Welcome, everyone.
I'm Susan Glassman. We are joined
tonight with two speakers.
So Elliott and Katie, if you'd both turn on
your video,
and Coryn, if you would turn on your
video now, too that would be great.
So, um as I said, I'm Susan Glassman, I am
the director of the Wagner Free
Institute of Science and
I'm thrilled to welcome you tonight to
our Weeknights at the Wagner
digital talk series. Tonight, we're
pleased to have two speakers:
historians and authors Elliott Shore and
Katie Rawson,
who will talk about a very important
cultural institution:
the restaurant. Their recent book, Dining
Out:
A Global History of Restaurants, looks at
the role that restaurants have played in
the history of technology,
race, gender, ethnicity, politics, and
almost any area of human endeavor you
can imagine.
And they will be sharing stories across
time and around the world and give you
an idea of
this sort of massive undertak-
undertaking that they did
in looking globally at restaurants. It
seemed particularly timely to hit this
topic
as our own ability to dine out, like so
much of the rest of our daily lives, has
fallen casualty to the pandemic.
So we're really looking forward to
Elliott and Katie
giving us some perspective on the places
where we go to eat
and where we do so much more. A few words
about the Wagner before we start:
for those who have never been or for
their first time on a program,
we are a natural history museum and
educational institution located
in Philadelphia. We were founded in 1855,
and we have a dual mission
to teach contemporary science to the
public and also to
interpret and preserve the Wagner's
historic building, which is a time
capsule of 19th century science.
It's pretty amazing, and someday when we
reopen,we hope you'll all come visit.
Tonight's talk is just one of many kinds
of programs that we offer, and as stated
in our name,
Wagner Free Institute, our programs are
all free
to make them truly accessible to
everyone.
We are located in a National Landmark
Building, which you can kind of get a
glimpse of from the picture behind me,
um and it houses a museum, a library, a
historic lecture hall, where
most of our programs normally take place.
So, on to tonight.
We're thrilled to welcome our two guest
speakers, Elliott Shore and Katie Rawson.
As I said, they are co-authors of the
recently published Dining Out: A Global
History of Restaurants.
Elliott is many things: a historian,
a widely published author, a librarian,
and
a organizational leader of many
organizations locally and nationally. Most recently he served as Executive
Director of the Association of Research
Libraries,
a non-profit that represents 124
research libraries across the U.S. and
Canada. He's Professor Emeritus of History at
Bryn Mawr College, where he also served
as
the Director of Libraries. And before
that, he was Director -
Library Director at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton.
Elliott has his PhD from Bryn Mawr
College and mas-
an  MS in Library Science from Drexel,
and also an MA in International History
from the London School of Economics; this
gives you an idea of why he covers such
a wide swath
of um amazing topics.
As I said, he's published widely
across a dizzying array of fields,
and I'll just give you a sampling:
history of advertising, history of
publishing,
history of radicalism, uh he's looked a
lot at German-American
culture and history, and of course, most
recently,
this big, big look at the history of
restaurants.
Katie is the Director of Learning
Innovation at the University of
Pennsylvania.
She previously was the Humanities
Librarian for English at Emory
University,
and prior to that, Coordinator for
Digital Research
at Penn. She has her PhD from Emory
in in their Institute of Liberal Arts
and an MA in English from the
University of Mississippi Oxford.
She's written extensively about food, its
social and cultural meanings and
manifestations,
including food and Faulkner as in
William,
labor and equality at the Waffle House
food chain,
and about American food ways. She also
focuses on the use of data in the
humanities and collaboration
in academia. Katie also has the special
distinction
of having won the door prize when she
attended the old Price is Right
when Bob Barker was host. I'm really
jealous of that.
Among other things, Elliott's a very
good friend of the Wagner and a member
of our advisory board.
We're meeting Katie for the first time
and we hope it won't be the last, but
we're grateful for them for joining us
tonight and we know you'll enjoy the
talk.
Finally a quick plug for the Wagner: this
program, like
almost everything we do, is free of
charge and it's our mission, as I said, to
make programs widely accessible.
Somehow we've managed to do that for 165
years,
and we're intending to keep it going. So
we've quickly adapted to make our
programs available online,
something we've never done before, while
while the building is closed.
But we need support to make that happen,
so if you enjoy tonight's program, as we
know you will,
and would like to see more, we hope
you'll consider making a donation or
joining the Wagner.
And I do want to thank everyone who is
already a member or who has contributed.
You make it possible for us to do this
work. So now I'm going to turn the
program over
to Katie and Elliott. Thanks for joining
us.
Hi, thanks for having us, um really
quickly, I'm gonna share my screen with
everyone, and then we'll get started.
Okay so tonight, we're going to talk
about
the history of restaurants in the
context of our current
moment. We'll begin with the origin of
restaurants and cities
before moving on to how restaurants have
been using
and innovating in technology to respond
to the things in their environments like
restaurants are doing
now. We're also going to talk about how
women
and Black people have shaped restaurant
culture and responded to discrimination
in restaurants.
And we're going to end by looking at one
story about a restaurant and a waiter
during a historical crisis of World War
II.
So let me just give a small introduction
to how this book
came to be. And we believe it is the
first
book that has tried to take on the entire
global history of restaurants, which of
course, is impossible.
And we um did it, we think, in a way that
would be interesting to folks through
stories and themes and some of those
themes you will, we will talk to tonight.
And as you can imagine, we will leave out
a lot of stories and we hope you will
come back to the book and read
the rest of the stories.
The beginnings of this book
were in the first actual real, really serious look at the history of
food,
and that was done by Paul Friedman,
and um it's called Food: The History of
Taste.
And in that book, there was a, I did a
chapter on dining out in the west and
this wonderful
um smallish press in London, Reaction
Books, which I can only
suggest to you as being a
wonderful place to look for
really interesting material, is
interested in books that have
scholarly precision but are written for
a general
educated public. So that's what we tried
to do with this book,
and we hope that you will
enjoy it. Paul Friedman has done a couple
of books you probably have heard of
beside The History of Taste, Ten
Restaurants that Changed America
was one of the ones that just came out.
And then he's done a history of American
restaurants, which
actually came out after the other one. So
he's um,
he is probably the dean of the history
of restaurants.
So there's a lot of lore around what's
considered the world's first restaurant.
A lot of people tell the history of
restaurants beginning in Paris
in the 1700s, but in our book, we actively
didn't want to do that.
And didn't do that because that is in
fact the history of restaurants; it is
longer than that. Instead, we started in
major cities
in China and in the Mediterranean. And we
then we covered Paris in a chapter that
also includes a lot of contested stories
um and a lot of gastronomic lore. And I
want to throw this to you, Elliott,
what is it about cities that makes
them
the places that breed our first
restaurants?
It's a good question, and before i try to
answer that, I want to say
what a restaurant is and why they
haven't been around forever.
If you think about what happens in a
restaurant, the food
is cooked for you, the
um you get to order from a menu,
you know in that menu there's a price
for what you're going to pay,
you're served by someone else,
and you pay at the end of the meal. And
you have choices
along the way. And we never think about
that, because we've been
in restaurants until recently, for most of
our lives.
So that notion, all of those pieces of
the puzzle,
do not come together until
the 11th century in China. And it's an
interesting kind of
a story of why all of those things
finally come together
there and there are essentially,
oh, four or five reasons for that.
The Song dynasty in the
11th century had two cities
that were enormous. They're um Kaifeng
and Hangzhou. Both had more than a
million
inhabitants. And the, these
million inhabitants were at the
crossroads
of a trading um the
the trading lanes in China. So if you
think about, they have a million
folks in 1100. Paris was
a pretty big city; it only had 300,000.
Milan had 200,000 folks, and poor old
London
only had about a 100,000 folks.
So we're talking about
a megacity in what would have been the
Middle Ages
in the west. So it's the size
of the um, the urban population,
the notion that it's a trading center
and therefore people are coming from
everywhere in China, and
um the third thing that happens right
away is ethnic restaurants.
The folks who came from the south
wanted to eat southern food; the folks
that came from north wanted to eat
northern food;
and some people were itinerant
traders, and some people were wealthy
merchants.
So every kind of restaurant and every
kind of food
was available. And we know this, this is
one of the interesting stories, we know
this because
the Chinese have kept records
of all of their
inhabitants and who lived where and what
happened at each
address. So we not only have the
addresses of the restaurants, we have the
menus
of the restaurants, and we have an
extraordinary
set of background material to look at.
And folks in the, um in the west
had some inkling of this because Marco
Polo
writes about the Hangzhou restaurants,
and many people thought it was fanciful,
but actually it can all be backed up by
the
work of the um,
by the archives in China. So then we move,
it takes 700 years until
there are restaurants in the west, and
for some of the same reasons. One reason
I left out,
two reasons I left out with China are
there were
small, everyone had small denomination
cash, which would have not been the case
in medieval Europe. And the other thing
was
a loosening of the social orders. So the
social orders
in China were loosening under the
Song dynasty.
And all of those factors led to the
creation of the restaurant. It takes
until
the 18th century in Paris
for that to happen. This is the Palais
Royal,
which was actually built for Cardinal
Richelieu
and then--in the 17th century. And then
was taken back
taken over by the or sold to the
king. And then in the 1780s
had reverted, it was sold by the king
to private investors and
it was kind of almost like a mall of
restaurants in the 1780s.
And they, the beginnings of restaurants
in Paris are a little bit less clear
because
it wasn't that important, actually, for
people to
um document that. They did not have the
kind of record-keeping that the Chinese
had.
And so there are uh contesting stories
of when exactly it happened and where it
happens.
But it happens probably in the 1760s
and within a few years, the entire
rest of the panoply of what a restaurant
culture was like
um develops. You can see this is um
another early
restaurant in Paris.
And it's um, the Palais Royale was a
palatial place;
the restaurants there were palatial.
And here is another
um, palatial restaurant in France, a
little bit later.
And then we have the development of a
very
complete culture around restaurants,
the culture of spectacle,
and the culture of reviews of
restaurants,
and manners of how you should act in
a restaurant. This is one of the most
famous and crazy--
can we go back a little bit--this famous
and crazy-looking
thing, it's a funerary feast, and this is
the guy,
Alexandre-Balthasar-Laurent,
who is responsible for the beginnings of
all of these,
um he's the first food critic, and he
actually
um for fun had
catered his own funeral, put a coffin on
the table,
invited, and he wanted to see how many of
his friends would show up, and then he had dinner with them. So he was kind of
a
cool guy or a little bit strange. He then
published a book that has all of the
essentially it's a list of all the
restaurants
in Paris and if they're good and if
they're not good, and if people didn't
like him, of course, just like any
reviewers,
he um he kicked them out of--he either
gave them a bad review or kicked them
out of the book. So
all of the kinds of things that we
know about today happen
in 18th century France. The restaurant
itself
is, of the type that we're talking
about, this
elite restaurant that starts in Paris
becomes an export, um
an export from France. It becomes one of
the things that France
exports throughout the entire west and
and into the east as well.
This is the first great cookbook
which
comes out in the early 19th century. And
then we start to see restaurants
of this sort throughout the world,
probably starting in the early
19th century, and
there there's one in
in New York City by the 1820s and 30s,
and there are hotel restaurants
and uh important restaurants all
throughout
Europe. And they're all have French chefs
using French recipes. This is the most
famous restaurant
in London, the Cafe Royal, where Oscar
Wilde hung out and gained an enormous
amount of weight.
So this is the, sort of the very quick
history
of the restaurant.
So Katie, um across the book we talked
about how people have used machines
in restaurants, from the cafe mechanique
to the Automat. Why do you think it's
important to tell *these* stories
about technology? Yeah, I
I think it's important that we tell
these stories because
in part, I think it's important because
they illuminate how labor works in
restaurants,
and then they also illuminate how
restaurants often
change in response to new technology,
clearly, but also
um external conditions. Which is
something that we're seeing right now,
right? We're watching yet another shift
in the way that restaurants work. So some
of the early technologies that we talk
about
as like ways that the restaurant becomes
the things that we know
um is things like the invention of
particular kinds of lamps.
So having gas lighting inside allowed
people to
stay out late to eat dinner at night. It
really changed culture. It also meant
that you could light streets
and that instead of it being that you
would want to go home for dinner because
otherwise you would like, be in the dark
with strangers,
that instead it became something that
was respectable and fashionable
to be out in public in the night.
We also talk a lot, and I think that it's
important to really consider
the back of the house. So much of
restaurant technology is, uh is
not the stuff that we as customers ever
see,
but it is the stuff that changes our
entire experience. So
uh gas stoves were just transformative
for restaurants. They
they did two main things: first of all,
they made it so that everybody didn't
die in the restaurant.
So before you had gas stoves, people
were working
over open fire, uh people who worked in
restaurants actually often died
young. Great chefs often died young
because of uh,
because of all the charcoal getting
into their lungs.
And then also you can, uh you can
maneuver fire so much more easily with a
gas stove, so it even changes the cuisine
that we have.
And then from that there's like a whole
litany of other
little things that restaurants give us
like sink traps.
So um Soyer who is like one of the
chefs that we talk about and restauranteurs, one of the things that he helps
invent is the sink trap because he gets
tired of people
in his kitchen spending all of their
time cleaning out sink drains.
things like griddles and ketchup
dispensers that are
part of the 20th century and really
transform how quickly
food can be distributed and how,
uh how much alike we can make it, how
homogeneous it
is. And then there are things that are
part of our organizational
technologies. So when we think about
something like the brigade de cuisine,
it's basically a way of running a
kitchen that really
transforms how many dishes can be made
at once
and who has skills in what kinds of
of cuisines. But
because we are in this very peculiar
moment
of COVID-19, one of the things we really
wanted to tell a story about
is the Automat.
So in the book, we we spend almost
a half of a chapter on the Automat. So
Automats are basically places
where you go and instead of having a
human give you your food,
you put in your money into a machine and
the machine magically gives you your
food.
So the very first auto mats
were actually much much early.
So we know that there were mechanical
drink dispensers
uh definitely in the
1700s and
perhaps back into ancient Greece. And
then
by the time we get to the early
restaurants in Paris, there's this place
called the cafe mechanique
that has an automatic coffee service,
which is super popular, it's basically
people see it as like
entertainment and kind of like a parlor
game. So there are like crowds and crowds
of folks
coming to get uh drinks that are served
not
by a waiter or waitress but by the
machine itself.
And then in 1896 we get the first
real Automats. So the kind of places
like uh
Horn and Hardarts. The first ones
are in Germany in 1896,
and then the first one comes to America
in 1902.
And it arrives in our fair city, in
Philly.
Joseph Horn had traveled to Germany,
and when he was in Germany, he went to an
Automat and he thought that it was just
amazing; he thought Americans would love
it.
So he went to the company that sold them,
Automat GMBH, and ordered one,
and uh they put it on a ship,
and it started across the ocean, and it
sank.
So America had to wait just a little
longer
for its first Automat, but they shipped
another version of it,
and people from the company even came
over and helped install it.
And it was a huge success. By 1941, there
were 147 of them
in the U.S., across the eastern coast.
And in part, part of the reason that they
were popular
is some of the same reasons that we see
this kind of touchless food experience
being popular now. There was really
this story about cleanliness and about
food safety. The idea that there, that
they were places with like
less germs.
And I think the other fantasy was
that, um that it was like a workerless
space, so you like didn't have to see
labor at all
even though clearly people were still
making food behind the scenes.
As a person in an Automat you yourself
were navigating the space, um but
but there weren't, there weren't
workers there, and so there was also this
like egalitarian sense and
and notion that people spread about like
what it meant to go to the Automat.
I love this picture very, very much.
I think especially now, when I know we
are all missing going to restaurants, I
do
love that this man has brought his
little dog to the Automat.
And you'll see that for the most part,
these people are doing okay with their
social distancing.
So the Automat in some ways became a way
not just for people to get food, but it
also became a way of thinking in the
food industry. So this notion
of shifting the labor of food to the
people who are eating it,
or to people, or to machines became
really
important. And uh,
this is yet another version of that.
So, conveyor belt sushi was another space
where people
wanted to make sure that you didn't have
to have waiters all the time.
Sushi is very expensive and
a guy named um, Yoshiaki
Shiraishi in Japan
had a restaurant in the 1950s, and he was
struggling a bit because sushi was
expensive,
most of the people in the area that he
lived in were factory workers; they
couldn't afford it.
So he went and toured at a beer factory
and was like, wait, the way that they are
moving beer around here,
Icould do that with sushi. And so he
built his own little conveyor belt to
put the sushi on so that he
could have fewer staff in the restaurant
and so that he could have
more space for food and less space
for people, so it's like a counter
situation.
And now, as you can see from this
picture, it has just exploded into an
industry
in the same way that the Automat did.
Like there was
initially a purpose that was about
business, but then there's like the
secondary thing that is like the
pleasure of interacting with a machine
for food.
And all of this at this point seems
actually
to have some amount of uh foresight to
it.
So this is a contemporary
Automat, it's an Eatsa. They
actually closed down
just a couple of years ago, but I think
that this is becoming familiar to all of
us, this notion of getting your food from
a cubby,
putting your order in through an app, um
and kind of like the touchless
experience of dining.
Katie, when we started writing this book,
we knew that women would be an important
piece of it.
We tell stories about women actively
working to make their lives
better in and through food service
across the past 400 years.
Can you tell us a couple of the stories
that really stand out to you and how you
unearthed them?
Yeah so um, women have always
been in restaurants, but they haven't
always been equally
welcome. So for a long time, there were
separate dining rooms for men and women
in many places. Or in lots of other
places,
like women just couldn't, respectable
women just couldn't go into restaurants.
There was just the notion that many
restaurants
weren't places for women to be. And one
of my favorite stories about women
pushing back against
this comes from New York in 1907.
so two women, Mrs. Blatch
and uh, and her friend,
they go to this restaurant called the
Hoffman House, they come up, they
are like, "We want to come in." And
basically,
the uh guy who's running it is like, "No,
you can't come in at all." Um
and instead of just turning away,
they basically
decided that they were going to sue. They
decided that they didn't
think that this was fair. They were
both
kind of famous suffragists, um and so
they sued, And the sad part was
that the court, um the court
agreed that they shouldn't not be able
to go to the restaurant. But instead it
said
that you had to have a separate dining
room. Right, so it continued
this kind of American legacy of thinking
that having separate spaces
for two kinds of people is like an
acceptable solution
uh to, to access.
Which all of us know isn't a long-term
successful solution.
And eventually, clearly, this changed
over time. But I think it's an
interesting example of
how, how people have been barred access
and for a long time. But the stories that
I
really love that we
explore in the book are about women who
are waitresses and who are entrepreneurs.
So this I think, is just a beautiful
picture from Japan. So starting
in Japan, there were waitresses in the
17th century.
And many of them are at places
that are along these kinds of roads
that people travel on, right. And so lots
of these women
are probably simultaneously
uh sex workers and also waitresses. So
they're called meschiona[?]
um and it's unclear,
so there probably were some of these
women who
really were just waitresses and some of
them also
probably were in the sex trade.
At the same time, there were places like
this place in this illustration
which clearly isn't, is
mostly just like a family restaurant. You
can see that the woman
that is serving food has a baby on her
back.
So even while there is like this long
history
of uh, women on the edge of
respectability
around being waitresses and people
assuming that people
who are waitresses are also sexualized,
we also know that there's like a long
history of women who are just making
ends meet. And even sex workers who are
just making ends meet.
In the--actually, I'm going to do this
in a slightly--
I'm going to flip my slides. So, in the
19th and 20th century
we see women who become waitresses
really as a way to
have their own money and their own
identity and to have their own lives.
And in, in Japan and
Taiwan there is this whole culture of
the
jokyû cafes, which are these cafes that
young women work in
and uh they are,
like people across the media are just
terribly upset
about what's happening with these young
women who are,
who are becoming westernized and they
like talk with men,
and they like move out of their homes,
and like what on Earth is happening.
And I think that this is like, such a
really beautiful illustration
of these two young women who are, who are
just
working, right? Which is like, one of the
things about this is that, like these
women were women who were establishing
their lives.
And they're part of a longer lineage of
this
happening with women waitresses. So in
the 19th century,
um in America, Harvey Girls
were basically the waitresses for
these, these railroad restaurants. So,
they were restaurants that would have
been at railroad stations.
And in some ways, they're like the first
waitresses that are really considered
like, middle class and respectable in
America.
So high-end places before then would
have had waiters
um and low-end waitresses were often, as
I said,
like demeaned or maligned.
And so these Harvey Girls were often
women from the east
and they had decided to go west
and uh, and find themselves these jobs
that also
were like very kept in,
in a certain sort of way. And my favorite
story about this
is the story of Janet Ferrier
and Alice Stackhouse. So historian
 Lesley Poling-Kempes tells their story,
and basically,
Ferrier was a Scottish woman and she
was told by a doctor that she was going
to go
blind, and so she was like, "Well, I'm going
to see the world before I go blind." So
as a 14-year-old, she came to America,
and she was working in a Florida resort
and
met, met Alice Stackhouse, and they were
both like,
"You know what we really want to do is, we
want to see the world.
So we are going to go and be Harvey
House Girls."
They got a job at the same place and
they basically spent the next 40 years
uh working together to make enough money
to travel.
And as soon as they would make enough
money to travel, they would quit their
jobs,
and they would go and travel the world.
And then
when they ran out of money, they would go
back and work at the Harvey House some
more.
Trying to decide, Elliott, do you think
we're good on time
to tell the story of chifa? I think if
you tell it quickly, yes.
Okay! Um so
in terms of thinking about people who
are
entrepreneurs, one of my favorite other
stories about women entrepreneurs
is about the story of chifa. So
chifa is basically the national food of
Peru.
It is a mixture of Chinese food and
traditional Peruvian food,
and it actually comes out of a moment
in the 19th century when thousands of
Cantonese men
came to Peru to work on sugar
plantations.
These men came from a culture where they
often cook for themselves, where men were often the cooks in their homes as well.
And then they cooked for their families.
But then they married all of these
Peruvian women: Native Peruvian, Spanish
Peruvian, and African Peruvian women,
who often also were cooks. And so
you end up with this fusion cuisine. But
then,
many of these women were also already
like,
small shop owners or food store owners
and so
they come together with these men and
they start opening up these restaurants
that serve this kind of fusion cuisine.
And it really
uh, it takes off; it starts out in ethnic
enclaves but then becomes popular
across across cities and really across
all of Peru.
And I like having this picture
because you can see that the man is
clearly cooking
but he is cooking in part because the
women already had
all of the like financial bearing and
entrepreneurial experience
to make these restaurants what they were.
So as you can probably see,
our book aims to go beyond
the kind of white and great man
history of dining out. Which
I have to say, lots of the history that
is told about food is from
that perspective right? Um and like many
texts with white authors,
we could probably more fully account for
Black lives
in restaurant culture. For example, 19th
century Black caterers are really
central to
American dining and tastes, and um I
am, I still look at the book and I'm
surprised, because we didn't give them
their due.
But we do include Black
entrepreneurs in our
discussions about both the
democratization of restaurants
and the perennial importance of local
restaurants
even in the rise of global chains. And I
want to highlight
two of those entrepreneurs really
quickly.
Thomas Downing and Rodney Scott.
And also, I just love this picture.
So, Thomas Downing is uh,
basically ran a 19th-century oyster
house.
When he started running this 19th-
century oyster house, oyster houses were,
they were popular places, but they were
not upscale places.
They were often places that
the well-to-do didn't go. And he really
transformed that.
So Downing uh
began, grew--was born as a free Black
man
in Virginia, and he grew up working with
oysters. And when he came to New York
in 1918, he began his own oyster business.
So he was, he was cultivating his own
oysters and raking them
in the Hudson. Maybe 1818. Oh
I'm sorry 18, it's actually 1819, I just
flipped them.
And then by 1825, he uh
had earned enough money to buy a
building, and so
he basically bought a building and then
a series of basements.
Because if you have oysters, one of the
things you want to do is, you want to be
able to keep them
in a basement with constantly running
water over them, which is kind of
fascinating.
And so he basically bought this
building and
started creating a kind of oyster house
that was not meant to be rough and
tumble but was really set up like the
kinds of fine restaurants that Elliott
was showing earlier,
right. That had these big mirrors, that
had heavy velvet curtains,
and that had like really high-end
clientele. He also was known for having
really high-end oysters.
Which some of that was because he
cultivated his own oysters and people
were
impressed at what he did, but also he was
really great at working the
the system of sourcing. So he would go
out super early in the morning
to the boats where the oysters were and
he
would talk with, uh talk with the guys
who were selling them,
and he would take all of the best
oysters for himself. And then he would go
back into town.
And then when they would come on shore
to sell their oysters,
he would then be like, "Oh, I will go and
bid them up
without any reason like any plan to buy
them. So basically he helped his
colleagues drive up the cost of their
oysters.
He basically made it so that his
competition was paying more money for an
inferior product,
and I think really like cultivated this
sense of
of like, uh good business practice
and also of like, making sure that he
always had
the best, the best oysters that you could
get
in New York at that point. Um and because
of that, people like Charles Dickens and
Queen Victoria,
and a litany of other people whose names
we don't know anymore
came and dined at his restaurant.
In turn, he really invested his wealth in
to his family and into the abolitionist
movement.
So his family was part of the
Underground Railroad, and his son
George T. Downing became a really
important civil rights leader
from the 1830s through Reconstruction.
So the other person I want to talk about
is a hundred years later.
So more than a century later, Rodney
Scott
also made success by attending
to ingredients (almost two centuries
later, I guess, actually)
and drawing diverse crowds. So Scott's
Barbecue
is in Hemingway, South Carolina. And
even if you've never heard of Hemingway,
South Carolina, you still
might, that might ring a bell because
it's also where Sylvia Woods who
is another great Black restaurateur,
in Harlem, it's where she came from as
well. So it's this teensy, tiny city that
has like two of our
most important uh food
entrepreneurs in America. So his family
has had a restaurant there since the
70s, and what's really amazing about this
barbecue restaurant
is that they are tree to table. So
Rodney Scott and his family, they
cultivate
a whole bunch of woods, they cut down the
trees themselves
they uh, he actually worked with the
local blacksmith to design the barrels
that they use to turn
that wood into the charcoal that they
use.
He has close relationships, again,
thinking about how people source things,
with many of the
pig farmers in his area and gets the
right kinds of pigs
for his barbecue, and then
and then it all just gets sold in this
wonderful
tiny place at prices that everybody can
afford.
And because of that, he, he also has just
like this expansive clientele
and in 2009, John T. Edge wrote an
article about him
that really led to a flurry of
interest in the kind of work that he was
doing with this like tree to table
barbecue
and also uh about
him as a person. And people were like, "We
want to franchise your operation;
we want you to sell sauce." Right, like he
was given all kinds of
offers. And through this, he really like
stuck to his guns
that part of what they do well like
can't be expanded quickly; it can't be
replicated,
that it's really about a kind of
commitment to a practice.
And at the same time, he's managed to
stay committed to this practice
and really have a national presence.
So he,
he often cooks in other places; he does
festivals.
And I think that it's, that he
is like such a wonderful example of
someone who, uh manages to
maintain the kinds of traditions that he
has invested in,
and at the same time he like really is
an amazing businessman. He uh, his
restaurant burned down
in 2013, and he managed to work with
colleagues to raise money
to build a new one and then opened a
second restaurant in
2016 that's two hours from the first
one.
Anyway, also, you should know it is the
best barbecue you will ever have.
So if you're ever in Hemingway after
this happens,
you should go.
So while we wanted to tell the story
of great Black entrepreneurs, we also
tried to acknowledge the long fight that
Black diners have had with racism
in America. And one of the stories
that we tell is that of
Victor Green's Green Book, which I'm
sure many of you are familiar with,
and then also the reporting of Black
papers like the Baltimore Afro-American.
So really briefly, just because I think
that especially
since so many people's exposure to the
Green Book was through
that movie a couple of years ago, I think
it's really important to know more about
the person
who made this text. Um so
Victor Green was the Green Book's uh
editor
and creator. And basically, what the green
book did
was it provided a place for
people to go to know where they could
eat
when they were on the road that would be
safe, right?
So if you were a Black person traveling
in America
in 1937, where were you going to stop and
get gas, and where were you going to stop
and eat
so so that you like literally did not
get killed.
He himself was a postman
and he didn't travel a lot. But because
he was a postman, he had an access
to this entire network of postmen. So
with the first book, he really relied on
his colleagues in the postal service
to send him uh lots of their
ideas and the places that they knew were
good.
To gather intelligence for later books, he
really solicited directly from
people who were in his community,
from African-American, uh tourism and
business people and then
also from readers of the Green Book. He
paid all of his contributors,
and he funded the book with
advertising money.
Julian Bonds says, said of the Green Book
that it's a guidebook that not told,
that told you not where the best places
were to eat, but where there were any
where there was any place. And
so it was a really important text
from 1936 to 1964, when it ceased
publication
after uh restaurants were desegregated
by the Civil Rights Act. So
while Green was doing this work to make
eating safer for Black people when they
traveled in America,
there were other people who are clearly
fighting to desegregate restaurants.
And while many of us are probably
familiar with stories like those of the
sit-ins
at Woolworths, historians like Audrey
Russek
have worked to make sure that we know
other kinds of stories as well, and
Elliott's going to tell you one of those.
So right after John F Kennedy becomes
President,
there are a series of African
diplomats who come to the United States.
And they come to the United States
starting around 1961 to meet with the
president
and to visit the country. And one of
those diplomats was driving
across Pennsylvania and stopped at
Howard Johnson's. We haven't talked about
Howard Johnson's; we do talk about Howard
Johnson
in Hagerstown and um, Maryland, actually.
And he, and the
diplomat was refused service. And it
became a national
incident. And these national incidents
continued
until there was an uproar in Washington.
And nothing was happening, so
the editor of the Baltimore
Afro-American, which is the,
um the Black newspaper in Baltimore,
decided that he was going to try
something
that would change the mood
in the country. So what he did was he had
three
of his colleagues dress up like the way
they look right there.
These are American Black
men, two dressed up in,
in tuxedos and one dressed up in
African royal dress. And they
tour around Baltimore and go out to
Hagerstown and go around Maryland
and try to eat dinner. And
in many cases, they are able to do that
because of the way, because they say
they're African
and not African-American. There are a
couple of places where they are stopped
from eating. And there's, this becomes a
huge splash in the newspaper,
in the Baltimore Afro-American, and
becomes
the the actual tool that is used
by the African-American community to
change the
laws and change the rules in,
um in the first state
south of the Mason-Dixon line to allow
for integrated eating. So it took
a um, a sort of a parlor trick
and, but a way to expose
the hypocrisy and what was,
and what, I think you could say that
Katie was saying before
about what was true for women in the
early 20th century has been true for
Black folks for a much longer time, as we
know right now.
So we want to actually end
this part of the conversation with
another story not from the U.S.
that has similar kinds of eerie kinds of
connections. And then we'd love to
take your questions, I saw a couple of
questions
that we really need to answer for you
because I think we skipped over a few
things, so that we can get as much of
these stories
out to you. So um we're going to move to
Berlin in the 1920s.
and some of you have probably seen
Babylon Berlin which
has been a huge hit.This is a typical
example
of the Moka Efti ,which was a real
restaurant
in Berlin, which is in that
series. But this was the biggest
restaurant
in the world. And it was on Potsdamer
Platz
in Berlin and it served
one million meals a year.
It had a 2,000 seat cafe.
It had a huge cinema, and it had
by the end of its time, 12
other restaurants in it as well.
And uh, the list of restaurants is, give
you a sense of what was going on.
There's a, there are two German
restaurants, one from Bavaria and one
from the Rhineland, there's a Turkish
cafe,
which I think we have a picture of.
Oh this is the, one of, the one
before that,
one before that, is the Löwenbräu,
the Bavarian restaurant. You see the
Bavarian Alps out there.
And it's sort of highly stylized.
and then the next one you'll see is the
Turkish Cafe with the long view and the short view of it.
There's a a Spanish bodega, a Hungarian
restaurant, an American
Wild West bar, an Austrian restaurant,
and once the Nazis take over in
Germany,
they had two more restaurants. You could
probably guess which ones they are: a
Japanese tea house
and an Italian osteria. Now, what this
was, we think, is the first
um what the Germans call a [leibniz?]
castle[?],
sort of that, a kind of celebratory but
also performative
way of eating. And essentially eating
around the globe.
It was going to be the place that
people in Berlin would go to
essentially sort of have this incredible,
immersive
experience. And one of, the Turkish cafe
is important to us for this story,
and also the American Wild West bar.
So, we don't have a picture of the wild
west bar, but the American Wild West bar
was completely
staffed by um, people of color
probably African Germans.
Some people thought they were
African-Americans and they were supposed to be African-American cowboys. So
you start seeing this kind of insane
um, mixture of an ethnic restaurant, a
performative place, a place where you
hang out, a place where you could
eat the entire world in one place. And
I wanted to point to one person
who sort of embodies what we're
talking about here. And for those of you
who know German, you probably can see the end of this story.
This is Bayume Mohamed Husen,
who is actually from Zaire, Dar es Salaam,
and he is
used as a waiter
in the Turkish restaurant, he wears a fez.
And in the Wild West bar,
he wears a cowboy hat. And he becomes 
actually quite beloved by the people who
come there.
So he's sort of performing, himself,
in other kinds of ways that
we, I think from what Katie was talking
about before, give you a sense of
of how the restaurant itself is
implicated
in all of the kinds of cultural things
that we are now
experiencing in this country. And this
happens in
Germany in the 1920s. By
the 1930s, the
uh 1937, the restaurant is
taken away from its Jewish owners. There
are,
there are actually uh Jewish symbols
built into the Haus Vaterland theme,
and they're taken down. And
the some of the people, some of the
owners died
in concentration camps and
some of them got away.
Bayume Mohamed Husen was arrested in
in 1941 and taken to the Sachsenhausen
prison, concentration camp, where he
died
in 1944. This is an example of what the
Germans
have been doing for the last decade or
so of placing
what are called stolpersteine or
stumbling blocks, stumbling stones
in front of his house, that's where it is
in Berlin.
So if we move forward to after the war,
this is Haus Vaterland in 1947.
It was actually in business
up to this time and a little bit longer.
One side of it
was on the, um in East Berlin
and the other side of it was in
West Berlin. So it becomes a sort of totem,
and this notion of um
you know, what a restaurant could be over
time
and throughout place and sort of
exhibits a lot of the kinds of things
we've been talking, about a lot of the
tensions,
a lot of the joys of being in a
restaurant, and
a lot of the, sort of, violence that
embodies some of the stories we've been
telling. So
we thought that in this moment, this
is a story that we needed to tell you.
And we'd be happy to talk some more
about that and all of the
other stories we've talked about today.
And we we welcome your questions and we love the fact there are so many people
here
and um, to hear our story, and of course
we'd love it
if you buy our book. So thank you very
much,
and we're happy to take some questions.
Hi everyone, um if you have any questions
please just put them in the chat, and
I'll pass them along.
And thank you for the talk, Katie and
Elliott. 
Coryn, I saw a couple of questions in the
chat while we were
speaking. Yeah, let's see, it looks like
the first one is: "What
about food and taverns and inns? Maybe
you're separating these from restaurants."
I did not mention that when I was trying
to describe
what the, the definition of a restaurant
is as we understand
it. So taverns and inns didn't have
all of those, um categories.
They didn't have a menu, often. They
didn't,
they only had one food available; that
was it.
They would not have necessarily waiters
and uh,
waiters at that time. And they wouldn't
have necessarily seats for you to
eat at. You might be standing, or you
might be standing at a bar; you might be
eating outside.
So there are places to eat
from um, you know,
outdoors for a very long time. The
story of eating
together is a very old one. It starts
with religious experiences and cultural
experiences
in very early times.
And of course there are places to eat
and drink in cities like in Rome
and in Athens in the west. So all of
those
ideas come together not,
and, to become the restaurant that we
know, the ones that we're missing so badly,
not the ones where you just pull
something out of a
mechanical drawer, or you just stand at a
bar and have a hamburger with
a beer. So that's what we, that's what I
didn't say. So that's why--I saw that
question early on and I was sorry I
didn't say that, but that's what we're
trying to say:
the restaurant that we know is fairly
new.
The kind of restaurant that we're
describing
in France only comes to the U.S. in the
early 19th century.
So that kind of a restaurant that has
the whole panoply of what we
love when we go into a decent restaurant,
or even a not so great restaurant,
of the interaction with the waiter or
waitress, and a menu,
and price that we know we can afford, and
things that we think were cooked for us
and just for us.
And the next one is: "Were there Automats
across the East Coast? I'd always heard
that
heard that Horn and Hardart's were
only in Philadelphia and New York."
So yes, they are in Philadelphia and New
York.
They they scatter between it; isn't
that all of the East Coast?
Yeah, no, you're right, you can probably
tell that Katie
when she talked about the barbecue, did
not live very far
in South Carolina from the barbecue
joint. So I
I was wondering about that, too, Katie.
So yes they're Philadelphia, they start
in Philadelphia and they move to New
York.
And they stay in Philadelphia--I went to
them when I was a kid.
And I, um, and the New York Public
Library
actually sort of reproduced one, didn't
they, Katie, while you were--
Yeah, in 2012, they,
they basically re set one up for people
to experience along with an exhibit,
which I think is really exciting. And the
last ones
in New York I think were there until the
mid 90s, maybe even the early 2000s.
But by the end of it, they were really
novelty spaces instead of the kinds of
like, everyday life
places that they had been before. And
the, if I remember correctly, at the New
York Public Library, you could open up
one of the drawers, but you'd get a
a recipe instead of a piece of apple pie.
You have to take it home and make your
own. Yes, exactly.
"When did restaurants become popular in
department stores,
and where were some of the first
department store restaurants?"
That's a really, you know, that is
something we do not cover in the book,
but a very interesting question. I do
know about restaurants
in the great department stores in,
especially in Philadelphia,
especially John Wanamaker's which were
built in,
to, which was built into that building
on the top floor.
I'm not sure I know the answer to that.
Katie, do you?
No I mean, I don't know if this is the
beginning
of restaurants in department stores, but
I do know that um,
many of the earlier, many of
the early restaurants that were like
explicitly for women,
and were part of like the rise of this
kind of like luncheon culture,
were also in shopping spaces.
And so I don't know that that's the
beginning of them, but it would make
sense to me
if they were. One of the, the places
where restaurants
first go, these, these great restaurants
that we were thinking about, the French
restaurant,
were to huge hotels. So it was the hotel
that was the place that then became the
place where the restaurant developed
so there were these independent
restaurants,
like Delmonico's, which is the first
restaurant in the United States that
fits the definition that we we're talking
about.
But then very quickly, you get the
development of the hotel restaurant.
And all of them, essentially, all of
these high-end
hotels had the same menus. Because they
all
had Parisian chefs who'd all use the same
cookbooks.
So it was kind of fascinating to see the
development of cuisine
was for, often, for the upper class and the
upper middle class that traveled around
the world and literally
ate the same food in a hotel
in Shanghai or in Milan.
And it's, you know, it's almost kind of
like if you think about
chains, which we spend a lot of time
with in the book itself, um there is some
comfort in having
the kind of food that you're used to.
Just like the Chinese
travelers in Kaifeng and Hangzhou would
not
eat at a restaurant that didn't serve
their own food. I lived in
Taiwan for a couple of years, and
it was very hard to go out with a group
of Chinese folks who came from different
parts of China,
because they couldn't agree on which
restaurant we would go to. So we ended up
going to a restaurant that none of them
were from.
So that was that was the, that was the
compromise, and
of course they all hated the food.
It wasn't their food. A good compromise.
Yeah it's like, I've heard people make
fun of
people going to the Olive Garden in
Times Square, and then
a defense of it is that if you're a
tourist in New York City
the options are overwhelming, but at
least at Olive Garden, you know what's on
the menu
and what you're going to get.
Let's see, I have to scroll up because
we've gotten a bunch of questions come
in.
See... "When did chefs start
becoming celebrities, such as Stephen
Starr, and what caused
celebrity status?" Yeah, so
the first kind of celebrity chefs
that we look at in the book are people
in uh, the 1600s in Japan
and many of these people aren't
necessarily
restaurant chefs. They're often tea house
chefs.
And so in that sense they aren't,
they are making food for a public, but
it's often
a private public, if that makes sense.
And these are people who basically
as part of tea house culture get like a
real reputation;
they often then have texts and schools
that come up out of them,
these kinds of like notions of secret
knowledge, which is basically just the
idea
that they would have like, a kind of at
least culturally proprietary
way of cooking things, set of dishes
that they used.
And that, lots of that would be about
in the same way that it is true of
celebrity chefs now. Like a lot of it
is about the kinds of identities that
people
want to see and like, understand a
certain kind of food and a kind of
person to have.
So there's like one school that's like
very staid
and another school that is all about
ostentatiousness
So that's like, really where you get
some of these
like, first publicly known
chef names. And then
by yeah? That you were talking about,
handed those traditions down and some of
them still exist.
They do, yeah yep. We're talking about the
20th generation or so of some of these
families, or 15th generation.
That's right, and they still, they still
carry these original people's names.
So it's like if in hundreds of years
people
become followers of Starr,
right? Which we might see with some
things. So one of the other
things that we talk about later in
the book is the,
like the Nordic manifesto. And so
people out of these like, Nordic cuisine
traditions that uh, became super popular
in the mid to late
decade, first decade of the 21st century,
right.
So at Noma. And those things I
think
have the potential to be these same
kinds of like, schools that are really
initially brought about by star power
and then stay on because they have a
kind of food tradition that people
like, want to embrace and continue to
believe in. And in the
west in France it happens within a
generation that there are star cooks and
star,
and they publish their own cookbooks and
they start their own
essentially sort of lineage themselves,
so.
It's, it's an old, old kind of,
it comes pretty quickly with the
restaurant in the west.
And Soyer, the guy that I mentioned
who was like
part of inventing the sink traps, and he
was also super important in
popularizing the gas stove in
restaurants,
he also had a very
early line of cookware. So he was
basically like, the first kind of Emeril
pot that you could get
was a Soyer pot.
So he kind of invented that concept.
Next one is: "Career Philadelphia server
here, formerly Liat Zahav.
I'm wondering if you can talk a little
about the differences between
American restaurant and European
restaurant culture,
where in Europe it is essentially an
extension of your living room and a four
dollar glass of wine buys you a seat all
day,
whereas in the U.S., a $17 glass of wine
essentially buys you an amusement park
ride ticket for maybe two hours,
not to mention tax and tip."
Well, it's not true in all European um,
restaurants that you could sit there all
day.
But especially slightly higher-end
French ones,
you have to leave at a certain time.
In Germany you can stay forever
in a restaurant and never be kicked out.
It's a very,
very good question and a very
interesting one and probably take us a
very long time to answer it. I mean,
for example, what else you can do, I know
German restaurants
probably better than French and
English and Dutch restaurants, and
Italian restaurants, I know pretty well
in, in Europe. But in Germany, you can
bring your dog to the restaurant
and it sits with you just like you saw
in that sweet, that Automat
picture would not have been strange
and it still would not be strange
right now if you brought your dog to the
restaurant in Europe.
And I think there are, I think the
answers to these kinds of
questions have much more to do with
the cultures of these
two worlds and we're seeing those two
worlds sort of clash
in particularly unhappy ways right now.
and it might have often to do with
speed;
in Italy, you can also sit forever, and
you're supposed to eat
as you know, many courses.
When I lived in Taiwan, you would
supposed to eat to the point of
passing out, and that was a sign you were
a good guest.
So they're all kind, I think a lot of
these things are culturally determined.
Katie,
do you want to take a stab? It's a great
question.
It is a, it is a great question and I do
think it's
interesting to think about
how much of it is framed around,
around work culture, yeah, and like
cultural approaches to
time. Like I think about how one of the
so one of the things we talk about in
the book is how
in the United States, that really
people working away from home is part
of, one of the like, big
drivers of restaurants in the United
States. It's like when
in New York, people stop living next to
where they work
and they start living in more
northern parts of the city
and working in more southern parts of
the city, and as people
go further and further from living right
next to their work and end up
having lunch at work, right, like that
there is this sense that there,
that food is about fuel as opposed to
leisure.
And I don't know how much of that feeds
into these like,
other larger pieces of,
of difference in the rest--
"How did prohibition impact the
restaurant industry?"
Do you want me to repeat that one? No you
don't have to repeat it, I'm trying to think--
Yeah, it's a big question.
I don't think I know the answer to
that. I don't think either of us probably.
That's a very good question. Well, you
know what's great about these questions,
we now know what the second revised
edition
is going to include. [inaudible]
just about the U.S., although we skewed it
a little bit more to the U.S.
here, it really is an attempt to cover
the whole spectrum and um,
so you know, not an excuse that's an
explanation.
I guess I've never thought about if like
speakeasies served food or anything.
I'm sure someone knows that.
Next one a little bit like the question
on taverns, but: "Do you separate
restaurants from pubs,
i.e. public houses in the British culture?"
So you know if, if you think about pubs
before the restaurant moment, one of
the things we didn't mention
before, there's something called a
table d'hote.
Which [inaudible] essentially a meal that's
spread out usually about two o'clock in
the afternoon
for people to, and you pay a
specific amount of money, and then
you get anything that's
that's sitting you know on the, at the
buffet. It's essentially a buffet.
And you get something to drink with it.
Which is probably the origin
that, of the issue of food in pubs
and in the English context,
not necessarily in the, um in
the Central European context. But what
you see in
most of the um, pub cultures
in, I can give you examples from
Switzerland and Germany,
these were places where they were
forbidden by law to serve
food, so there had, you had to
then join a group that
were members. And this is actually
something true in the United States; it
was true in the Midwest.
If you wanted to get a drink in a
restaurant
when I was writing my dissertation and I
was in Missouri,
I had to pay a dollar and join the
restaurant and then they could give me
some really bad beer.
So some of the laws in
Europe were about what was allowed to be
served and what wasn't allowed to be
served
in a place where you could drink. So the
the British also, and there's place
called Rules, which is still in London,
which essentially had a specific
limited number of things that you could
get and you'd pay a couple of shillings
for it,
and that's what you'd get, and then you
could also drink. So it, it's not really a
restaurant, it's sort of like
you know, one or two things that you
can eat. So
it's, it's a complicated story that
that is different in most countries and
the Brits are a little bit more like
the U.S. Americans in terms of trying to
control drinking than
some of the European countries. Katie, do
you want to
add anything to that? I think the only
other thing I would add
is that one of the things that you see
is
the restaurantization
of many drinking establishments
and like in establishments, other
kinds of places
that were serving food and like were
clearly places where you could dine out
before.
But as restaurants rise across the
19th century, you see that these places
move to including more smaller tables
for individual parties;
they move to having menus as well; they
move to doing some of these things that
are basically adopted
from the culture of restaurants. And in
most
British pubs still that I know, you have
to go up to a counter and order the food
and pay for it and then sometimes
they'll bring it to you, but most times
you have to go get it.
So it's, it's a different kind of
a story.
That makes me think of Philadelphia's,
and I'm not sure
how much these are across Pennsylvania,
but the stop and go
issue of people trying to skirt the or
the requirement of serving food on
premises if you're serving like, single
serve beers or whatever, and you have to
have a certain amount of chairs, so they
have like
five bags of chips and some folding
chairs to be like a eating establishment
here.
I think it's it's about the local legal
system.
See someone asks, "I would be curious
about dining on the African continent.
I know you didn't cover that in the book.
Dining traditions are old and
interesting too.
And great presentation."
Katie, do you want to talk about that?
Yeah,
so we,
I feel super frustrated about the fact
that we don't have a lot about
dining on the African continent like
other than,
we do have a section about uh
dining in Egypt. So we talked some
about cook shops in Cairo. But
one of the things that
the literature... So, food studies doesn't
have the kind of literature that we
would want it to have, right? Like, there
are lots of things to still explore,
and lots of the literature on, about
dining on the African continent
is really, uh comes out of colonial
interactions rather than
being stories about
African dining traditions becoming
restaurant traditions. Like the stories
that are
about those traditions often end up not
being stories about restaurants
but are stories about other ways of
dining. And so I,
I think there is probably a really great
chapter, book, article, several books,
probably, to be written
on on that, but we just didn't have
the source space when we were writing
the book.
Which I was really disappointed about; it
wasn't what i expected when we started.
I was so certain we were going to be
like, six continents!
But that didn't happen.
The next one you'll have to have Africa
and then the McMurdo station in
Antarctica. This is gonna be a much
bigger book.
"Why did America develop so many Chinese and Italian restaurants
and not for, example,
Irish or Polish restaurants, although the
immigration rates were as high?"
There are Polish and um, Irish
restaurants.
You're right, there aren't as many.
It's an interesting question. I think
that
what, um, the Chinese story
is actually a long story that we tell in
our book. It's also a long story
in England as well.
And it's um, a story of immigration
and people who are being essentially
shunned
and are feeding themselves, and then
people start to
discover it. And it becomes something
that a lot of people eat.
Whereas, I'm guessing at this, I think
this is probably true:
Polish and Irish cuisine was
um, off, I mean we're talking about
another
issue, too. We're talking about um, class
as well. Because if you are
um, in a working-class situation, you're
not necessarily going to restaurants of
this,
you know you're, you might be going to a
place to get some food; you might be
going to
a, like a cook shop, what could be like
what we think of as a
deli now. Where you would go in and get
the kinds of things you need
and take them with you. So it's,
I think it's tied up in those kinds
of issues.
And I also think it's tied up, um,
both the Chinese and Italian stories
are a willingness to change the cuisine
to, to be "acceptable"
to British and American palates, which I
think is
the biggest part of the story; I would
imagine. Katie, would you agree?
I mean what the, the kind of Italian
restaurant you were talking about before,
Coryn,
isn't really an Italian restaurant. And
the food
that was Chinese food before there was a
rediscovery of quote unquote "real
Chinese food"
was not something that you could
probably get from China. So
it was a, it was an American version
of a kind of a food that became a
popular thing because it appealed
to certain kind of tastes that um
were palatable to Americans. Is that a
fair thing to say,
Katie? I mean, I think,
I think yes. Also, one of the,
one of the arguments about like, the
success
of ethnic restauranteurs is that
often they are
mixing um, the novel
with the familiar, right? So that they're
like riding that line
between things that people know and also
kind of a sense of excitement
about what is new. I do wonder if--
I think this is such a good question,
because every, every answer that I come
up with that I'm like, oh well, maybe it's,
maybe it's about this aspect of like, the
kind
of--that was available for people to do
like, doesn't quite hold for all of
the groups.
But I, you know, like in the Chinese
case,
the fact that people couldn't
necessarily labor in
all fields because of legal restrictions
meant that you could do food work,
you could do laundry work.
And so, like that's another reason that
you might get concentrations
of restaurants and, and like food service
in
particular communities. But like, that
doesn't hold for
the Italians, so.
Coryn, you should unmute. Yeah, got
a little alert from Zoom.
Um, "Does the roadside diner 
fit into your story?
Certainly not a place for the elite."
Katie, do you want to take this one? Sure,
yes,
it does! We, we have a whole chapter
that's really about dining on the
road. And
um, and dining on the road is,
I feel like the, if one thinks about
restaurants, about the history of
restaurants as having like a couple of
turns. So there is this moment
when, when you first get restaurants
and they're these kinds of elite spaces
and then there's the kind of
democratization of restaurants that are
still often
in cities. And then, when you have
people moving to the road, one of the
things that you get that Elliott was even
suggesting, in these like, high-end
hotel dining that was all the same, is
this notion
of having a kind of like replicability.
So roadside diners,
often end up being replicable, whether
they are parts of chains like, Howard
Johnson's, which we can talk about,
or whether even they're like, independent
places.
In part because lots of them were
buying from the same kind of purveyors.
Right, like if we think about
um, these, these very specific,
and I, at one point, I had a picture of
this in our slides, and I took it out!
There were patents for these like,
food wagons and these diners.
So that people would basically buy this
kind of,
trailer, this basically like modular
building so that they could really
cheaply put up
a place where people could eat. That
was like, a way
to establish a restaurant. And so, in
that way,
like it, it looked like lots of other
places and often shared menus with other
places as well.
Yeah, and they would move and they
wouldn't necessarily be open all year
long.
They would probably only be open in the
warmer months.
So it's, it was also a continuing
kind of change.
And this is also why lots of the
big
uh, like, kinds of fast food chains come
out of the Sun Belt
is because a lot of this really grows
out
of car culture. And initially, car culture
is much more seasonal than it is today.
Yeah it reminds me of hearing that um, in
France
there was kind of a shift in, in what a lot
of bistros sold as they,
I guess larger companies bought
a lot of what had been independent
bistros and they all started getting from
the same suppliers, and the menus became,
and the cooking became,
people are saying, more identical between
them. Which may
bring it back, kind of, to their roots.
And...
This may have been answered, but um,
"For Philadelphia, what was the first
restaurant?"
Or, "the oldest restaurant in Philadelphia."
I don't know off the top of my head, I'm
sorry to say, nor does Katie.
Another, another area that we need to
learn more--
By the way, the--you know, in some
ways,
one of the things that we talk about
in the restaurant is, it's now become
more--so typical to go to restaurants
that cooking at home and having a meal
for people is
the special occasion. Whereas the going
to the restaurant used to be the special
occasion.
And the day we started writing the book,
the um, it was true that in the United
States,
people started to spend more than, more
money
eating in restaurants or taking home
prepared foods than buying
in grocery stores and supermarkets. So it
tipped
in the middle of the 2000-teens that we,
you know, that eating in a restaurant is
so normal now--
except it isn't--that we think that
cooking at home is kind of cool.
And it's, it's the new eating at
restaurants.
But we will try to find out the answer
and we will try to send it along to
to you and Susan, and she can send it out
to the folks who are here.
We can include that in our follow up.
"What is um, what is interesting is the
change from dining out to dining in.
I as a person from another country
was used to dining out being a big event
and taking the whole evening, and I was
stunned moving to America that you had a
two-hour window.
Can you talk about that change,
especially in the current or recent
environment?"
And it's kind of a natural follow-up to
what you were just saying it, sounds like.
Well and it's also what Katie was saying
before about the notion
of um, you know,
money. And things shouldn't take too
long; people eat too quickly,
often, people think, in the U.S.
And that the restaurant is a place to
earn money from people and not
necessarily this
kind of convivial sense. There are
American restaurants that do that,
where you can sit there forever.
But, and they only "rent" out the table
for one person for one night. Usually the
cost of that
is prohibitive in the United States and
it's about a very high-end way of
thinking. You have enough time and enough
money
to spend your time in this leisurely way,
but it's really not what you should
be doing, kind of thing.
It's only something for the super rich.
So it's a, I think it's what Katie was
saying before: this is a huge
cultural difference that plays out in
the restaurant
in the U.S. and plays out in some other
countries as well.
But um, certainly, you know, not
everywhere.
And I think Katie had her finger on that
when she said that before.
There I go again. Two comments to
pass along are that Utah still has the
membership
thing, but also so does Philadelphia's
pop-up beer gardens have.
Though those are free, you still have to
become a member.
And there's a documentary about Horn and
Hardart's called the Automat that's
nearly completed.
And this will be the last question and
just,
"Any thoughts about the rise and
fall of theme restaurants like Planet
Hollywood and Rainforest?"
I'm gonna let Katie go for that.
That's so cruel; you're the one that
talked about Haus Vaterland. Um,
so, I think that these restaurants, we
don't, we don't talk about them in the
book.
But they really are following in this
same kind of like,
event dining um, experience that
that Haus Vaterland really was like
an
early version of. Which are, which are
these kinds of like,
theme park spaces.
I, I don't know why
they rose and fell.
That is, that seems interesting. It also
seems really interesting to me to think
about like,
I think those things were super popular
in the 90s, like what happened
in that moment that we have now like
also gotten over.
So i think it's a, I think it's a
great question.
Uh,
also they are interesting because they
are also spaces
that are like Olive Garden in the sense
that they are chains,
that they do have like really
familiar menus,
and yet, like there's this notion of
like,
the space around you as the thing that
is being celebrated.
Which I think in some ways is the thing
that I've discovered that I miss most
about restaurants right now,
like the idea that that my house is nice
and everything; I'm happy that I have it,
but I would much rather be in the kinds
of interiors that someone else has
designed
as an experience. And those are like
clearly obvious experiences of interiors,
but like if we think about Zahav, that is
also clearly a cultivated experience of
an interior.
But I don't, can't actually answer the
question. I think this also ties to the
question before about eating quickly
here and not, you know, and taking one's
time.
It's, if eating out is a form of
entertainment
and not a form of conviviality or
conversation, um, then
why not a theme restaurant, right? Or why
not something,
a pod restaurant. Or you know, in other
words,
you're, you're going there not
necessarily to eat,
and not necessarily to have a
conversation or have a quiet
sort of set of conversations, but you're
there to experience something.
So you're absolutely right, it is like
Haus Vaterland.
You know, let's, let's you know, you
don't,
you can have coffee in the Turkish
cafe; you can have dessert at the
Bavarian Alps, and you could
watch--in one one of the places there
uh the Rheinterrasse, the Rhine
restaurant,
you could watch the, um the Lorelai,
you could watch
the ships go by where the Lorelai is, and
there would be a
thunderstorm on the hour. And actual
water came down
and hit--it's, it was hitting the patrons,
so they had to put up a glass
barrier. And there were little airplanes
flying around. So
you know, we're talking about the 1920s
and it's,
you know, I'm sure the food was probably
pretty bad,
but the experience was "fun." So it's not
just an American notion.
And one last thing about Haus Vaterland
before we turn off,
it was designed by somebody who had
spent a lot of time at
Coney Island, in New York. So that's where
the idea came from so it's, it's also a
sort of
German-American kind of production.
Thank you both, and thank you everyone
for the great questions, as usual.
Thank you for having us. Thank you, Elliott
and Katie and Coryn
for a great program and um, we really
would like you to come back; Ithink
you've touched the
tiniest bit of an incredible history. So
thanks so much, and come all join us
again!
