Endpapers from Dining in New York (1930)

March 25, 2008
Michael Dashkin, a frequent contributor to this site with his photographs, wrote for us a 5-part article on several old restaurant guides he unearthed in our New York section (which takes up an entire wall in the front of the store). This week's blog entry frames the genre and is given over to Michael's analysis of a rare 1920s guide, when New York was just becoming aware of its gastronomic variety:

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It's a fortunate accident that any copies of old New York City restaurant guides have survived. By old, I mean guides published in the 1920s through the 60s and into the 70s. Ephemeral material, these books weren’t intended to be held on to for long. Like today’s guides and web sites, they were published to offer current, practical suggestions for tourists or native New Yorkers simply looking for dining ideas.

Most of them served their humble purpose and were discarded soon after they were published. But if they hung on to reach the mature age of 10, 15 or more years, they started to take on a second life, becoming guide books for anyone who wants to step back in time to explore not just the culinary past, but the city's manners, habits, people and neighborhoods, too. Like photographs, the copies that survived become more interesting as they get older, reflecting both a changed city and changing tastes.

These guide books – the older ones, at least – portray a restaurant world very different from our own. The manners of diners and waiters both are more formal, even at the less expensive establishments. The nouvelle cuisine hasn’t been invented yet. With the exception of Japanese, Chinese and a scattering of Indian restaurants, there were few Asian establishments.

There were once many more Russian and Spanish restaurants in Manhattan, reflecting émigré communities in flight from revolution and civil war. There were an awful lot more German and Scandinavian places back then. Of course, there were no Starbucks and other corporate chains, but there were Schrafft’s, the Automat, Hicks and quite a few other local chains.

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George Chappell’s The Restaurants of New York, published in 1925, is the oldest guide I looked at. He’s a somewhat reluctant restaurant critic anyway and, to make matters worse, his friends try to discourage him from even attempting the project:

Twenty years ago, yes – It might have been possible to write an “Outline of Eating,” for then, if ever, was the Golden Age of Gastronomy on the Island of Manhattan. But the removal of Delmonico’s to it’s ephemeral quarters ‘uptown,’at Forty-Forth Street, forsooth! Wrote ‘Finis’ to a chapter. It was the end of an era, the break-up of a dynasty.

Sound familiar? You should have been here twenty years ago when giants walked the earth? In fact though, Chappell was writing at an interesting moment in the city’s restaurant history. As we read we see the diversity and complexity of New York restaurant life as we now know it beginning to take shape.

Chappell wasn’t a chef or restaurateur or even a food critic by profession (in this, he was like most of the guide writers). He was an architect by training and wrote architecture criticism for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. But he had a real feeling for the hold that food has on people’s stomachs, certainly, but on their memories, too:

…The mere mention of an ancient eating place will evoke a clear vision of our favorite dish, be it the humble corned beef and cabbage, a particular pastry, or a glorious goulash. Say “Keen’s” to me and I see a blue-plate dinner worked into a design as beautiful as a Spanish tile; “Browne’s,” and a massive chop with a tender kidney coiled in its embrace; the “Brevoort,” and a squab chicken en casserole…

He wrote a guide book that contemporary readers would probably find a million faults with. He sometimes forgot to provide a restaurant’s address, he never gave the phone number and he didn’t often describe the dishes served (frustrating for a reader today who would actually like to know what people were eating back then). But he made up for these shortcomings by offering brief, charming sketches of the various restaurants’ rooms, décor, owners, staff and patrons.

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Chappell covers a lot of territory, eating his way from Wall Street, through Greenwich Village, and up Broadway and Park Avenue, stopping along the way to drink, dance and offer a brief history of the supper club (“The first super clubs were distinctly rowdy”).

One of my favorite chapters covers “the little restaurants” of midtown:

Every side street in New York bristles with small restaurants, neighborhood places which care for their particular sections…They are the feeding places of the average citizen.

Before skyscrapers took over midtown, there were numerous modest Italian, French and American teashops and table d’hote in the area and we glimpse the neighborhood as it was before it became a corporate business and tourist district.

A chapter entitled “the foreign feeding grounds” is, perhaps inevitably, a somewhat discomforting period piece (“Strange odors will be encountered and queer, unknown tastes”). Among others, he visits Chinatown, the German restaurants of Yorkville on the Upper East Side, discovers Syrian restaurants near Bowling Green and dines at perhaps the first Japanese restaurant in New York, Miyako (“You may be baffled by the bamboo chopsticks and the general absence of the usual tools, but spoons are not lacking if desired”).

Chappell’s work is a genteel precursor to the modern guide book, charming for its unhurried pace and lack of the pigeonhole categories and telegraphic descriptions we associate with modern guides.

--Michael Dashkin

Next week's entry will examine the next generation of guides as exemplified by Rian James's 1930 work, Dining in New York.