafes flourished and chains began to form, such as the Physical Culture Restaurants in New York, with branches in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Chicago. Sadie Schildkraut also built a string of 15 vegetarian restaurants in New York, while in the early 1920s Los Angeles added two raw food restaurants and a Sephardic kosher café to its list of meatless eating places. A chain of vegetarian cafeterias appeared in the South, including one in Knoxville.

Although meat rationing during World War II would bring back menus featuring vegetable plates, the vegetarian movement would not experience another boom until the counter-culture-inspired food revolution of the 1970s.

© Jan Whitaker, 2008