More than any other single person, Fred harvey created a cuisine in America. The man who is said to have “civilized the West, one meal at a time” invented chain restaurants and chain hotels, pioneered cultural tourism, and “introduced America to Americans.” The father of this nation’s hospitality industry was dirt-poor when he immigrated to the United States from England in 1853, and although he died in 1901, the company he created grew and thrived well into the mid-twentieth century. While the business passed from him to his son, Ford, then to Ford’s son, Freddy, the brand never changed. Harvey’s biographer, Stephen Fried, deemed this a brilliant strategy because, long after Harvey’s death, customers still felt “as if they were being taken care of by Fred Harvey himself.”
To be taken care of by Fred Harvey implied quality and couth, an ethos so entrenched that in the 1920s the company battled Oklahoma’s corporation commission all the way to the state supreme court over Fred Harvey’s requirement that men wear jackets in Harvey House dining rooms. The company’s civility wasn’t only about etiquette. During the Depression, Harvey Houses became known as “the softest touches in the West” because their policy was never to turn away a hungry person, even one who couldn’t pay.
When the young Harvey first sailed from London to New York, the very idea of a restaurant with a varied menu was new. In 1876, when he opened his first railway eating establishment in the Santa Fe’s Topeka depot, train-station dining rooms were famously repulsive. Decades later, William Allen White referred to Harvey Houses as “beacons of culinary light and learning.”
As the gold standard of hospitality in hotels as well as trains and train depot restaurants, Fred Harvey hosted everyone who was anyone. The company dispatched Hopis in its employ to greet Albert Einstein when he visited the Grand Canyon; Harvey’s La Posada in Winslow, Arizona, had a special room reserved for Howard Hughes. M. F. K. Fisher wrote that dinner in a Fred Harvey dining car with her Uncle Evans when she was nineteen inspired her to care about food. Walt Disney, who created the character Mickey Mouse while riding on the Santa Fe, included a replica of a Fred Harvey restaurant in the original Disneyland.