SEPTEMBER 2016
I love restaurants. I’m a serial eater-out, prowling New York for an uncommonly delicious dinner, at a bargain price, cooked by someone else. And never mind if the meal turns out to be disappointing. There is always the promise of the next meal, the next new place, and besides, the pleasures of eating privately in public tend to compensate for most culinary catastrophes that do not involve a cab to the emergency room after the latest hole-in-the-wall around the corner serves me last week’s clams. My husband says that I never learn; if there’s a new restaurant in our neighborhood, I try it.
Given that Paul Freedman’s new book, Ten Restaurants That Changed America, is largely a history of eating out in this country, it’s worth noting that the “restaurant,” at least as food scholars define it, is historically quite recent. The word comes from the French restaurer, to restore, and was coined in the 1760s, after a nutritionally minded Frenchman known only as Boulanger (his first name has disappeared from the annals of gastronomy) decided to open a place in Paris offering a choice of “restorative” meat broths, along with tables to sit at, wine to sip, and possibly a bit of cheese or fruit to end the meal. (BOULANGER SELLS RESTORATIVES FIT FOR THE GODS, the sign on his door said.)
People, of course, had been eating out for several millennia by the time the mysterious M. Boulanger boiled down the bones for his first soup. Cooking pots, set deep into stone counters, lined the main thoroughfares of ancient Rome. Street vendors in Southeast Asia hawked all the fixings you would need for an exceptionally tasty lunch or dinner, much as they do today. Inns served travelers from whatever provisions happened to be in the innkeeper’s wife’s kitchen; respectable women, forced by circumstances to travel alone, were expected to dine in their rooms (the beginning of room service); and couples could eat together downstairs in a room off the bar, which was reserved for men. What the French call maisons de rendezvous, not to mention the better brothels, served lunch and dinner to their guests—something I discovered toward the end of lunch one afternoon at an excellent restaurant near Tangier, when couple after couple (there were only couples) began to scamper upstairs with their bottle of amontillado before the cheese and the quince paste were even cleared. The great feasts of the aristocracy were cooked in the castle by a battery of chefs and consumed in vast dining rooms, where men and women could mingle freely. Status came with an invitation, not a reservation. The wealth that counted was measured in hectares, exclusivity was what you conferred on the friends (and more important, the enemies) you fed at your domain, and as likely as not, your menus were based on Cardinal Richelieu’s famous dinner parties—fancy and, obviously, French.
The first commercial appropriation of seigneurial haute cuisine was a Paris restaurant that opened in the late 1770s—ten years before the storming of the Bastille and, appropriately, situated on the Rue de Richelieu. It was called La Grande Taverne de Londres, perhaps to signal its neutrality in the coming domestic head roll, a mile away on the Place de la Concorde. Fifty years later—with new money already flowing into New York by way of mining and stockyard barons, railhead property speculators, futures traders, and the politicians whose pockets they lined—two entrepreneurial brothers from Switzerland, Giovanni (soon to be John) and Pietro (soon to be Peter) Del Monico, raised the money to open the first important French restaurant in the United States. It was at 2 South William Street, in the heart of the financial district, and it came with 80,000 square feet of seriously opulent dining space, including, in the Paris tradition, private rooms available upstairs for negotiating business deals or, more frequently, the pleasant combination of adultery and dinner. The brothers and their descendants—in particular, a nephew by the name of Lorenzo, who turned out to be a visionary restaurateur—followed the money steadily and successfully uptown until at one point there were four Delmonico’s in the city, and in the third to open, a French chef named Charles Ranhofer, who in short order became the most celebrated chef in the United States. Together, Lorenzo Delmonico and Charles Ranhofer generated a passion in the public for their consummate if somewhat overwrought French food, a passion that began to chip away at the social wall between the city’s established first families and its new moneyed classes. If you were able to read a menu that ran to more than a hundred dishes (one of the pleasures of Ten Restaurants is its reproductions of dozens of menus), and had the time to linger over fourteen courses, you could go to Delmonico’s, and everyone who could did.
Delmonico’s, fittingly, is the first of Freedman’s ten restaurants. It lasted, in its various locations, for nearly a hundred years, during which time it established its style of haute cuisine as the gold standard in American dining and spawned generations of imitations in big cities across the country. It remained the standard until its name was sold by the family in the 1920s, and its lingering reputation was eventually surpassed by the sanctum sanctorum of Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon, another of Freedman’s ten. Le Pavillon was a seriously snooty place that in fact began as a tourist restaurant in the French pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, but by the 1950s it had morphed into an East Side gastronomic temple, where the possibility of dinner was conferred on a chosen few by its imperious patron, and nobody else could get a table. The fact that I ate there often (or at all) was entirely thanks to my friend and journalism’s budding gourmand R. W. Apple, who at the time was a correspondent for the overnight shift at NBC News and testing the limits of an already famous expense account. I was a graduate student living down the hall and subsisting on Milton, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and tuna curry (as in a can of tuna, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a tablespoon of curry powder).
Le Pavillon set the midcentury style for fine French dining in New York—much of it classic brasserie fare refined by its estimable chef, Pierre Franey, into an almost ambrosial simplicity. Meanwhile, the front of the house, ruled by Soulé’s moody assessments of who mattered and who did not, kept customers in line through what Freedman calls the “intimidating ordeal of trial by snobbery,” and replaced the dread of a curdled sauce with the dread of a table in Siberia (a fate visited on Harry Cohn, the CEO of Columbia Pictures, when he bought Le Pavillon’s building, in the mid-fifties). It may be that Soulé himself shared the anxieties of a new urban postwar society eager to reconfigure old distinctions between different kinds of money and status. But, as chef after chef escaped his reign of terror and opened admirable French restaurants of their own—twelve in New York alone—that legacy was bound to pall.
Paul Freedman is a social historian—a medievalist by training, known in academic circles as the author of books such as Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, a classic study of the spice trade as it affected taste and status in European culture in the Middle Ages; and now, among foodies, as the paterfamilias of the food-history program at Yale, where he teaches and where he has broken down another kind of exclusivity by inviting chefs, food scientists, and writers to teach and speak. He has spent the better part of the past ten years eating out, and it is clear from the first few pages of Ten Restaurants that those restaurants are not the whole story he has to tell, but simply what you could call transformative prototypes—platforms from which to open a discussion of the way America eats, the ethnic and racial and regional and class and immigrant realities that its kitchens represent, and the entrepreneurs with the passion or the wisdom or simply the ambition to embrace (and profit from) the simmering of the stockpot of social change.
A particularly illuminating example is the story of the Mandarin, the San Francisco restaurant presided over by Cecilia Chiang, an elegant and by all reports warmly hospitable woman who had grown up before the war in a fifty-three-room Peking palace, and who eventually made her way to California to serve what the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen famously anointed as “the best Chinese food east of the Pacific.” Established in 1960, it was one of the first upscale Chinese restaurants in America, as well as one of the first to offer authentically Chinese fare to the yang guizi—“white devils” is the common term—who ate there, as opposed to the bland Chinese-American dishes invented and served, at the time, almost anywhere beyond the precincts of the country’s teeming Chinatowns. (In Providence, where I grew up, the Sunday-night takeout menu of our one neighborhood Chinese restaurant consisted entirely of a bag of cold, crispy noodles and a combination carton known as “chow mein-chop suey mixed.”) Freedman’s chapter on the Mandarin is a forty-page lesson in the history of Chinese immigration—from the indentured coolies who laid the tracks for the western end of the Transcontinental Railroad (many of whom were left to die when the work was finished) to the cooks of an ongoing Chinese diaspora who are introducing the wildly various tastes and peoples of “China” to the West. There are now more Chinese restaurants in the country—40,000, Freedman says—than there are McDonald’ses, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined. And yesterday’s no-go Chinatowns have turned into thriving models of an ethnic-eatery tourist trade.
But in New York, the prize for selling the facts and fictions of ethnic bonhomie used to belong to the Italian restaurant Mamma Leone’s—the extra m Americanizing the word “mama” being one example—which, as the story goes, “opened” in 1906, when Enrico Caruso invited a group of friends to shell out fifty cents a head for a down-home dinner in his friend Luisa Leone’s living room. By the time Mamma Leone’s closed, nearly a century later, it was the city’s largest restaurant, with eleven dining rooms and 1,250 seats, not to mention more strolling accordionists than Manhattanites in sight. There were years when every tour bus entering the city was said to disgorge its passengers for an obligatory meal there, which made it an irresistible photo-op stop for sports celebrities, politicians, and college kids in New York for a weekend. Having once made that stop myself, I can report that the food, while leaden, introduced people who weren’t Italian to the idea of Italian food at a time when the pasta most Americans dipped into was a can of precooked Franco-American spaghetti clinging to a thin coating of sugary tomato sauce.
Then there is Antoine’s in New Orleans. It is one of the oldest restaurants in America—it dates from 1840—and continues to provide the kind of antebellum menu that Freedman describes and clarifies as Haute Creole cuisine, thus performing what for me is the invaluable service of defining the cultural and culinary differences between Creole and Cajun cooking. As spectacle, it makes upstarts like Mamma Leone’s look like summer stock. I went once with my husband at the end of 1969, and sat with the other tourists in one of the fourteen high-kitsch dining rooms where all the king’s men of Louisiana used to negotiate their deals, eating dishes so oversauced as to lose any particularity of flavor. (Freedman, who includes an appendix of recipes from each of his chosen restaurants, received, from Antoine’s, one for a dish called Oysters Foch, which involves glopping Sauce Colbert—itself a combination of a complicated tomato sauce and a warm Hollandaise, whipped slowly over a double boiler—onto cornmeal-fried oysters perched on foie gras–laden toast.) I ordered the Oysters Rockefeller, a recipe from Antoine’s turn-of-the-nineteenth-century kitchen and still promoted as a closely guarded secret, despite the dozens of versions available online today. The truth is that I remember nothing about those oysters or, in fact, about the rest of the meal, perhaps because later that night I conceived a beautiful daughter, somewhat hurriedly, in the middle of a hotel fire that we then managed to flee with two book manuscripts intact. How could a meal compete with that?
If you’re looking for true Southern comfort in Ten Restaurants, you might want to forget about Antoine’s and go straight to the chapter on Sylvia’s, the enduring soul-food restaurant on Lenox Avenue, near the Apollo Theatre, which a waitress from South Carolina named Sylvia Pressley Woods and her husband, Herbert, bought for twenty thousand dollars in 1962, transforming a local luncheonette into a celebration of the African-American kitchen that had seen her through a hardscrabble Southern childhood. Woods’s grandfather was hanged for a murder he did not commit; her father died of complications from German gas attacks suffered during the First World War. But her mother and grandmother, raising her on a farm with no elecriticity, no water, and only a mule for transportation, kept the culinary legacy of black America—what we now call Southern food—alive, warm, and sustaining on the kitchen table. (According to Freedman, “routine breakfasts” on the Pressley farm included “biscuits and syrup, grits, okra, tomatoes, and fried fish.”) By the time Woods died five years ago, at the age of eighty-six, black communities North and South knew her as “the queen of soul food,” a title that few who ever entered her restaurant would dispute. I ate at Sylvia’s for the first time a few years after it opened in the early sixties, invited by a boyfriend at a time when Harlem was widely considered a no-go zone for white people of either sex. (“Don’t tell your mother,” my boyfriend, who was black, said when we got on the uptown train.) The menu was plain but irresistible, with fried chicken and smothered chops and candied sweet potatoes and, tucked among the greens and black-eyed peas, platters of macaroni and cheese. What you felt at the time was the hearth, the comfort of a woman in the kitchen—whether in fact or in spirit, or whether it was a Luisa Leone or a Sylvia Woods herself. Since then, Sylvia’s has become a sprawling, landmark restaurant that can seat four hundred and fifty people. And yes, the tour buses stop there now.
New York, like Paris or London, still sets the style for the rest of its country, which may account for the fact that six of Freedman’s top ten are or were once New York restaurants. Schrafft’s, which began as a candy company in the 1890s, originated in New York and in its heyday, in the mid-fifties, maintained more than fifty locations in and around the city. In many ways, it was the prototype for the better national and regional chains that followed it, ensuring middle-class Americans affordable and dependable quality, along, alas, with the numbing conformity of most American tables—the difference being that Schrafft’s was primarily a place for women to eat. The Schrafft’s I knew best was at 61 Fifth Avenue, a few blocks north of my grandmother’s Greenwich Village apartment, and I got to eat there as a child whenever I visited. It remains, in memory, one of my favorite places—an intensely and intentionally feminine restaurant where you took off your white gloves to lunch on tea sandwiches, iceberg salads, creamed chicken, or more exotically, chicken à la king, unencumbered by brothers or even waiters, or for that matter, by any noisy males demanding attention, and consequently so tidy and appealing in retrospect that, reading about it now, I had to remind myself that this was the Eisenhower fifties, when women were not seated in most New York restaurants without a man to order for them, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of working women in the city were thus consigned to eating their paper-bag sandwiches on park benches or at their desks. Schrafft’s thrived under four generations of Shattucks, its founding family (most significantly, its women), and died, you could say, from feminism, in the late sixties. Freedman tells us that when women started demanding and at long last receiving equal rights as customers in the city’s restaurants, the chain tried to attract men by installing stand-up bars and even advertising the perks of a cocktail hour. No one came.
Schrafft’s was among the few restaurants in Freedman’s ten to open with an explicit social purpose, and to succeed in serving it. Another, surprisingly, was Howard Johnson’s, the brainchild of the testy and obsessively controlling entrepreneur from Quincy, Massachusetts, who gave it its name, its steep-roofed architecture, its orange and turquoise paint, and (for children) its thrillingly predictable menu—as in twenty-eight “personally created” ice-cream flavors, butter-grilled hot dogs, and deep-fried clams—and who in the process became the franchise food king of the American highway, providing millions of traveling families with a guarantee of the same fresh, tasty meals under any of its thousand orange roofs.
Johnson was not a populist. He began life with the burden of a family debt to pay and ended it a multimillionaire, with a yacht, three big houses, a penthouse on Sutton Place, a table at the Stork Club, and a taste for restaurants like Le Pavillon (although when it came to dessert, he much preferred HoJo’s ice cream, and according to his fourth wife, always kept ten cartons in the freezer.) But he was also in many ways a pioneer. He controlled the franchises he dispensed, supplied everything from their napkins to their food, and retained the right to cancel their contracts at the slightest breach. He saw, before anyone else, that we were now a country of cars, a people on the road, and that nobody else had thought to feed us properly. Like Schrafft’s, Howard Johnson’s was part of my childhood. Whenever and wherever we drove, I waited to spot the iron pole with its hanging logo—Simple Simon the Pieman, and Simon’s drooling dog—signaling the choice I would have to make between peppermint stick with hot fudge and marshmallow sauce in a sundae, or a double-scoop sugar cone with sprinkles. It was done in, Freedman says, by McDonald’s. Not the same thing at all.
Meanwhile, in the more rarefied pockets of Manhattan, prominent people had already taken up “power lunching”—a term coined some years later by the Esquire editor Lee Eisenberg—in the sleek, modernist splendor of the Grill Room at the Four Seasons restaurant. There, at the penultimate eatery on Freedman’s list, diners picked at simple seasonal American food, high-priced and superbly cooked, while surrounded by the seasonal flora selected by Philip Johnson, who designed the restaurant. Freedman rightly regards the Four Seasons, which opened in 1959, as an aesthetic and entrepreneurial triumph: a combination of the vision of the young Seagrams’s heir Phyllis Lambert, who talked her father, Samuel Bronfman, into commissioning the most beautiful new building in New York for his headquarters; the partnership of the two men she chose to create it, Mies van der Rohe and Johnson, his on-site architect and designer; and the determination of the businessmen—Joe Baum from Restaurant Associates, being the first and most determined—who nurtured its restaurant until a real-estate speculator took over the building and, this year, forced it to move out. But Freedman also knows that “seasonal” does not necessarily mean “local” in a city like New York, and that, for its powerful clientele, the prospect of being seen by similarly powerful people, all of them negotiating lucrative, glamorous deals in hushed tones, was perhaps the truly satisfying part of lunching back to the wall at one of the Grill Room’s coveted banquettes. What the Four Seasons did accomplish was the end of the three-hour, three-martini lunch, the kind followed by a nap at your desk. It is worth noting that by the time the restaurant closed this summer, the power brokers lunching at those banquettes were as toned and trim as a California surfer. They had daily sessions with their trainers, jogged in the park, played squash, and ate plenty of salad greens.
Which brings us to Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the tenth restaurant on Freedman’s list and by now the only one with a particular social mission to have succeeded not only in maintaining but in spreading it to, among other places, the California school system, the White House gardens, and the kitchen of the American Academy in Rome. I often ate there during a stint as a visiting professor at Berkeley, in the early 1990s, and by then it was already an institution, the unassuming, vine-draped shrine of a global culinary creed.
Chez Panisse opened in 1971, in a quirky, meandering house in Berkeley and, after a few rough years, was filtering not only the taste of France but the taste of Italy, Mexico, and Japan, to name just a few places, through an ur-locavore sensibility soon to be known as California cuisine. (The Momofuku-brand kitchen wizard, David Chang, is said to have called it “one fig on a plate” eating.) It was the first American restaurant to change the way I cooked at home, and given that the cookbooks produced there by Waters and her chefs were filled with dishes begging to be made “in season”—carrot soup with chervil, pasta with snow peas and salmon roe, pear ice cream with pear-caramel sauce—it nurtured my patience in Italy in the summer to wait for the surprises that a vegetable garden brings.
Reading Paul Freedman about America, stalking myself through the taste of meals at eight of his ten restaurants, each sampled for different reasons at different moments of my life, I began to draw the outlines of a world I shared with other people, people more or less like me, and to wonder what “like me” meant when it came to expectations of inclusion, of common flashpoints of reference, of understanding and participating in the coded language of what we eat and how it is prepared and who is sitting at all those tables around us in what we call a restaurant. I think that’s what Freedman intended us to do.
I missed, of course, Delmonico’s, which closed years before I was born, and to my regret, I also missed the Mandarin, in San Francisco, where I spent a couple of months in the late sixties, and perhaps because of this, rarely ventured out of Haight-Ashbury, where even the soy sauce came laced with Acapulco Gold. And I wish that Freedman had gone further afield in his travels, told the story of one exemplary Mexican restaurant in, say, Austin or Santa Fe; or of the first great steakhouse in Omaha or Chicago; or of one of the millennial beer-beard-and-baby places across the bridge in Brooklyn that have transformed (and democratized) eating out in this century. But for me, restaurants like Schrafft’s and Howard Johnson’s, with their wide demographic reach and the sense of community, however brief, that they created in the people who enjoyed them, balanced some of the privilege I had to acknowledge, the exceptional accidents and circumstances and associations of an East Coast life that accounted for my evenings at Le Pavillon, and my one power lunch at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, where I consumed an unseemly amount of lobster salad, steak, and frites while suffering the stares and whispers of the mover-and-shaker regulars, trying desperately but unsuccessfully to place me.
I’m not sure how either of those restaurants changed America, although they certainly changed New York. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that most Americans had actually ever heard of Le Pavillon or its overweening proprietor, even during his reign of terror among the city’s moneyed classes. Ten Restaurants is a book as much about the contradictions and contrasts in this country as it is about its places to eat. It is designed to keep you up, thinking, and as I did this summer, returning to its rich and often troubling pages.