“Food, culture, people, and landscape are all absolutely inseparable”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: Stephen Lurie and our friends at The Pudding with an elegant and insightful looks at what America’s earliest restaurants can teach us about America…
The New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection of menus, dated 1880-1920, captures the emergence of modern restaurant dining…
… A menu describes what a reataurant serves– but a menu also describes who is being served. [Collectively] they refect the class, gender, political, technological, and environmental shifts of history.
The thousands of menus in this collection document a period of fundamental transformation– and the birth of the society and the restaurant we know today.
I’ve searched through the archive to tell you that story in ten dishes. Your table is ready– right this way…
Restaurant dining in America was once an Imitation: wannabe aristocrats attempting French feasting. But as the 19th became the 20th century, the American middle class and the true American resaturant emerged: diverse, accessible, opinionated… and at times, chaotic.
From Bisque d’Ecrevisses and Celery in a Crystal Celery Vase through “cosmopolitan” and “ethnic” food to Potatoes O’Brien Au Gratin and Baked Alaska, the tasty (and illuminating) tale of dining out in America: “A History of Menus is a Menu of History,” from @luriethereal.bsky.social and @pudding.cool.
* Anthony Bourdain
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As we dig in, we might send tasty birthday greetings to a man who has built a culinary domain that epitomizes (in its scale, at least one huge quadrant of) the current state of the restaurant business: Wolfgang Puck; he was born on this date in 1949. He made his name with Spago restaurant in Los Angeles in 1982. He now has more than 20 fine dining restaurants and dozens of pizza bars, bistros, cafes, airport restaurants, express outlets, catering services, cultural center cafes; he sells gourmet foods, cookware, and appliances; and he runs a catering empire (that has catered he official Academy Awards Governors Ball every year since 1994).
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