Chapter Six
To a stranger, New-York must seem to be perpetually engaged in eating. Go where you will between the hours of 8 in the morning and 6 in the evening, and you are reminded that man is a cooking animal. Tables are always spread; knives and forks are always rattling against dishes; the odors of the kitchen are always rising. Is the appetite of the Metropolis ever appeased?
This was how the reporter and author Junius Henri Browne introduced his chapter on restaurants in his Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York (1869). The only difference between then and now is that in the city that never sleeps, it also never stops eating. It didn’t start out this way.
Taverns and Gardens
The city’s first commercial eating establishments were taverns. Drinking, of course, was their primary function—eating was an afterthought. The sale of alcoholic beverages was where taverns made their main profits—just as it is in most New York restaurants today. The City Tavern may have been New Amsterdam’s first tavern. Constructed in 1643, it was a two-story building with a basement. It could house several travelers and occasionally prisoners. It was also a place of business where public and private deals were transacted. In addition to selling beer, wine, and brandy, it also sold food, although precisely what kind of food has not survived. Other taverns were soon constructed, one by a Frenchman who named it The White Horse, a name that will be commonly employed by subsequent taverns. Another was opened by a Metje Wessels, whose “eating house” served beer and wine in 1656, and it became the place for dinners and festivities. Precisely what was served was not recorded. The exception was the terrapin, which was noted as one of the most popular dishes. Perhaps the Dutchman Adriaen van der Donck was referring to this when he wrote in 1655, “Some persons prepare delicious dishes from the water terrapin which is luscious food.”
Traditionally, American taverns were licensed to sell wine for consumption on the premises; inns were licensed to lodge travelers and to sell beer and ale. Over time, these distinctions broke down—taverns also lodged travelers, and both taverns and inns sold beer, ale, wine, and cider. By the early eighteenth century, rum was the prevailing beverage served in taverns. Higher-class establishments also offered coffee, tea, and chocolate. Taverns also served food. Unlike restaurants, which arrived in America in the early nineteenth century and provided menus (or bills of fare, or whatever they were), taverns served whatever was available, and diners usually had little or no choice as to their victuals.
Dutch taverns survived the English takeover of the city, but English taverns soon outnumbered them. Some, such as those operated by Roger Baker, Michael Howden, and John Parmyter, served the gentry. Elias Chardavoine’s victualing house served French food, something that was quite unusual at the time. France, of course, was known for its haute cuisine, which was greatly appreciated by England’s wealthy, but most Americans considered it effete and a waste of money.
By the 1730s, the social life of the city revolved around taverns, one of which invited diners to sample “the most Dishes of Meat” in the “best Order,” and “drink the richest Wine,” according to a newspaper advertisement. In 1775, Edward Bardin’s tavern served “Roast Beef, Veal, Mutton, Lamb, Ducks and Chickens, Gammon, Lobsters, Pickled Oysters, Custards, and Tarts of Different Kinds. Chicken Pies ready for Supper every night. Tea and Coffee every afternoon.” The number of taverns and other alcohol sellers increased rapidly as the population grew.
The upper classes, particularly those engaged in businesses, frequented coffeehouses. In 1696, Lieutenant John Hutchins opened a coffeehouse called the King’s Arms; it became the unofficial headquarters of English émigrés in New York. Many more coffeehouses were opened in New York City during the early eighteenth century, serving good food as well as beverages.
Some taverns sported “gardens,” offering summertime entertainment—fireworks, concerts, plays, and outdoor dining. A 1763 advertisement for the “Spring Gardens” offered the “best of green tea &c. Hot French rolls will be provided. N. B. Pies and tarts will be drawn from 7 in the evening till 9, where gentlemen and ladies may depend on good attendance; the best of Madeira, mead, cakes, &c.” The most popular tavern garden was Vauxhall, named for the garden in London. It offered “Reception of Ladies, Gentlemen, etc., and will be illuminated every evening in the Week; Coffee, Tea, and Hot Rolls at any hour in the day, neat Wines and other Liquors, with Cakes.”
The city’s most famous early garden was constructed by William Niblo, an Irish immigrant, who, in 1823, purchased the grounds of a small circus, called “The Stadium,” at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. There he opened Niblo’s Garden, featuring a restaurant and concerts. It quickly became one of the most important eating establishments. Particularly popular was its ice cream and its sherry cobblers, which were sipped throughout the gardens. The British aristocrat and philosopher Thomas Hamilton dined at Niblo’s in 1833 and described his meal of “oyster soup, shad, venison, partridges, grouse, wild-ducks of different varieties, and several other dishes.”
Taverns thrived well into the nineteenth century, but their functions—drinking, eating, and sleeping—were increasingly replaced by hotels, bars, saloons, boardinghouses, and independent restaurants. Taverns survived well into the twentieth century, but by then, they were little different than saloons and bars of the time. Some taverns became quite popular and famous: the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village was frequented by writers, actors, poets, counterculture leaders, and political activists in the 1950s and 1960s; and the Stonewall Inn tavern, also in Greenwich Village, is credited with launching the gay rights movement in America in 1969.
Hotel Dining
The nation’s first luxury hotel was New York’s City Hotel, built in 1794. For almost half a century the four-story, block-long hostelry on lower Broadway was New York’s premier inn, the place where wealthy and celebrated visitors stayed when they visited the city. The hotel operated on the American plan, where guests paid both for rooms and all meals (in contrast to the “European plan,” which included breakfast only). Manhattan businessmen ate dinner or had tea in the hotel’s dining room. Dinners often included choices of twelve to sixteen meat, poultry, or seafood dishes along with vegetables and fruit.
Astor House, Broadway and Vesey Streets in New York City, 1907. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ds-01872
By the mid-1830s many New York hotel dining rooms were serving la haute cuisine française. At the Globe Hotel at 66 Broadway, customers enjoyed “excellent French cookery,” according to an English visitor. He was even more taken with the food at the palatial Astor House, which employed French chefs to run its dining rooms. Menus were incredible as illustrated by the Astor’s “Table-d’ Hôtel” for Wednesday, March 21,1838:
Vermicelli Soup
Boiled Cod Fish and Oysters
Boiled Corn’d Beef
Boiled Ham
Boiled Tongue
Boiled Turkey and Oysters
Boiled Chickens and Pork
Boiled Leg of Mutton Oyster Pie
Cuisse de Poulet Sauce Tomate
Poitrine de Veau au Blanc
Salade de Volaille
Ballon de Mouton au Tomate
Téte de Veau au Marinade
Casserolle de Fomme de Terre garnie
Compote de Pigeon
Rolleau de Veau à la Jardiniere
Côtelettes de Veau Sauté
Filet de Mounton Piqué aux Ognons
Ronde de Bœuf
Fricandeau de Veau aux Epinards
Côtelettes de Mouton Panée
Macaroni au Parmesan
Roast Beef
Roast Pig
Roast Veal
Roast Leg of Mutton Roast Goose
Roast Turkey
Roast Chickens
Roast Wild Ducks
Roast Wild Goose
Roast Guinea Fowl
Roast Brandt
Queen Pudding
Mince Pie
Cream Puffs
Dessert.
When the Astor House opened, guests paid three dollars per week for room and full board. Its bar was one of the largest in the city, and it offered a prodigious free lunch for all customers who bought drinks. Not surprisingly, the prices escalated rapidly as well-to-do foreign visitors discovered the hotel.
The success of the Astor House encouraged others to build luxury hotels. At the former site of Niblo’s Garden on Broadway at Prince Street, Stephen Van Rensselaer built the Metropolitan Hotel in 1852. Its restaurant became one of the most important in the city. The St. Nicholas Hotel was built on Broadway at Broome Street and cost the unheard of price of one million dollars. It had two dining rooms and two taprooms. In the dining rooms, one English visitor in 1856 was amazed at the number and variety of dishes and beverages from which diners could choose:
Two soups, two kinds of fish, ten boiled dishes, nine roast dishes, six relishes, seventeen entries, three cold dishes, five varieties of game, thirteen varieties of vegetables, seven kinds of pastry, and seven fruits, with ice-cream and coffee. The wines numbered eight brands of Madeira, seventeen of sherry, eighteen of champagne, six of port, four of Burgundy, twenty of hock, sixteen of claret, six sauternes, nine varieties of brandy, three liqueurs, and Scotch ale, India pale-ale, and London porter.
Menu from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, 1903. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Digital id: rbpe 1310100a http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.1310100a
The Fifth Avenue Hotel facing Madison Square surpassed all hotels in New York when it was completed in 1859, and its menu at its restaurant was impressive. Its culinary delights, however, were topped with the completion of New York’s most famous hotel and restaurants at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which started as two separate hotels. William Astor, the grandson of John Jacob Astor, built the Waldorf Hotel in 1893 on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. Four years later, his cousin, John Jacob Astor III, built the Astoria Hotel on a lot adjacent to the Waldorf. A corridor between the two hotels was constructed, and the complex became known as the Waldorf Astoria; it is generally referred to, however, as the Waldorf.
The Waldorf was particularly famous for its dining rooms. One reason was a Swiss immigrant, Oscar Tschirky, who arrived in New York in 1883 and worked as a busboy at Hoffman House and later waited tables at Delmonico’s. Before long he became head of the restaurant’s catering department, where he became popular with some of New York’s most famous people. Tschirky joined the staff at the Waldorf two months before it opened. His management skills helped launch the hotel’s restaurants. He was put in charge of its private dining rooms, which were frequented by the city’s most famous people, such as the financier J. P. Morgan, the actress Lillian Russell, and the wealthy, overweight businessman and gourmet Diamond Jim Brady. Tschirky made a point of remembering what important guests preferred to eat and drink. His success in the dining rooms elevated him to the position of hotel steward responsible for supplying and preparing all the restaurants with provisions, and he managed all of the restaurant staff, including thirty-five chefs and hundreds of employees. The restaurants served French cuisine, and Oscar, as he was called (because most Americans were unable to pronounce his last name, he asserted in his autobiography), proclaimed that eating at the Waldorf was just as good as eating in a top Parisian restaurant.
Palm Court dining room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, circa 1902. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ds-02798
Tschirky instituted a number of changes at the hotel that were later adopted by other restaurants. Traditionally, upper-class menus were written in French; the Waldorf’s menus were written in English, although a bilingual menu was available on request. It was not the first restaurant in America to do so, but other city restaurants soon followed its lead. Another change was in the number of items listed on the menu. Some haute cuisine restaurant menus had reached gargantuan proportions, weighing in at a thousand items. Tschirky maintained the quality of the French food served at the hotel but simplified the menu and decreased the number of courses served. Other city restaurants soon followed his lead with this innovation as well.
In January 1907, the Waldorf Astoria made a bold move—it put up a sign on the hotel’s bulletin board announcing that “ladies without escort will be served in the restaurants at any hour.” This broke an unwritten rule of ignoring single women who sat down at its restaurants. Upper-class restaurants had “discouraged” unescorted women diners. Waiters ignored them and refused to take their orders. This policy, of course, did not apply to wealthy women known at the restaurants. Women could dine in private meeting rooms at hotels and restaurants. On April 20, 1868, the city’s prominent women intentionally met at Delmonico’s large meeting room on its second floor and formed the Sorosis Club, the nation’s first club for professional women. It sent a shock wave through the city, but the club continued to meet, usually for lunch at meeting rooms of high-end restaurants, such as the Waldorf Astoria.
The Waldorf restaurants were the first upper-class eateries in the city to announce that single women could dine alone, and strong public pressure forced them to reverse this policy shortly after they made it, but it did begin public discussion and some eateries changed. At the time, single women could dine at tea rooms and at the Women’s Lunch Club, where exotic salads and “ice cream overpoured with maple syrup and walnuts, and other innovations of endless charm” were served, reported a writer. In 1909, women shoppers were served lunches “with expedition and sometimes with courtesy” on the top floors of department stores. When the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted women the right to vote in 1920, single women demonstrated their freedom by visiting speakeasies, nightclubs, and restaurants throughout the city, including the Waldorf.
The Waldorf influenced what Americans ate. The hotel restaurants popularized chafing dishes, which they used to prepare two of their iconic dishes: chicken à la king and lobster Newburg. Neither of these dishes originated at the Waldorf, but it did originate the “Waldorf salad,” consisting of chopped celery, apples, and mayonnaise, artistically arranged on a bed of lettuce. Walnuts and other items were added later. It quickly became popular throughout the nation, as did “Oscar” sauce, a sauce that the hotel bottled and sold.
Prohibition closed most of New York’s haute cuisine restaurants; the Waldorf restaurants did survive, but they did not thrive. Tschirky believed that “Prohibition ruined fine cooking and robbed America of some of its most distinctive native dishes,” such as terrapin stew and lobster Newburg, for the well-to-do who could afford these dishes and were not interested in them without accompanying alcohol.
The owners of Waldorf and Astoria agreed in 1929 to move their hotels to make way for the Empire State Building and to relocate to Park Avenue, where the now merged Waldorf Astoria Hotel was even grander than their previous incarnations. It had three dining rooms, one of which was the Palm Court, where Tschirky served as maître d’hôtel until he retired in 1943. His influence survived as other restaurateurs studied and copied his mode of operating.
Oyster Saloons
Oysters were one of New York’s most prominent and cherished foods. From the earliest colonial days, vendors sold them on the streets. Small wagons provided New Yorkers with oysters, “biscuits, pepper, and ginger beer; in short, for a few pence, the carter or mechanic has a whet which might satisfy even a gourmand.” Others sold oysters flavored by ketchup for a penny apiece from “rude huts, paralytic shanties” along the East River. Those who frequented “these al fresco oyster-houses are longshoremen, truckmen, stevedores, sailors, and others of that ilk, and a very large bowl of oyster soup, not stew, can be obtained for 5 cents.” Others sold oysters from “floating-houses,” which preserved live oysters for several days by placing them in baskets in the cellar and attic of the oyster boat.
A step up from the floating houses were a large number of “oyster saloons,” “oyster and coffee saloons,” and “oyster and lager beer saloons.” They were mainly constructed in cellars and typically identified themselves with balloons made of “bright red muslin stretched over a globular frame of rattan or wire and was illuminated at night by a candle placed within.” Most oysters were served raw, but some were cooked in various ways. Many establishments were on the “canal street plan,” which meant that you could eat as many oysters as you liked for twelve cents. By 1835, an estimated five thousand New Yorkers were engaged in retailing oysters.
Rumors abounded that bartenders gave spoiled oysters to those who ate too many.
Charles Dickens, visiting New York in 1842, wrote that he considered such places “pleasant retreats” with “wonderful cookery of oysters, pretty nigh as large as cheese plates.” Another British visitor reported that “there is scarcely a square without several oyster-saloons; they are aboveground and underground, in shanties and palaces. They are served in every imaginable style escolloped, steamed, stewed, roasted, ‘on the half shell,’ eaten raw with pepper and salt, devilled, baked in crumbs, cooked in pates, put in delicious sauces on fish and boiled mutton.”
According to Scottish poet and journalist Charles Mackay who visited New York in 1859, the oysters were
cooked in twenty, or, perhaps in forty or a hundred, different ways. Oysters pickled, stewed, baked, roasted, fried, and scolloped; oysters made into soups, patties, and puddings; oysters with condiments and without condiments; oysters for breakfast, dinner, and supper; oysters without stint or limit—fresh as the fresh air, and almost as abundant—are daily offered to the palates of the Manhattanese, and appreciated with all the gratitude which such a bounty of nature ought to inspire.
Oyster cellars catered to the well-to-do as well as the less affluent. Upper-class oyster bars were filled with mirrors, pictures, and other artistic enhancements. Tables could be closed off with curtains, which provided customers with privacy. Less ornate cellars had a counter at one side. Behind it, oyster shuckers, frequently blacks, quickly opened oysters “for their customers, who swallow them with astonishing relish and rapidity.” Good shuckers could open 3,500 oysters a day—but the average was about 2,500.
The greatest concentration of oyster houses was found along Canal Street, but again, according to an English visitor in the 1860s, the oyster should be called “the national dish; it is at least the great dish of the Atlantic States.” He continued,
The oyster is the sine qua non of all dinner parties and picnics, of all night revels and festive banquets. For tenpence you may have a large dish of them, done in any style you will, and as many as you can consume. The restaurants ostentatious and humble are in the season, crowded with oyster lovers: ladies and gentlemen, workmen and seamstresses, resort to them in multitudes, and for a trifle may have a right royal feast.
Oysters were so plentiful that everyone thought the supply was inexhaustible. But there was a limit. The beds were overharvested, and production rapidly declined in the 1840s. To meet demand, oysters were shipped in from Long Island Sound and then from the Chesapeake Bay. Estimates varied as to how many vessels were engaged in the oyster trade: some said 1,500; others said ten times that. But it was a dying occupation. Pollution and untreated human waste that drained into the harbor destroyed oyster beds. The beds in Harlem River were closed in the 1870s. Health scares associated with them frightened New Yorkers away from the dives and street vendors. Many oyster saloons became seedy, and upper-class New Yorkers migrated to other eateries. When oysters were thought to have caused a typhus outbreak in the 1890s, more beds were closed by health officials. By 1916, most oyster beds in New York Bay were closed or destroyed by pollution. The most iconic oyster restaurant in the city today is the Grand Central Oyster Bar, which opened in 1913. It imports all of its oysters from Long Island and other areas where oysters thrive. Its signature dishes include oyster pan roast and oyster stew.
Oyster Bar Restaurant, Grand Central Terminal, Manhattan, 2013. Courtesy of Kelly Fitzsimmons
Boardinghouse Fare
A British actor who immigrated to America in 1797 reported that New York was more a village and a collection of inns than a real city. But he was delighted with the culinary choices at one upscale boardinghouse: “[It served] fish, ham, beef, boiled fowls, eggs, pigeons, pumpkin pies, lobsters, vegetables, tea, coffee, cider, sangaree, and cherry-brandy!” A later British visitor to New York also thought well of the fashionable boardinghouse where he stayed:
In the first-rate boarding-houses of the American commercial capital, there is an entire absence of all vulgarity. The attendance and culinary arrangements are after the models of some of the best English private establishments, and the general tone of the society refined enough for the most fastidious; nor are the expenses so exorbitant as in many a noisy, disagreeable hotel.
Boardinghouses had been common in New York since colonial days. As merchants, clerks, salesmen, seamstresses, mechanics, and immigrants streamed into the city in the early nineteenth century, lower Manhattan became crowded. The island’s well-to-do sold their three- and four-story houses and moved uptown. Entrepreneurs purchased the old houses, subdivided the rooms, and converted them into boardinghouses. As landlords made more money selling liquor and other provisions than they did by renting out the rooms, they often converted the parlors or cellars into saloons, or made them into grocery stores that sold liquor. There were not enough old houses to meet the needs of incoming immigrant families, so entrepreneurs began purchasing old nonresidential buildings and converting them into boardinghouses.
Some boardinghouses catered to specific groups, such as Germans, Irish, or Chinese. Others catered to specific professions, such as actors. They were less expensive than hotels, and guests often remained in residence for long periods of time. Guests were typically served three meals a day. In 1842, Walt Whitman, then a twenty-two-year-old New York journalist, proclaimed that the “universal Yankee nation” was a “boarding people.” But sixteen years later he grossly exaggerated in proclaiming that three-quarters of the adults in New York City lived in boardinghouses.
Boardinghouse fare depended on the proprietors, and many residents were unhappy with what they were served. Asa Greene, author of the novel The Perils of Pearl Street (1834), recorded his impressions of the food served by a boardinghouse landlady he called “Mrs. Conniption.” Breakfast consisted of salted shad or mackerel, dried beef steak, and occasionally stale sausages, or heavily salted pork, and bread that was “heavy as a grindstone.” Water “drawn from the Manhattan hydrant or the pump” was converted into a hot drink by the addition of “a small quantity of damaged coffee, burnt crust, or roasted rye, well pulverised.” Dinner included cheap meat (mutton, beef, or pork), which “was dry as a chip, and totally destitute of any inviting qualities.” Vegetables consisted of “watery potatoes, sliced beats, boiled cabbage, and so forth.” Sour apple dumplings, rice pudding with molasses, tart apple pies “with the crust as strong as sole-leather,” or “shrivelled peaches” were served for dessert. The tea table consisted of dry bread with “extra-salted butter,” and weak tea that was made with a “thimbleful of tea . . . put into a quart, a gallon, or some other assignable quantity of water.” This was flavored with small amounts of brown sugar and watered-down milk.
In the same spirit, Thomas Butler Gunn, author of The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses (1857), wrote that “meals were uniformly served up ‘neither cold, nor hot.’” The soups “might have been improved by a less liberal allowance of grease and unground pepper, of which latter there always remained a deep sediment—as of small shot—in each plate.”
Vegetarian Eateries
Other boardinghouses were established by vegetarians and temperance advocates. These were promoted or inspired by Sylvester Graham. In 1833, Asenath Nicholson launched a temperance boardinghouse. She teamed up with Graham to institutionalize his dietary principles in her establishment, and she later published the first “Graham” recipes devised in accordance with his precepts. Other Graham boardinghouses opened, and many survived until late in the nineteenth century. Noted guests at such places included New York newspapermen Horace Greeley and William Lloyd Garrison. The aforementioned Thomas Butler Gunn was surprised and pleased with the offerings at one of the Graham houses:
We had no meats, no fish, no gravy-soups. Tea and coffee were also rejected, as stimulants. But every variety of vegetable appeared at our table, as also fruit and pastry. (No butter entered into the composition of the latter, that being a tabooed article.) Bananas, melons, peaches, grapes, oranges, cherries, pine-apples; all the daintier forms of Vegetarian fare were provided with a liberal hand. The display, indeed, exceeded our expectations.
The New York Vegetarian Society was organized in 1852; it organized dinners. One in 1894 held at the St. Denis Hotel in 1894 offered an impressive menu:
Soup.
Relishes.
Olives. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Salted Almonds. Pickled Walnuts. Haricot beans on bread with curry sauce.
Removes.
Braised lettuce with mushroom sauce and celery croquettes.
Stewed oyster plant with rissole and sweet potatoes Lyonnaise.
Brussels sprouts, cream sauce.
Lemon ice.
French peas, country style.
Baked stuffed tomatoes with spaghetti a la Milannaise.
Fried squash, Creole style, with corn fritters.
Mixed salad with toasted crackers.
Sweets.
Rice and apricots. Croute of mixed fruits. Orange salad. Nesselrode pudding.
Dessert.
Stilton, Roquefort, and Camembert cheese. Fruits of the season. Nuts. Raisins. Cakes. Tea. Coffee. Chocolate.
Vegetarian boardinghouses went out of business by 1900, but vegetarian restaurants, such as The White Rose or The Laurel, were operating in the city. These sold vegetarian steaks, cutlets, filets, and duck. According to one author in 1904, their vegetables were “amazingly” well cooked; he also reported that their mushroom and nut dishes were outstanding, a black cream of mushroom soup was “worthy of a plutocrat” and the coffee made from peanuts was delicious. The publication of Upton Sinclair’s Jungle (1906) and other exposes about the meatpacking industry encouraged many New Yorkers to become vegetarians. Vegetarian restaurants survived and today thrive as do vegan and raw food restaurants.
Tenements
Boardinghouses were so profitable that entrepreneurs began converting large warehouses and other buildings into “tenant houses,” later called tenements. A large brewery erected in 1792 in the Five Points neighborhood, for instance, was in 1837 converted into a dwelling that eventually housed more than seven hundred Irish and African Americans. Unlike boardinghouses, tenements did not provide food for those renting rooms and often did not have kitchens.
As more immigrants flooded into the city, entrepreneurs converted larger old buildings for multiple dwellings. The rooms were tiny—often just big enough for a bed—and most did not have running water, heat, ventilation, or indoor plumbing. Instead, there were outdoor privies with inadequate sewage systems. Water had to be carried in buckets from wells or pumps on the street. New York City and State passed laws to improve conditions in tenements, but the laws often went unenforced. As more immigrants moved into the tenements, they became dangerously overcrowded. According to the New York Tribune, garbage was set in boxes on the streets: the waste was “composed of potato-peelings, oyster-shells, night-soil, rancid butter, dead dogs and cats, and ordinary black street mud.” The garbage boxes formed “one festering, rotting, loathsome, hellish mass of air poisoning, death-breeding filth, reeking in the fierce sunshine, which gloats yellowly over it like the glare of a devil whom Satan has kicked from his councils in virtuous disgust.”
As more immigrants streamed into the city, more tenements were created to house them. In 1900, there were 42,700 tenement buildings in New York, housing almost 1.6 million people. Jacob Riis’s exposé How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) concluded that more than half a million people living in the tenements were either begging for food or subsisting on charity.
One building that was, surprisingly, converted into a tenement was Fraunces Tavern. Originally built as a family home, it was converted into a tavern in 1762. In the early nineteenth century, it was converted back into a house, with street-level shops added later, before it ended up as a tenement for immigrants. In 1904, the building was bought by the New York chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, who tried to restore the building to its original eighteenth-century condition. Today, it claims to be the oldest surviving building in Manhattan; it functions as a museum and a restaurant serving food and beverages loosely based on colonial fare.
Another tenement building, at 97 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, was built in 1864. It was designed to have twenty three-room apartments. Each apartment—about 325 square feet—would typically house a family of seven or eight. There was no running water and no toilets, although the apartments did have small kitchens. Residents were able to prepare simple meals. In 1988, this became the Tenement Museum.
Room in The Tenement Museum , 97 Orchard Street. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-highsm-14234
Foreign Food
By the mid-nineteenth century, restaurants, bistros, and cafes thrived in New York, as did more affordable oyster houses and other inexpensive eating establishments. Manhattan alone had an estimated five or six thousand restaurants and eating houses. They ranged from the elegant and expensive Delmonico’s to “the subterranean sties where men are fed like swine, and dirt is served gratis in unhomoeopathic doses” with “broken earthen-ware, soiled table-cloths, and coarse dishes,” as a New York reporter wrote in 1869.
Many restaurants served “foreign” food, and some were widely frequented. “Gosling’s French and American Dining Saloons” on Nassau served a thousand customers a day at lunch. It was good and cheap. In 1843, three customers ate “roast veal farci, with two slices of bread, potatoes, a pickle, and a ‘smaller’ of beer,” and the total cost for all three diners was about thirty cents. By comparison, a meal for three at Delmonico’s cost more than fifteen dollars. Henri Mouquin’s opened in 1857 on Fulton and Nassau. Their “diner du jour” consisted “of soup, one entree, and cut of roast meat with one vegetable, and cheese with bread at discretion.” It cost “25 cents, with a pint of red wine at 12 cents extra,” according to a magazine writer in 1866. Mouquin later moved his restaurant uptown to Twenty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue where he upped the prices and became a “rendezvous for epicures.”
Chinese, Italian, and German restaurants thrived in New York by the late nineteenth century. Chop suey joints became common in Five Points (an area later called Chinatown) beginning in the late nineteenth century. By 1898, eleven Chinese restaurants could be found on Mott and Pell Streets. By the 1930s, Chinese restaurants were common even on Times Square. Italian restaurants opened as immigrants from Italy flooded into the city, but in the 1890s, they rapidly increased as New Yorkers fell in love with spaghetti joints where meals were accompanied by a bottle of red wine. Others became very popular, such as the one opened by Stefano Moretti on Fourteenth Street in the 1860s. German restaurants were common in New York by the 1870s. They were located off streetcar lines and sold German foods and wines. Some served the city’s well-to-do, such as Lüchow’s in Manhattan and the Peter Luger Steak House in Williamsburg.
Chophouses, “adaptations” of English grillrooms, were also common. In the 1860s, they were clustered around Houston and Bleecker Streets. They served a wide range of foods, such as served “stewed tripe, liver and bacon, mutton-chops, porter-house steak, and cuts from ‘joints.’ The bill of fare is a written one hung up at the bar. The prices are moderate, and the food better cooked than in almost any of the other eating-houses.” The De Soto, the leading chophouse in 1866, was run by an English immigrant named William H. Garrard. It was frequented by actors and “dramatic critics” who ate “broiled kidneys and Welch rarebits” and drank ale and cocktails. Forty years later, among the popular chophouses were Farrish’s on John Street, Engel’s near Herald Square, and Browne’s on Broadway near Fortieth Street. These were “much frequented” by “actors and singers and have fascinating collections of old prints and quaint photographs.” They were inexpensive. For “a chop, baked potato, a bit of water-cress, plenty of good bread, and English pickles,” the cost was forty to eighty cents. They also served “broiled kidneys, porterhouse steaks, imported Bass, porter, or stout, Scotch ale, or half and half (properly pronounced “’arf ’n’ ’arf”), served in the pewter and drawn from the wood, are also to be had at their best at these places, and at a reasonable price.”
By the time that the Depression hit, foreign food was readily available, as a writer noted in 1931:
Within a few square miles, you can sample the foods of India, Syria, Japan, and Normandy; you can eat the foods of the French, the German and the Irish; the specialties of the Italians and the Swedes and the Russians and the Danes. You can drink Turkish, European and Florentine coffee; rose-water or Danish beer. You can revel in Smorgasbord, Hors d’oeuvres, or Antipasto; and buy a meal for 50 cents or 50 dollars.
There were also Jewish restaurants. The most famous was the Café Royal, on Second Avenue, then the heart of New York’s Yiddish rialto. It opened in 1908 and quickly became the place where socialists, artists, writers, and Yiddish performers mingled. In his book The Strangest Places (1939), Russian immigrant Leo Calvin Rosten proclaimed the Café Royal to be “the Delmonico’s, the Simpson’s and the Fouquet’s of Second Avenue, all in one.” He continued, “Everybody who is anybody in the creative Jewish world turns up at the Café Royal at least one night a week. To be seen there is a social duty, a mark of distinction, and an investment in prestige.”
Foreign and ethnic food was and is a defining element in the city’s foodscape, and today restaurants offer foods and beverages from hundreds of different national, regional, and ethnic groups.
Speed Dining
Until the mid-nineteenth century, New Yorkers engaged in business went home for afternoon dinner. As the city grew and residences were separated from places of employment, lunchrooms emerged. They typically offered fast service and cheap food. Most customers ate quickly and returned to work. An English visitor in 1828 described the “Plate House,” one of the city’s early quick-service lunch establishments, as a long, narrow, dark room with two rows of boxes “just large enough to hold four persons.” Attendants glided “up and down, and across the passage, inclining their heads for an instant first to one box, then to another, and receiving the whispered wishes of the company, which they straightway bawled out in a loud voice, to give notice of what fare was wanted.” As customers ordered their food, attendants yelled them out: “Three beef, 8 !” “Half plate beef, 4!” “One potato, 5!” “Two apple pie, one plum pudding, 8!” The numbers at the end identified the table. Other colloquial names for dishes were “a plate of Siamese Twins” (fish balls); “woodcock” (pork and beans); “boned turkey,” “corduroy,” and “West Broadway” (hash); “Irish goose” (codfish, baked or boiled); and “a plate of Tennessee, and be quick about it” (hot corn bread). Within seconds the food was delivered. Customers ate in silence, ate quickly, and left.
Time was money, whether at a restaurant or in a boardinghouse. Speed of delivery and speed of eating was everything. In the 1830s, an Englishman described breakfast at his boardinghouse:
Here was no loitering nor lounging; no dipping into newspapers; no apparent lassitude of appetite; no intervals of repose in mastication; but all was hurry, bustle, clamour, and voracity, and the business of repletion went forward, with a rapidity altogether unexampled. The strenuous efforts of the company were, of course, soon rewarded with success. Departures, which had begun even before I took my place at the table, became every instant more numerous, and in a few minutes the apartment had become . . . “a banquet-hall deserted.”
Another reported that New Yorkers spent “from five to ten minutes for breakfast, fifteen to twenty for dinner, and ten for supper. . . . Each person, as soon as satisfied leaves the table without regard to his neighbors; no social conversation follows.”
Later in the century, a French visitor observed, “In five minutes they manage to gulp down a certain amount of food, pay and go. An intelligent barkeeper attracts customers by the facilities he can offer for rapid feeding. ‘Try our quick lunch’ is stuck up in the streets.”
And there was noise. As an American reporter noted in 1869,
From 12 o’clock to 3 of the afternoon, the down-town eating-houses are in one continuous roar. The clatter of plates and knives, the slamming of doors, the talking and giving of orders by the customers, the bellowing of waiters, are mingled in a wild chaos. The sole wonder is how any one gets anything; how the waiters understand anything; how anything is paid for, or expected to be paid for. Everybody talks at once; everybody orders at once; everybody eats at once; and everybody seems anxious to pay at once.
Most lunchrooms were mom-and-pop shops that sold sandwiches, soup, and few other items. By the 1920s, lunchroom chains began to develop in New York. Most chains had only two or three establishments. These shared a name and were advertised as a system. Large chains might also have had central food distribution and preparation. One such chain was W. F. Schrafft’s, launched by Frank Shattuck in 1898 as a candy store in Boston. By 1915, Schrafft’s had extended its operation to New York City. By 1922, the chain had twenty-two stores.
Faster and more efficient ways of feeding workers continued to emerge in the city. One solution that developed was the Exchange Buffet, which opened in 1885 across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. It catered only to males, who proceeded down a long buffet containing items such as sandwiches, salads, and cakes to eat and tea, coffee, or milk to drink. They picked the foods that they wanted and juggled them in their hands to tall counters where they ate standing up. They bused their own dishes, tallied their own bill, and then told the cashier what he owed. This self-service operation based on the honor system was surprisingly successful, and the company opened thirty-five more establishments in Manhattan and Brooklyn during the next few years.
Other businessmen saw crowds surging about the Exchange Buffet and developed their own model. In 1889, William and Samuel Child opened their first lunchroom on the main floor of the Merchants Hotel. Cleanliness was an important part of the operation, and they dressed waitresses in white aprons and white caps. Unlike the Exchange Buffet, they catered mainly to women. They are also credited with introducing the tray, so that customers didn’t have to juggle their dishes. This was so successful that the brothers opened more cafeterias, more than one hundred by 1925.
Cafeterias particularly thrived in large institutions—corporate dining rooms; government offices; museums; military installations, such as Governor’s Island; and prisons, such as Riker’s Island. New York YMCAs opened their first cafeteria in 1916. New York schools soon opened cafeterias for their students. By 1929, the city had 786 cafeterias.
A restaurant chain that thrived during the Depression was Chock full o’Nuts, which was launched by a Russian immigrant, William Black, who had opened a nut stand in a basement in Times Square in 1926. The chain was successful, and Black opened eighteen additional shops around the city. When the Depression hit, he converted his nut shops into budget luncheonettes, charging a nickel each for coffee and a sandwich consisting of cream cheese, chopped nuts, and lightly toasted date-nut bread. He later added soup and pie to the menu. By the 1950s, he owned twenty-five outlets in Manhattan and two in Brooklyn. In 1953, he came out with his own brand of coffee, also called Chock full o’Nuts. It later expanded to a chain with 125 restaurants. Although the chain did not survive, its brand of coffee did.
Yet another type of self-service operation that thrived in New York was the coin-operated vending machine. They were developed in the United Kingdom in the 1880s. The Thomas Adams Gum Company began selling gum in vending machines on New York’s elevated train platforms in 1888. Coin-operated machines offered the means to sell food in many places without the need for a sales force. They took off nationally in 1901, when F. W. and H. S. Mills debuted penny-in-the-slot machines, which became ubiquitous across America shortly thereafter selling gum and candy.
Europeans began selling a wide variety of foods through vending machines, especially in transportation hubs. Philadelphians Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart ordered the coin-operated machines from a German firm and, in 1902, opened America’s first Automat. These were self-service operations that dispensed food through coin-operated machines with glass windows. Food, such as sandwiches, pies, coffee cake, cookies, pudding, hot dogs, vegetables, and side dishes, was prepared in advance and placed in glass compartments so that customers could see what they were buying. Heated or refrigerated compartments provided hot and cold food. Empty compartments were filled by workers who prepared food behind the row of machines.
In December 1902, James Harcombe, a New York restaurateur, opened the first Automat in New York. It was fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, but it had “an attractive front and a handsome interior,” reported the New York Times, and it should have, for Harcombe spent seventy-five thousand dollars in lavishly decorating the restaurant. Scientific American stated that, when compared with the average café, the Automat was “illuminated with extravagant splendor but is a dismal place compared with it.” He advertised it as “Europe’s Unique Electric Self-serving Device for Lunches and Beverages. No Waiting. No Tipping. Open Evenings until Midnight.” Prices ranged from a nickel to a quarter. To compete with high-end restaurants, the Automat offered a wild assortment of lavish dishes, including “lobster à la Newberg.” In addition to food and coffee, it also offered beer, wine, and cocktails. Despite widespread promotion, the restaurant did not thrive, and it closed about 1907.
Horn & Hardart expanded its operation to New York City in 1912, and within a few years, the company operated fifteen Automats in the city. In September 1922, the company opened a combination Automat cafeteria, which they claimed was the largest restaurant in the city with the capacity to feed ten thousand New Yorkers daily. (But one of the most poignant images of the Automat, painted by Edward Hopper in 1927, was a woman alone drinking a cup of coffee in an Automat.) In order to maintain the quality of its operations, the company opened a central commissary that supplied all of its operations in New York. Horn & Hardart did well during the 1920s and thrived during the Depression. In 1933, the company did something unusual—it hired Francis Bourdon, a classically trained chef who had worked at top restaurants in Europe and America, to run its commissary, a position he held for the next thirty-five years. He developed new recipes, gave the chain some prestige, and guaranteed that the quality of food remained the same in every outlet.
After World War II, Horn & Hardart expanded to fifty outlets in the city, and by 1950 most had converted into cafeterias. Then decline set in. It was a combination of issues—New York City began charging tax on food, and it was impossible to put pennies into the nickel slots. The company lost money on its popular high-quality coffee, so it upped the price to a dime. Business declined when they began to water down their coffee and decrease the quality of their food. Finally, fast-food establishments took away even more business. Within four decades, most automats were closed, many having been converted into Burger King outlets. The last Automat in New York closed in April 1991. But this was not the end of the concept. Many businesses and colleges have cafeterias, where workers and students can acquire food items through coin-operated machines, and of course, coin-operated candy, snack, and soda machines are ubiquitous throughout New York.
Cheap food was available from other eating establishments. By the 1880s, cheap hash houses were common. In these, customers acquired bread and butter, potatoes, and pickles for just fifteen cents. Hamburger steak was available for just eight cents. Even cheaper food could be had at the Italian basement eating houses, which served macaroni, toast, and coffee for a nickel. The winter of 1902 was extremely cold, and many New Yorkers were out of work. Bernarr Macfadden opened a cafeteria for the unemployed at City Hall Park. It charged a penny per course, and when it closed in the spring, it actually made a profit. When the Depression hit in 1929, Macfadden duplicated and expanded his concept. Yet another response to the Depression, at least for the customers who had some money, was the “all you can eat” restaurant. These were restaurants with chairs, tables, and waiters. Customers were charged an entrance fee—sixty cents or a dollar—and then they could eat all they wanted on any item on the menus.
High-End Restaurants
The French and Swiss never immigrated in large numbers to New York, but they had a disproportionate influence on New York food, for many were cooks, confectioners, chocolatiers, bakers, restaurateurs, and café owners. After the French Revolution in 1789, many French refugees came to the United States, where they shared the legacy of French cuisine. One of those who arrived on American shores was Captain Joseph Collet, who opened an ice-cream parlor. The French writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote admiringly that Collet had “earned a great deal of money in New York in 1794 and 1795, by making ices and sherbets for the inhabitants of that commercial town.” Collet opened the “Commercial Hotel”—a fancy name for a boardinghouse with a coffeehouse on the lower floor.
François Guerin opened a confectionery and a small lunchroom on lower Broadway opposite the City Hotel in 1815. He sold “imported and domestic confectionery, inviting specimens of pastry and cake, bottles of choice French cordials, fancy boxes filled with Parisian bon-bons interspersed with the fruits then in market.” He also served soup and sandwiches and sardines. Louis Curtillet, an immigrant from Provence, sold “meat pies, plum puddings, confections de crème glacées, and punch à la Romaine.” In the 1840s, John Pinteux’s Café de Mille Colonnes offered coffee, juleps, and ice cream. It was patronized by the “gayer bloods, who loved glare and glitter and the noise of Broadway.”
In December 1827, Swiss immigrants John and Peter Delmonico opened a little café on William Street, near the harbor. It had just six tables; there, patrons could enjoy European-style pastries, ices, bonbons, cakes, and coffee. In March 1830, the café was expanded into a fine dining establishment that was listed in the city directory as “Delmonico & Brother, Restaurant Français.” After a fire swept lower Manhattan and their café was destroyed, the Delmonico brothers bought Collet’s café and boardinghouse, while they began to construct a new restaurant.
An enlarged Delmonico’s on South William Street opened in 1837. It offered salads and other novel French dishes, and the restaurant became very popular. Its eleven-page menu listed a full selection of French dishes (with English translations opposite), such as Potage aux huitres, Salade de chicorée, Blanquette de Veau à la Perigueux, Meringues à la crème, and an impressive French wine list with Bordeaux, vintage 1825. Delmonico’s quickly became the city’s premier restaurant where the upper classes and visiting dignitaries dined. While some meals could be had for less than fifteen dollars for three, other meals weighed in at more than eighty dollars per person, a very costly meal at the time. But the food was good. Frederick Marryat, an English naval officer, traveler, and novelist, visited Delmonico’s and other French restaurants in the 1830s and reported that they served “excellent” French food. A visiting Frenchman, Georges Savuvin, went even further, when he reported in 1893 that the food served at Delmonico’s was “better and more sumptuous” than that served “in the best restaurant in Paris.”
Newspapers and magazines reported on the lavish dinners for the city’s upper crust, as well as visiting dignitaries and royalty. One dinner and ball attended by eight hundred of New York’s social elite cost $350,000, an exorbitant amount in 1897. Another dinner for forty guests cost $10,000, or $250 per dinner, again an unheard of amount at the time.
Annual Banquet of the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York, Delmonico’s restaurant, February 22, 1906. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-139580
Delmonico’s success encouraged the establishment of other French restaurants. By the mid-1830s, many New York hotels served French food in their restaurants. The Astor House employed French chefs to run its dining rooms, and a number of these men became quite famous. The French influence was clearly visible on the menus of these restaurants as well as the way the food was served via service à la française (service in the French style), meaning that all food was served at the same time. Carl Schurz, a German visitor to the city in the 1850s, described this experience at the Union Square Hotel restaurant:
Some fifteen or twenty negroes, clad in white jackets, white aprons, and white cotton gloves, stood ready to conduct the guests to their seats, which they did with broad smiles and curiously elaborate bows and foot scrapings. A portly colored head-waiter in a dress coat and white necktie, whose manners were strikingly grand and patronizing, directed their movements. When the guests were seated, the head-waiter struck a loud bell; then the negroes rapidly filed out and soon reappeared carrying large soup tureens covered with bright silver covers. They planted themselves along the table at certain intervals, standing for a second motionless. At another clang of their commander’s bell they lifted their tureens high up and then deposited them upon the table with a bump that made the chandeliers tremble and came near terrifying the ladies. But this was not the end of the ceremony. The negroes held fast with their right hands to the handles of the silver covers until another stroke of the bell resounded. Then they jerked off the covers, swung them high over their heads, and thus marched off as if carrying away their booty in triumph. So the dinner went on, with several repetitions of such proceedings, the negroes getting all the while more and more enthusiastic and bizarre in their performances.
The French themselves shifted to service à la russe (service in the Russian style) during the mid-nineteenth century. This meant that food was served in courses—typically appetizers, salad, soup, and entrées followed by desert. American restaurants did not convert to service à la russe until later in the nineteenth century.
French cookery in New York reached a peak at the beginning of the twentieth century, when hotel restaurants run by French or French-trained chefs—at the Waldorf Astoria, Essex House, and Ritz-Carlton, among others—were among the nation’s premiere eating places. Wealthy Americans also hired French chefs to preside over their household kitchens.
New forms of restaurants emerged during the late nineteenth century. Louis Sherry opened an elegant restaurant at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street. The restaurant’s decor and its French chefs soon attracted New York’s social elite as well as those who loved good food. To prepare the food, the restaurant had sixteen chefs and two hundred kitchen employees. Sherry’s was soon followed by others. Thomas Shanley, an Irish immigrant, opened a small restaurant on Twenty-third Street in 1891. It was in the old theater district. He drew theatrical celebrities from the theaters, and his business grew. The theater district moved to Times Square, and in 1910 Shanley moved his restaurant to Broadway between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets. He offered “light entertainment” in addition to the food and liquor. It had an opulent interior, and its food was good and costly but of secondary importance to customers who came for the entertainment, for it had a full orchestra, the first restaurant in the city to have one. Shanley is credited with being the first in New York to launch what would later be called a lobster palace. It was an overnight sensation.
Other lobster palaces emerged about the same time. These included those owned by George Rector and Captain James Churchill, and J. B. Martin’s Café Martin, Maxim’s, John Murray’s Roman Gardens, Reisenweber’s, Bustanoby’s, and many more. Typically, they were built on or near Longacre Square (later renamed Times Square), the city’s theater district. Lobster palaces were expensive, elegantly decorated, and sported live entertainment, such as orchestras, dancing, and floor shows. They served a variety of dishes, but lobster was their signature dish. They also possessed liquor licenses permitting them to serve alcohol throughout the night, and in many ways they were the city’s first nightclubs. Selling liquor was where they made their profits.
High-end restaurants also made much of their profits from the sale of liquor that preceded, accompanied, and followed a meal. French restaurants, for instance, particularly featured expensive imported wines as part of their dining experience, and the sale of alcoholic beverages played an important role in their profits. When Prohibition went into effect in 1920, restaurants, particularly lobster palaces and haute cuisine establishments, were hit hard. Louis Sherry saw the writing on the balance sheet and closed his restaurant a few months before Prohibition went into effect. Shanley’s closed in March 1923. After nearly a century of glorious history, Delmonico’s did the same in May 1923.
There were notable exceptions. The Russian Tea Room opened on Fifty-seventh Street in 1927. Initially, it served as a gathering place for those fleeing the Russian Revolution, but it quickly attracted a wide audience by offering Russian and Continental cuisine. Sardi’s restaurant, opened in the theater district by Italian immigrant Melchiore Pio Vincenzo Sardi (aka Vincent Sardi) in 1927, served Italian and French fare; its most popular dishes in 1930 were Moules mariniére, the classic Normandy mussel dish, bouillabaisse, and filet of sole. Other popular exceptions included the “21” Club, which sold liquor throughout Prohibition, and The Colony, which was reborn in the midst of Prohibition. Before World War I, The Colony was a somewhat shady bistro with a gambling den upstairs. Gene Cavallero became headwaiter in December 1919, and in 1921 he teamed up with two other waiters to buy the restaurant. They remodeled the premises in ten days and reopened with a menu of fine French cuisine. The Colony was almost immediately discovered by society matron Anne Vanderbilt (Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt Jr.), who was followed by other members of New York’s fashionable set. It was a very expensive restaurant, and its specialties were chafing dishes, game, and its hors d’oeuvres. By late 1920s, The Colony was so much the favored haunt of New York’s wealthy that the restaurant closed during the summer, its clientele having decamped for Europe.
Haute Cuisine Revival
Prohibition ended in December 1933, but by this time, the country was in the depths of the Depression and few restaurants served haute cuisine. This changed after New York hosted the 1939 World’s Fair. Located in Flushing Meadow in Queens, the fair had an optimistic theme, “Dawn of a New Day,” where visitors could glimpse “the World of Tomorrow.” The Food Zone included 150 cows sponsored by Borden and a wheat field—the city’s first in sixty-eight years—sponsored by Continental Baking, makers of Wonder Bread. The Beach Nut exhibit illustrated how coffee was grown, harvested, and roasted. Standard Brands exhibited Fleischman’s Yeast, Royal Desserts, and Chase & Sanborn Coffee.
More than eighty restaurants were located around the fairgrounds. The Japanese restaurant served sukiyaki; the Italian, spaghetti; the Swedish, a smorgasbord; and the Mexican, chili con carne. Two restaurants emerged from the fair to become New York culinary landmarks. One was opened by Dario Toffenetti, an Italian immigrant and Chicago restaurateur. He acquired the concession for a restaurant at the fair and decided to open a restaurant in New York. At Forty-third Street and Broadway, he built a large modern restaurant complete with an escalator and massive chandeliers. It could seat a thousand people, and the day it opened in August 1940, it served 8,500 customers. It offered simple, low-cost food, such as “Spaghetti a la Toffenetti with Fresh Meat Sauce,” supposedly derived from an obscure manuscript that Mrs. Toffenetti had located in Bologna. Toffenetti’s restaurant was open twenty-four hours a day, and for almost thirty years it was one of New York’s most popular restaurants, serving thousands of customers daily.
A very different type of restaurant was launched by Henri Soulé, the maître d’hôtel at the restaurant at the French Pavillon. The restaurant, which the New York Times called “an epicure’s delight,” served classical French food. Wealthy New Yorkers were familiar with the French cuisine; during Prohibition and the Depression, they had traveled to France, where they dined at the world’s finest restaurants. The French restaurant at the World’s Fair, however, attracted a wide audience. Most fairgoers had never before sampled French food; they did so at the Pavillon, and they liked what they tasted.
Henri Soulé remained in New York when the fair ended and opened a restaurant on New York’s fashionable Upper East Side in 1941. Hoping to trade on the restaurant’s popularity at the fair, he named the establishment Le Pavillon. Soulé was joined by many of his former colleagues, such as Pierre Franey, who had been the poisson commis (assistant fish cook). Soulé attracted the rich and famous to dine. Le Pavillon was a solid success from the beginning as New York’s social and economic elites—Astors, Cabots, Kennedys, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts—dined regularly at the restaurant. It survived World War II and thrived during the 1950s. Soulé made a virtue of snobbery. Presumably to protect the sensibilities of his refined customers, he refused entrance to those who did not meet his standards. Soulé is also said to have coined the term “Siberia,” referring to the tables closest to the kitchen (considered the worst in any restaurant).
When Henri Soulé died in 1966, the New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne eulogized him as the “Michelangelo, the Mozart and Leonardo of the French restaurant in America.” Soulé’s greatest achievement, according to Claiborne, was his nurturing of restaurateurs and other influential individuals on America’s food scene. Pierre Belin and Paul Arepejou, who started at Le Pavillon, opened La Poinière in 1954. Roger Fessaguet, who had moved from Le Pavillon to La Caravelle, made La Caravelle the “incubator for some of New York’s better-known chefs.” Michael Romano worked with Fessaguet until restaurateur Danny Meyer tapped him to become the chef at the Union Square Café. David Ruggerio went from La Caravelle to Le Chantilly, and Cyril Renaud became the chef and owner of Fleur de Sel.
Le Pavillon survived only a few years after Soulé’s death, but French cuisine continued to thrive in New York. A host of restaurants serving a variety of regional French cuisines as well as Escoffier’s classics appeared in New York. Lutèce opened in 1961, with Chef André Soltner at the helm. For more than three decades, Lutèce was considered one of the finest restaurants in America. Le Périgord, opened by Georges Briguet in 1964, still upholds the tradition of fine French cuisine in New York. Sirio Maccioni, who came to work at The Colony in 1956, opened Le Cirque with Jean Vergnes in 1974. It has moved premises and transformed itself over the years, but Le Cirque continues to employ notable chefs, and alumni of its kitchens include Alain Sailhac, Jacques Torres, Daniel Boulud, David Bouley, and Michael Lomonaco.
Among New York City’s longest-tenured French restaurants are La Grenouille and La Mangeoire, serving classic and country cuisines, respectively; of more recent vintage but highly regarded are Restaurant Daniel, Jean Georges, and Le Bernardin.
Management Groups
Joe Baum, a graduate of the Cornell’s hotel management school, was hired by Rikers Restaurant Associates (later renamed Restaurant Associates) in 1953. It operated twenty-four restaurants in the New York City area. They had just acquired the Newarker, a restaurant at Newark Airport, then a small regional airfield. Baum was placed in charge of developing the Newarker.
Baum hired Albert Stockli, a classically trained Swiss chef, to run the kitchen. Together, they devised an unusual menu with showy, attention-grabbing features—large portions, sparklers in birthday cakes, and lots of dishes that were flambéed tableside. The restaurant lost twenty-five thousand dollars in that first year, but it soon became a “destination” eating place. Despite its location in the airport, the Newarker served a thousand customers a day—most of them not airline passengers—and grossed twenty-five million dollars a year.
Baum was placed in charge of the Restaurant Associates’ specialty restaurants in 1955. He hired big-name consultants, such as James Beard, Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, Barbara Kafka, and Rozanne Gold, to help him think through restaurant concepts and menus. Then he recruited top talent to design and run the restaurants. He is credited with popularizing themed restaurants, such as the Aurora (French), the Hawaiian Room at the Lexington Hotel (Polynesian, complete with hula dancers), La Fonda Del Sol (South American), Zum-Zum (German sausage), Quo Vadis (French and Italian), the Forum of the Twelve Caesars at Rockefeller Center (Roman), and many others, such as the Brasserie, Hudson River Club, Café Greco, Tavern on the Green in Central Park, and The Four Seasons. The expenses were enormous, and Restaurant Associates began to lose money. Baum was let go in 1970.
A few weeks after leaving the Restaurant Associates, Baum was hired by the New York Transit Authority to design a world-class restaurant at the top of the brand-new World Trade Center and to consult on other eateries in the buildings. He developed the Market Bar and Dining Rooms on the ground-floor concourse, Windows on the World at the top of the North Tower, and twenty other eating places for the massive new office complex. Windows on the World opened in April 1976, quickly becoming a landmark and a destination restaurant for tourists and New Yorkers alike. From then on, Baum continued to design restaurants. He took over and redesigned the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center, which reopened in 1988. When Joe Baum died, in 1998, he and Restaurant Associates had created 167 restaurants.
With some notable exceptions, such as The Four Seasons, most of Baum’s restaurants have not survived, but his approach has influenced many who came after him: the chefs and restaurateurs Drew Nieporent, Daniel Boulud, Danny Meyer, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Stephen Hanson, and David Chang have followed in Baum’s footsteps, designing new restaurant concepts in New York and around the world. Drew Nieporent, a Cornell hotel management graduate, worked at Tavern on The Green, before he formed the Myriad Restaurant Group, which operates Tribeca Grill, Nobu New York City, The Daily Burger at Madison Square Garden, and thirty-two other restaurants. Danny Meyer created the Union Square Hospitality Group, including the Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, Shake Shack, The Modern, Café 2, Terrace 5 and others. Korean American David Chang opened his first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, in the East Village in 2004. He then opened other restaurants in New York and other cities and created the Momofuku restaurant group to manage them.
Restaurant Workers
The first modern fast-food chain to hit New York was White Castle, which arrived during the Depression. Initially, it sold nickel square hamburgers, soda, coffee, and pie. Hamburgers were prepared on an assembly-line format to fulfill orders as quickly as possible. Outlets stayed open late at night and were often located near businesses, such as newspaper plants, that operated twenty-four hours a day. It served as a model for other fast-food chains that moved into the city after World War II. These included McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Au Bon Pain, Chipotle, Starbucks, Jamba Juice, and many more.
Today, fast-food chains employ fifty thousand workers in the city. Most are paid minimum wage (currently $7.25 an hour), and most work only part time. Few receive medical insurance, paid sick days, or vacation days. In November 2012 and again in April 2013, workers at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and other fast-food chains went on one-day strikes asking for a living wage.
Immigrants form the main workforce behind the food service industry and their suppliers, such as meatpackers, and farm laborers, such as those who pick tomatoes. According to the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, 47.5 percent of the restaurant workers in the city were foreign born in 1980; by 2000, this had reached 64.5 percent; today the number is much higher. More than 125,000 immigrants—many undocumented—are employed in the city’s restaurants. Most are paid minimum wage—and some even less. The number of undocumented workers in restaurants is likely to increase in future years. As a Manhattan chef and restaurateur explained in 2011, “We always, always hire the undocumented workers. . . . It’s not just me, it’s everybody in the industry. First, they are willing to do the work. Second, they are willing to learn. Third, they are not paid as well. It’s an economic decision. It’s less expensive to hire an undocumented person.”
In 2011, 69 percent of all small restaurant and other food service business owners in New York City were foreign born. In other culinary sectors, immigrants make up an even larger percentage: 84 percent of small grocery store owners were foreign born, as are most of those employed in other restaurants and grocery stores. A 2007 report, “Unregulated Work in the Global City,” conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, stated that in the food retail industry, “the workforce is almost exclusively immigrant, from Mexico, Central America, Korea, Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Delivery workers are mostly African immigrants.”