New York City didn’t invent the restaurant. That honor goes to France, and even in the United States, the earliest-known restaurant was in Boston — Julien’s Restorator, which opened in 1794.
But it didn’t take long for New York to catch up.
In 1810, the city directory listed five free-standing “victualling houses.” By 1847, a tourist guide estimated that there were about 100 restaurants, plus the “Oyster Houses and Cellars, which are numerous in all quarters of the city.” A decade later, there were thousands.
The making of the “city of restaurants” changed how we eat, where we eat, and — especially — how fast we eat. Maybe New Yorkers didn’t invent the restaurant, but we did perfect it.
New York’s restaurant scene in the mid-1800s created a template that persists to this day.
At the bottom of the range, the era’s version of fast food: The sixpenny eating house, so named because the main dishes cost six pence. These short-order houses, including Sweeney’s, Johnson’s, Dunlap’s and Sweet’s, catered to an all-male clientele drawn from Manhattan’s commercial district around Wall Street and Lower Broadway.
The rise of the sixpenny changed meal habits. Previously, when men were able to go home at midday, that meal was the day’s most substantial of the day. At the end of the workday, families ate a small supper of cold meats, soup, cheese and bread.
But by the 1840s, this option was an impossibility for many. Thus, men of the middle and upper classes took their dinners at the public dining houses while their wives and children ate a small meal of breakfast leftovers at home — an early form of lunch. The dinner hour was pushed back to the early evening, and families either had supper at 9 or 10 o’clock or did away with this meal altogether.
Sixpenny restaurants shared a template followed by other kinds of New York restaurants: a large, rectangular room with tables for four arranged in long aisles. In some cases, the tables were booths or “boxes” that lined the sides of the room, again separated by a long aisle. Some eating houses also had counters that ran the length of the room.
Waiters, usually of Irish descent or African-American, stood along the aisles, ready to take the orders of hungry and hurried patrons. In place of a printed menu, a chalkboard displayed the meal options and prices — six pence for a small steak, three cents for a cup of coffee — or waiters called them out.
The sixpenny houses encouraged and even cultivated the rushed, slovenly eating habits ascribed to 19th-century Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular.
In 1868 the Tribune presented a typical downtown diner:
“Sharp, nervous, and pulse at 98, [he] rushes into the saloon, drops into the chair . . . shouts “roast beef and coffee” to the nearest waiter, looks twice at his watch in the minute he is gone; then hitches up his cuffs, salts and peppers his beef, and, grasping knife and fork, attacks it as though it were alive and it was doubtful which would eat the other first. He flushes his coffee in the second attempt, demolishes a dessert ordered in advance, wipes his mouth with a handkerchief in lieu of a napkin, seizes his check, slaps down his change, and is off almost before you have begun your dinner.”
But the sixpenny refectories were hardly the only eating-house option. The mid-priced eateries, called chophouses, like Clark & Brown’s, had a slightly slower pace and a menu that was a bit more official.
At the high end, meanwhile, was the precursor of the five-star restaurants that lure the 1 percent today: Delmonico’s.
This famous restaurant began as a modest affair, a confectionery shop opened by Swiss brothers Peter and John Delmonico in 1827. Three years later, the Delmonico brothers expanded their operation into a restaurant on the Parisian model, hiring a French chef and a staff of waiters who prepared and served a wide selection of hot meals.
Delmonico’s patrons celebrated the restaurant’s service, appointments and food. The details of service included “the whitest napkin, coolest ice, and the best demitasse of coffee . . . this side of Constantinople.” And the rich furnishings consisted of mirrors, marble, gilding, fine fabrics, crystal, silver, porcelain, and linen.
The menu, printed in French and English, consisted of 11 pages and included an astonishing 346 entrées, 11 soups, 24 liqueurs, 58 wines and an extensive list of side dishes and desserts. One paid a high price for Delmonico’s service and atmosphere. Dinners started at $2 in the 1850s, two days’ wages for the average manual laborer of the time.The sixpenny houses encouraged and even cultivated the rushed, slovenly eating habits ascribed to 19th-century Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular.
Is Delmonico that different from the Per Se of today? Are sixpennys that different from diners? We still wolf down our food. We still pay big for culinary genius. And then, as now, if you’re hungry, there’s no better place to be.
The original ‘cronut’
Some trends never change. Diners who line up today for the cronut would, in the 1840s and 1850s, have likely waited at the hot baker of the age: Butter-Cake Dick’s.
Owned by Dick Marshall, a former newsman, and located on Spruce Street between Nassau and William, directly under the offices of the New York Tribune, Butter-Cake Dick’s served cakes and coffee to journalists. In 1850, a cup of coffee and the cake that gave the shop its name, described by George Foster as “a peculiar sort of heavy biscuit with a lump of butter in its belly,” sold for three cents.
Butter-Cake Dick’s cakes were essentially doughnuts or, as they were known at the time, “sinkers,” thanks to their heft, which derived from a heavy dose of lard and butter.
It’s said that politicians from nearby City Hall would stop by Butter-Cake Dick’s and buy donuts for the journalists as bribes.
Adapted from “Urban Appetites: Food & Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York” by Cindy R. Lobel, out now from The University of Chicago Press.