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@restauranthistorian
My favorite linen postcards
When I began this blog I was inspired by my vintage postcard collection. I had focused my collection on restaurant cards and had built up a sizable collection. It all seemed so easy! But then I began to inquire about the history of restaurants in ways that exceeded my collection. In many cases it made more sense for a blog to feature pictures of the owners, or menus and advertisements. And, of…
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Dance and dine at the Cow Shed
I was looking through my collection of restaurant menus, when I spotted the Cow Shed and remembered that I had always wondered about that name. Was there really once a genuine cow shed in the middle of Detroit that it was commemorating? [Above, 1935 menu cover] I discovered that it was a night club that had opened in 1933 in an unoccupied building that had long housed a fire station. No cows. So…
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Bad restaurant food
Were 19th century European visitors to the United States inclined to be super critical about the food they ate in restaurants and hotels? It’s hard to know the answer, but they were often negative. An example was a woman from Scotland who grew so used to bad food that she was surprised to find a good breakfast in La Junta, Colorado, in the 1880s. She bonded with the proprietor, a German who had…
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The long life of the Marston ‘empire’
The Marston family ruled their restaurant kingdom in Boston for a very long time, just short of 80 years. It all began modestly. Seafaring Russell Marston, the family’s patriarch, was the first. He went to sea at age 14, and after 17 years in which he ended up with his own ship, he docked and became a restaurant operator. Restaurant is a rather glorified term for his first venture on land. He…
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Bob’s Bar-B-Q
I’ve been exploring my postcard and ephemera collection and picking out favorites to see what I can find out about them. Judging from the geographical identification on this card – indicated by highway numbers and miles from towns, it clearly was a roadside enterprise catering to car and truck traffic on Route 20 in Indiana. What I didn’t know is how very popular it was, not just with truckers…
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Rolling dessert carts
A few years back I published a post called “tableside theater” that looked at cooking performances at guests’ tables in restaurants. This sort of dining room drama occurred mainly in restaurants that wanted to give a sense of luxury that justified a higher price than the meal might otherwise command. [Above: Hotel Bismarck, Chicago] Another aspect of restaurant theater, usually less dramatic,…
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“Let’s order out”
There are few Americans who wouldn’t recognize that the insulated carrying case shown here is for pizza delivery. Of course, pizza is easier to deliver than an entire meal. Yet I just read a story in the New York Times that claimed currently, “Almost three of every four restaurant orders weren’t eaten in a restaurant . . .” And it reported that a National Restaurant Association survey from last…
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A favorite cafe photo
It’s snowing outside, a perfect day to look through my collection of restaurant images. This is one of my best photos and I’ve always wondered about the place’s history. The man in the foreground is almost certainly Mr. Hart. He proudly stands next to his new car, a 1940 Hudson, while his employees smile in the background. He seems unaware that his restaurant faces a doubtful future. The…
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SIP-n-NIP
From time to time I become the lucky recipient of donated restaurant images. The most recent one is shown above, a charming small photo of a drive-in where the sign looks almost as large as the building. The question was, where was it? It took quite a bit of sleuthing to find the answer, with searches of on-line resource by both the donor and me. Luckily for me, the donor also became a…
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Box Stew
Today, going back at least to the 1950s, box stew has meant a slow-cooked beef stew. But in the 19th century and into the start of the 20th, it meant an oyster stew that featured what were referred to as box oysters. [Above: Bill of fare from a Washington, D.C. dining saloon in 1869] They were also referred to as “Fulton Market box oysters”, indicating that they were highly identified with New…
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The mystery restaurant critic
I recently bought the three newsletters by San Francisco restaurant reviewer Jack Shelton shown above. At least I thought they were written by Jack Shelton. But I was wrong. He began producing the newsletters in 1967, eleven years after he came to Sausalito, near San Francisco. His main occupation was producing direct mail advertising and fundraising appeals. But in 1959, before beginning his…
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Dining Chinese in the 1800s
Almost as soon as the Chinese began arriving in San Francisco in the 1850s their restaurant dishes became news of interest. A story appeared in major dailies in 1849 which observed that there were “two restaurants in the town, kept by Kong-sung and Whang-tong, where very palatable chow-chow, curry and tarts are served up by the Celestials.” [Above: early 20th century, San Francisco, when the…
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A grandiose failure?
It’s difficult to assign a definite cause to the short life of Raphael’s, a Chicago restaurant that opened in October 1928 and seemed to have closed by the following July. It would make perfect sense if it had failed after the Wall Street crash at the end of October 1929, but it seems to have closed while the boom was still in progress. [Above: Detail of a platter from Raphael’s shown below, with…
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Newspapers & restaurants
Newspaper workers, especially reporters and pressmen, made up a significant part of urban restaurant patrons in the 19th century and much of the 20th. Early on most of them were men, dropping in at all-night eateries of which there were many. Such eating places tended to choose locations close to the newspapers which were often grouped together in areas of a city referred to as “newspaper row.”…
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More about odd restaurant names
When I started looking up strange business names for restaurants I was thinking this was something in the past. I was so-o-o-o wrong. It’s impossible to say how many there are – or how many there have ever been, but now I’m convinced that they are as popular as ever, probably even more so than in the past. [Denver Post comic strip, 1997] This was strongly confirmed when I discovered a current…
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Heroism at Lunch, cont'd.
I am republishing this post that I originally presented ten years ago, because of the September 4 death of Joseph McNeil, age 83. The Greensboro lunch counter has been on exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. since the 1990s when it was acquired from Woolworth’s. It will be one of 250 items featured in a show of “revolutionary objects” at the museum…
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Restaurant psychology
My last post about a restaurant designer who applied psychology to his work inspired me to look further into this subject. I discovered that when the restaurant world was experiencing hard times there was a turn toward psychology, though of course that wasn’t the only inspiration. In the 1920s, when liquor sales became illegal, expensive restaurants were inspired to look harder for ways to…
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