Dining Out in Boston: A Culinary History

By James C. O'Connell

Over the years, Boston has been one of America’s leading laboratories of urban culture, including restaurants, and Boston history provides valuable insights into American food ways. James C. O’Connell, in this fascinating look at more than two centuries of culinary trends in Boston restaurants, presents a rich and hitherto unexplored side to the city’s past. Dining Out in Boston shows that the city was a pioneer in elaborate hotel dining, oyster houses, French cuisine, student hangouts, ice cream parlors, the twentieth-century revival of traditional New England dishes, and contemporary locavore and trendy foodie culture. In these stories of the most-beloved Boston restaurants of yesterday and today—illustrated with an extensive collection of historic menus, postcards, and photos—O’Connell reveals a unique history sure to whet the intellectual and nostalgic appetite of Bostonians and restaurant-goers the world over.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781611689938

Book preview

Dining Out in Boston

A Culinary History

JAMES C. O’CONNELL

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND

Hanover and London

University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2017 James C. O’Connell

All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: O’Connell, James C., author.

Title: Dining out in Boston: a culinary history / James C. O’Connell.

Description: Hanover: University Press of New England, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016014219 (print) | LCCN 2016015088 (ebook) | ISBN 9781611689105 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611689938 (epub, mobi & pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Food habits—Massachusetts—Boston—History. | Food—Social aspects—Massachusetts—Boston—History. | Restaurants—Massachusetts—Boston—History.

Classification: LCC GT2853.U5 O25 2016 (print) | LCC GT2853. U5 (ebook) | DDC 394.1/20974461—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016014219

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Boston’s Restaurant Tradition

2. Dining Out from 1800 until the Civil War

3. Development of the Dining Culture

4. Restaurant Niches Proliferate: The Civil War to Prohibition

5. Dining in the Emerging Modern Age

6. The 1950s and 1960s

7. The Culinary Revolution

8. Twenty-First-Century Dining: Creative and Casual

Appendix: Locations of Historic Boston Hotels and Restaurants

Notes

Index

Color plates

PREFACE

This is a guide to restaurants that mostly no longer exist. It seeks to conjure up the world of restaurants that developed in Boston over two centuries, helping us imagine what it would have been like to dine out in the city over that time. Such a survey can help us understand how our eating habits have evolved, how people have forged social identities by dining in restaurants, and how restaurants have shaped Boston’s metropolitan community and American society at large.

The foundation of Dining Out in Boston: A Culinary History is historic menus, which not only indicate what diners ate but also summon the taste of the dishes and a restaurant’s ambience and clientele. Menus can produce an effect similar to maps in helping us envision distant places, or music scores in helping us hear the notes. They have been an underutilized source in culinary history and open up new vistas on the restaurant experience.

In asking what people ate in Boston restaurants, we engage the question of what sort of dining culture the broader region has developed. Some observers comment that food in the Hub was not very good before the 1970s, so there is not much to talk about. Following that idea would be a mistake. Regardless of the nature of the food compared to today’s cuisine—and it was better than many people think—the city has had a vital restaurant culture stretching back to 1800. Bostonians enjoyed dining out.

Writing this history of Boston restaurants has been like assembling a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. I have put together this story from menus, guidebooks, travel accounts, newspaper and magazine articles, restaurant reviews, advertisements, postcards, literature, and websites. Secondary works in the history of food, travel, business, and urban society have been important sources. I have interviewed restaurateurs and others knowledgeable about Boston’s restaurants. At the start, it was not clear where the evidence would lead. Yet I was always guided by the question of what kinds of food diners ate and why they did so.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago, a friend of mine and I were casting about for dissertation topics in American cultural and urban history, and we kicked around the idea of writing a history of American restaurants. It was several decades ago, and such a history would probably have been considered frivolous compared with the political and social issues of the day. No scholarly histories of restaurants or culinary practices existed to serve as models. And we simply could not figure out what the organizing questions and the sources might be. American society was yet to become restaurant-obsessed. I took on a more mainstream topic but kept the idea of restaurant history in the back of my mind. Over time, I discovered secondhand book dealers who specialized in culinary topics and ended up forming a substantial collection of historic restaurant guides. I enjoyed perusing them but never quite figured out how to put them to use.

My interest in restaurant history has been stimulated by lifelong restaurant-going. My parents started me off as a child at the notable Student Prince & Fort Restaurant, of Springfield, Massachusetts, eating chopped sirloin in mushroom sauce with mashed potatoes and rye bread with butter. Student years in Chicago brought me to dozens of ethnic restaurants. Travels abroad and at home alike exposed me to many styles of cuisine. Needless to say, I have been an avid patron of Boston restaurants. Much of this dining experience has been distilled into this book. I also have received much inspiration from books and articles about restaurants. Reviews in the Boston Globe, the Phoenix, Boston magazine, and the New York Times have kept me abreast of dining trends. In my Inside Guide to Springfield and the Pioneer Valley (1986), I tried my hand at writing a regional restaurant guide.

The idea of writing a history of Boston restaurants occurred to me in Barcelona, at the Pitarra Restaurant in the Gothic Quarter. It was our first day in town, and my wife and I were eating the menu del día for lunch. The restaurant was full of regulars—we seemed to be the only tourists. Everyone seemed to be eating the three-course, 11-euro lunch in a mindful and deliberate way, savoring the food like gourmands. The service was professional, and a host in jacket and tie bustled around clearing tables and delivering bills. It struck me that the Catalans treated their meal like a sacrament. I felt that Americans treated restaurant meals differently, but I could not quite figure out how.

This question became a springboard for a cultural history of restaurants in Greater Boston. As I researched books on restaurants, I realized that the field of culinary history has been blossoming and that the time might be ripe for a book on Boston restaurants. The breakthrough for this project occurred when I discovered troves of historic menus at The Bostonian Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, American Antiquarian Society, Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library, the New York Public Library, and various websites. Menus, as noted, provided the primary sources that would allow me to tell the story of bygone dining customs and enthusiasms. Reading the menu from nineteenth-century Boston hotel dining rooms and from elaborate banquets made my mouth water. Like a menu reader strolling down a city street, I wanted to sense how the food might have tasted and what a restaurant’s ambience and clientele might have been like.

This book examines three levels of mostly local eating places: (1) the city’s most prominent restaurants in a given era, (2) mainstream full-service restaurants, and (3) fast-food and specialty eateries like cafeterias and ice cream shops. The book focuses on locally owned restaurants.

This investigation sheds light upon the distinctive culinary culture embodied by Boston’s restaurants. It has been not just about the food but also about restaurants as cultural institutions and the regional culture they have helped cultivate. Restaurants at their best represent a craft experience available to the public just by walking in, dining and drinking, and paying the tab. In an era of corporatization, the restaurant is also one of the fields most open to individual entrepreneurship. Boston has a large proportion of innovative, locally owned restaurants, which contribute to the region’s vigorous creative culture.

This book sets out to cover all the major trends of restaurant dining from 1800 into the 1980s. It condenses coverage of Boston’s culinary evolution since the 1980s in order to make the book manageable. Restaurants from various eras may have been left out due to editorial selectivity, so I extend my apologies for any omissions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Several libraries made available collections of menus and other materials related to historic restaurants and hotels. These libraries, with helpful staff providing menu images, included Jaclyn Penny, American Antiquarian Society; Elizabeth Roscio, The Bostonian Society; Laura Peimer, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; and the Massachusetts Historical Society. The website of the New York Public Library Menu Collection, which displays thousands of historic menus from 1850 to the present in an easily searchable format, has also provided source material.

A number of people read and commented upon drafts of the book, offering all kinds of ideas about the subject. They included Richard Garver, Kathleen Fitzgerald, Keith Stavely, Geraldine Quinzio, Paul Hennessy, Paula Murphy, Charles V. Ryan IV, and Susan Wilson. Susan Wilson has been extraordinarily helpful in photographing menu images. Many people have been helpful in providing background material on particular restaurants and hotels, including historic menus. They include Kevin Fitzgerald, Jacob Wirth; Susan Wilson, Omni Parker House; Mary Ann Milano-Picardi, Union Oyster House; Scott Herritt, Marliave Restaurant, also known in earlier years as Café Marliave; Sarah Wiggins Banville, Cantina Italiana; Dom Capossela; Suzanne Wenz, Fairmont Copley-Plaza; Rosanne Pickard Mercer, Mercer Public Relations; Steve Pickford and Toni Frederick, Longfellow’s Wayside Inn; and Victor Passacantilli.

Friends and acquaintances have provided much food for thought in exploring the history of Boston restaurants. Two gentlemen, in particular, provided their rich recollections of Boston restaurants: Charles V. Ryan III and the late John Winthrop Sears. I have received intellectual stimulation related to culinary history from presentations made at the Culinary Historians of Boston, which meets at the Schlesinger Library.

My literary agent, Albert LaFarge, has been encouraging and highly effective in bringing this book to publication. My wife, Ann Marie, must be recognized for joining me in all the spadework of dining out these many years—in Boston, western Massachusetts, Cape Cod, and cities and countries beyond. She has participated in boundless table talk on the nature and quality of restaurants and cuisine and has read and provided detailed comments on many manuscript drafts.

: 1 :

Boston’s Restaurant Tradition

The French invented what we think of as the restaurant in recognition of the unexpected pleasure that comes in dining with intimate friends inside a larger circle of strangers.

JAMES CARROLL

When people think of the history of eating in Boston, some remember it being the land of the bean and the cod. To others, cold roast Boston comes to mind. The most famous dishes produced in Boston have been New England clam chowder, baked beans, and Indian pudding. The region’s great contribution to America’s culinary life has been Thanksgiving dinner. A shorthand perspective of Boston cooking tends to associate it with Puritanism. This legacy helped shape Boston’s reputation as a restaurant town. The 1977 guidebook Where to Eat in America concluded: Boston is not a brilliant culinary area like New York, nor a particularly distinguished restaurant region like San Francisco or New Orleans.¹

Because of such perceptions, food writers have focused primarily on the restaurants of flashy New York, sybaritic San Francisco, or Creole New Orleans in describing American restaurant history. Some writers have argued that New York is representative of the rest of the country because every conceivable type of food has been available in that city. New York–based food writer Mitchell Davis has written: New York food is American food, and not only because the concentration of media makes it seem so. Like America, New York and its food are modern and multicultural.² San Francisco and New Orleans stand out as restaurant towns because of the epicurean mythos that has developed around each city.³ Although Boston’s gastronomic reputation has not been as celebrated as these cities’, its long-standing and inventive restaurant culture provides singular insights into how Americans have dined out.

Boston has a reputation for good dining dating back to 1800. Over the decades, the city pioneered many features of American restaurant life, opening one of the first French restaurants, some of the first hotel dining rooms, oyster houses, ice cream parlors, and tearooms. Besides advancing traditional New England cooking, Boston adopted high-end French dishes and later introduced German, Italian, and Chinese items to the menu. During the first half of the twentieth century, Boston hotels and nightclubs popularized dining-and-dancing. Historic restaurants such as the Union Oyster House, Durgin-Park, Locke-Ober, and the Parker House ranked among the most celebrated eating places in the country. By the 1970s, budget student hangouts spurred culinary experimentation, and gourmet French restaurants spawned a hunger for gastronomic quality. Today, Greater Boston is at the cutting edge of locavore and trendy fusion cooking. It has its share of gastropubs, tasting-menu restaurants, food trucks, and craft producers of food and drink. With all this, Boston has had a rich culinary story well worth exploring.

•  •  •

HOSPITALITY AND RESTAURANT CULTURE

Restaurants have been gathering places offering the public hospitality outside the home. This form of hospitality originated with colonial inns, where travelers could find a room and a meal in what was little more than a family’s home. Early Boston hotels, notably the Boston Exchange Coffee House (1808), Tremont House (1829), Revere House (1847), and Parker House (1855), were some of the first places to provide restaurants as we know them. Though originally intended to accommodate travelers staying at the hotel, they soon became popular with local men of affairs who wanted to take dinner in a fashionable social setting. At first, engaging company and a decent, filling meal were sufficient. But, especially at the higher end of dining establishments, the variety and preparation of food became a sensual pursuit and a status symbol. At the same time, small independent restaurants opened to provide quick, affordable meals to local businesspeople and workers. Some such places became social meeting places, while others, particularly oyster houses, were the fast-food eateries of their day.

Boston, which was one of America’s leading laboratories of urban innovation, developed restaurants as havens for eating and respite in a complex metropolis. Restaurants were secure, predictable places of association, where people could stake out social space in the city. They could be third places, gathering spots that provided a leisure alternative to places of home and work.⁴

The first customers for dining out were the wealthy elite. Travelers who could afford to stay at the Boston Exchange Coffee House, Tremont House, or other early full-service hotels were in the top socioeconomic tier. Locals dining at these hotels tended to come from the front rank of businessmen and professionals, who wanted to participate in the prestigious and engrossing social event of the hotel’s daily dinner. But dining out in the antebellum period was not exclusive. The emerging middle class was also joining hotel meals and patronizing stand-alone eateries. The growth of the middle class and its aspirations during the nineteenth century was remarkable—and it was reflected in the expansion of restaurants and their prominence in the social round of daily life.⁵

The large lower-middle and working classes ate in low-cost oyster houses, lunchrooms, and saloons. Working people only wanted to grab a bite when at work or away from home. No matter what their class, unless they were poverty-stricken, everyone would eat out sometimes. Restaurant-goers sorted themselves by class, gender, and ethnic group, expressing their status, power, and taste.

Locke-Ober and such hotels as the Parker House, Young’s, the Brunswick, the Vendome, the Copley Plaza, and the Ritz-Carlton emerged as places of privilege, affluence, and luxury. Private clubs, such as the Somerset and Algonquin, were examples of third places for the Brahmin elites. The ultimate occasion for socializing was at the banquets that proliferated during the nineteenth century. Usually held at hotels, banquets were arranged for political, literary, business, civic, religious, and fraternal groups. Banquets were male bastions, where gluttonous eating, alcohol, tobacco, and hale fellowship held sway.

By the 1870s and 1880s, upper- and middle-class women, who had previously been dissuaded from dining out, started using confectioners and ice cream parlors as their own downtown social institutions. Popular spots included Weber’s and Bailey’s. During the twentieth century, tearooms, particularly those located in department stores, became female third places. As automobile use became widespread during the 1920s, tearooms sprang up in suburbs and the countryside.

Bohemians and other high-livers patronized French restaurants, such as Marliave, Mieusset Frères, and Chez Dreyfus, and the Italian-oriented Vercelli. Harvard students and sporting types frequented Billy Park’s Chop House and Jacob Wirth. Ethnic groups—Italian, Chinese, Jewish, German, Syrian, Greek—established eateries where they could congregate with compatriots and dine on old country dishes.

From 1900 until 1950, dining and dancing went together at hotel dining rooms and swanky nightclubs. During this era, these supper clubs were more about social mixing (couples out together for a night on the town), dancing, floor shows, and drinking than they were about the quality of the food. City life and going out were at a high point. The era of nightclubs likewise introduced the concept of the theme restaurant. Nightclubs differentiated themselves with exotic Parisian, Egyptian, Oriental, Spanish, Venetian, and German settings. As the dining-and-dancing epoch passed away after World War II, mainstream restaurants adopted a wide range of thematic motifs. Steak houses at the Kenmore and Somerset Hotels adopted Olde English décor. Polynesian restaurants served an Americanized version of Chinese food amidst tiki carvings, bamboo, and fake palm trees. Outside the city, Colonial Revival inns recreated the ambience of early America. Restaurants were producing an escapist tableau for diners to experience.

During the post–World War II era, the expanding middle class had unparalleled disposable income and leisure time, vastly enlarging the market for restaurants. Budget-friendly chains like Howard Johnson’s, Brigham’s, Friendly’s, and Schrafft’s made family dining into a major pastime, and suburbs experienced significant restaurant expansion.

Restaurants entered a period of rapid evolution during the 1970s, when gourmet French cuisine flourished and other ethnic culinary traditions became popular. The quality and novelty of food became the focus of dining, setting a trend that has grown to the present time. Boston’s downtown renaissance was under way, and restaurants were part of the movement. Just as hospitality was a fundamental ingredient of individual dining spots, a lively restaurant scene made the whole city seem more hospitable. Restaurants became everyday places, not only special-occasion destinations.⁶

•  •  •

WHAT’S ON THE MENU

In telling the story of Boston’s restaurants, Dining Out in Boston focuses on the development of restaurant food. By studying menus dating back to their beginnings in the early nineteenth century, we can trace the development of the city’s culinary heritage and better understand the contributing foodstuffs, flavors, recipes, dining customs, and the pressure of fashion. We can get a sense of the quality of the food. As chef Jeremiah Tower has written: To me, menus are a language unto themselves. . . . Reading an old menu slowly forms in my mind’s eye its era, the sensibility of the restaurateur or the chef, even the physical details of the dining room. I can picture the guests, even when I don’t know who they were.⁷

Written bills of fare, as menus were usually called during the antebellum era, appeared at American hotels in the early nineteenth century. Early hotels like the Tremont House, which served dinner in the style of table d’hôte (French for the host’s table, because the host often dined with the patrons), used the bill of fare to establish a sequence of courses that were served to all diners—soup, fish, meat, game, dessert, and beverages—which evolved in nomenclature and makeup over the years. The à la carte menu, which allowed the diner to select individual dishes, was used at independent eateries and was introduced to hotels by the Parker House in 1855.

The term menu, a French word derived from the Latin minūtus, for small, fine, or detailed, and used to denote an aptly detailed list of dishes, gradually gained cachet in America.⁸ Menus reflected an act of hospitality, presenting the diner an array of dishes to consider. They offered a consumer’s cornucopia, stoking tantalizing expectations, especially when dishes were given foreign names or served with costly ingredients. In the 1830s, hotels started printing a new bill of fare each day. With the passing years, the bill of fare assumed more stylish designs and was presented in a sturdy format (with heavy cardboard, leather, or fabric covers) to project an air of grandeur and withstand excessive handling. Hotels often printed artistically designed menus for banquets and major holidays, which customers saved as souvenirs.⁹

The menu has been a marvelous conceit. Menus can be pedestrian, bombastic, or, at their best, poetic. Just reading a menu can induce craving. Displaying menus outside a restaurant, a European custom adopted in the United States in recent decades, conveys the bounty of the kitchen to the street. Posting menus on the Internet makes the offerings of specific restaurants known everywhere.

Charles Ranhofer, a nineteenth-century chef at New York’s Delmonico’s Restaurant, the nation’s pacesetter for fine dining, explained that the menu was a contract between the kitchen and the diners about what would be served:

In carrying out the order the menu should be strictly followed, in fact, it must be an obligatory rule to do so. . . .

Menus are indispensable for service à l’américaine; there should be one for each guest, for as no dish served from the kitchen appears on the table, every one must be informed beforehand of what the dinner is composed, and those dishes that are to follow each other.

Menus must be both simple and elegant, and of a size to allow them to be easily placed in the pocket without folding, as it is the general desire to keep the bill of fare at a dinner at which one has assisted.¹⁰

Menus demonstrate how each era has had a basic culinary restaurant repertoire. Diners expected to find certain dishes, and chefs sought to accommodate the desires of the public. During the nineteenth century, according to the historian Paul Freedman, hotels and restaurants across the country tended to serve a fairly standard, yet extensive, menu. Dishes were unlike those eaten at home. Restaurants began varying the standard around 1900 to incorporate an evolving set of dishes and culinary values. To this day, despite a broad range of ingredients and cooking styles, specific types of restaurants tend to have similar menu items.

During the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, the menus proffered in the bustling dining rooms of the Tremont House, Revere House, Parker House, and other leading hotels were encyclopedic, presenting an immense array of courses and dishes. Their cooking was grounded in the traditions of Anglo-America yet often included French dishes, which helped define fine restaurant food. These restaurants cultivated a mode of gourmet dining that would evolve over the decades and set a standard in Boston for other dining places to follow.

They served some of the most lavish meals available in the country. Anthony Trollope observed with irony: The Puritans of Boston are, of course, simple in their habits and simple in their expenses. Champagne and canvas-back ducks I found to be the provisions most in vogue among those who desired to adhere closely to the manner of their forefathers.¹¹

The gastronomic bounty was most on display at the lavish hotel banquets of the latter nineteenth century. Meals could consist of ten or more courses with matching wines, Madeiras, and cordials. Banquet menus became popular souvenirs. The Gilded Age was notable for its conspicuous consumption, incisively examined by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Gluttony and rotund bellies signaled that one had made it.

Meanwhile, the middling and working classes ate at lunchrooms that served comprehensive bills of fare. Though copious, their food was comparatively plain. Stand-up oyster bars, which provided the fast and inexpensive food of the day, usually just posted their limited offerings on a sign or blackboard.

Foodstuffs served on menus were local and seasonal. After the Civil War, the variety of foods swelled, as railroads and steamships transported comestibles from all over the world. Refrigerator cars kept meat and fish fresh. Canning made seasonal foods available year-round. Boston, as a global port, was a pioneer in importing and consuming exotic foods. Consumer demand for expanded choices and higher quality grew.

By the early twentieth century, food products reached a high point in Boston. Edwin M. Bacon extolled the quality of ingredients: Boston has long been celebrated for good feeding. Its markets are uncommonly well and choicely stocked. . . . ‘Boston wants the best,’ it is said, ‘and is willing to pay for it.’ And can afford it, too, it might be added, since the wealth per capita and average earning-capacity are greater here than in any other metropolitan city in the world. Dealers in meats in the West will tell you that the choicest cuts are invariably sent to Boston. . . . Boston being the second fishing-port of the world and the great centre of the fresh-fish trade for the United States, no place better to indulge one’s appetite for good fish could be found in this country.¹² Although contemporary foodies might be condescending toward traditional New England cooking, diners enjoyed and celebrated it.

Restaurant food changed dramatically during the 1920s. Victorian gluttony became a thing of the past. Luxury game dishes like canvasback duck and terrapin had been hunted into scarcity. Prohibition killed off much fine dining because then, as today, restaurants made the majority of their profits from selling alcoholic beverages. Without beer, wine, and cocktails to support the bottom line, luxury restaurants withered. Culinary populism was on the rise at lunch counters and cafeterias like Hayes-Bickford and Waldorf, which offered standardized portion-controlled American fare. At ladies’ tearooms, dishes became lighter and courses fewer. Dessert foods and ice cream expanded their role on restaurant menus. All these trends were amplified during the 1930s during the privations of the Great Depression.

The classic New England menu became codified during the early twentieth century. The region became populated with Colonial Revival inns like Longfellow’s Wayside Inn and the Toll House, where one could order Yankee pot roast, roast turkey with cranberry sauce, and shortcakes and cobblers. As the region paid greater attention to its culinary traditions, seafood became a focus, and Anthony’s Pier 4 and Jimmy’s Harborside became leading restaurants. The guidebook author Duncan Hines and Gourmet magazine, during the 1940s and 1950s, considered straightforward Yankee cooking to be the country’s best. The food historians Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont, in Eating in America, lauded the culinary integrity of Boston’s connection to traditional New England cooking: A unique quality of the historic restaurants of Boston is that almost all of them were dedicated to the New England cuisine, in contrast to New York’s famous eating places, which kowtowed to the prestige of French cooking. Valid gastronomic traditions are almost invariably built around foods locally available, and this was the case for Boston, whose seafood has always been important on its restaurant menus.¹³

Despite the celebration of Yankee cooking, the general quality of restaurant food was suffering by the 1950s and 1960s. The industrialization of food diminished the quality of ingredients. Hyperefficiency and convenience superseded taste and gastronomic integrity. The theme and decor of restaurants eclipsed culinary values.

The 1970s challenged convention at restaurants, just as dramatic change was sweeping many other American institutions. Critics started to attack the abuses associated with industrialized food. Plain old meat and potatoes went out of style. The news media started to report on restaurants. Travelers brought back ideas about good food from Europe. Julia Child and other advocates of fine food stimulated culinary exploration. Students and other budget diners supported a flowering of health- and ethnic-oriented eateries. Bostonians started going to restaurants for the quality of the food and trying new dishes. French gourmet food was in vogue at Madeleine Kamman’s Modern Gourmet, Lucien Robert’s Maison Robert, the Harvest, the Ritz-Carlton, and several other hotel restaurants. Epicurean and ethnic food shops and gourmet home-cooking became popular. Sauces, herbs, spices, and other touches gave dishes more flavor and sophistication. During the 1980s, Boston restaurants helmed by such chefs as Lydia Shire, Jasper White, Gordon Hamersley, and Frank McClelland started creating high cuisine based on regional traditions and ingredients. Boston magazine’s restaurant writer Steven Raichlen reported: I have watched Boston evolve from a culinary backwater to a city with world-class dining. Dining has become our favorite pastime—a great new restaurant opens almost every week.¹⁴ As skilled chefs assumed a leading role, menus became much shorter, featuring a limited array of dishes, a practice they deemed necessary for achieving the highest levels of quality.

And so it has gone over the ensuing decades. Boston is indisputably one of America’s top restaurant cities, for its variety, quality, and invention. Foodies—chefs, suppliers, writers, and diners—set the tone for a vibrant culinary culture. New dishes are constantly being introduced to the repertoire. Epicureanism, particularly a taste for locally grown and crafted food products, has become a popular passion. Boston’s restaurants are a distinctive part of metropolitan life.

Dining Out in Boston explores Boston’s rich culture of eating out. It takes the story up to the 1980s, when today’s culinary revolution got seriously under way. The multitudinous restaurants, trends, personalities, and the escalating obsession with food of recent years deserve comprehensive treatment of their own. This book closes with an analysis of the contemporary dining scene, which is the outgrowth of two centuries of restaurant history. The book focuses on locally owned restaurants and Boston-based chains, skirting national chains.

This restaurant history seeks to explain how Boston chef Barbara Lynch’s conception of a restaurant has evolved over the decades. As Lynch has maintained, At its heart, a dining experience is a very personal thing. We literally nourish guests, and if we do it right, we provide not only incredible food and drink but also comfort; entertainment; education; and, above all, a lovely escape from reality. . . . I’ve always believed that you can walk into a restaurant and immediately know whether or not it has a soul—and the memorable ones always do.¹⁵ Just as individual restaurants have souls, so does the restaurant culture of Greater Boston. Let’s savor the long-forgotten historic menus and see how Boston’s restaurants have developed.

: 2 :

Dining Out from 1800 until the Civil War

He [the hotel keeper] feeds them in droves like cattle. He rings a bell, and they come like dogs at their master’s whistle.

THOMAS HAMILTON

In tracing the history of restaurants in Boston, you have to start with colonial inns and taverns. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Boston was the leading seaport in British North America, the town had more than its share of public houses. Reverend Cotton Mather, in 1675, observed that every other house seemed to be a tavern.¹ There were major concentrations of taverns on State Street (King Street in colonial times) near the Old State House and near Faneuil Hall and Dock Square, places where the business of the colony and the port was being conducted. Taverns hosted merchants and seamen and visitors from the New England hinterlands.

In a town like Boston, inns and taverns served different classes and offered varied qualities of comestibles and accommodations. Locals seeking refreshment would frequent taverns and coffeehouses for drinking, conversing, and reading newspapers. Dining was rudimentary until the mid-eighteenth century, when tables, chairs, and table settings became prevalent in the American colonies. The genteel upper class began to transform table habits by introducing forks to join knives and spoons as eating utensils.²

During the Revolutionary era, the taverns serving Boston’s elite included the Bunch of Grapes (as commemorated by a plaque on the Exchange Place building at the corner of State and Congress Streets); the British Coffee House, at the bottom of State Street at Long Wharf (after the Revolution, the American Coffee House); and Cromwell’s Head. These taverns served better food and utilized genteel serving utensils as compared with their more modest Boston peers. Boston’s taverns catered to lodges and clubs. The first Masonic lodge in America, for example, was founded at the Bunch of Grapes in 1733. Before the Revolution, the Bunch of Grapes was the informal headquarters of the High Whigs, the political faction challenging British authority. Leading Loyalists met at the British Coffee House.³ After George Washington drove the British from Boston in 1776, he was feted at the Bunch of Grapes, where Lafayette was entertained four years later. Two of the leading workingmen’s taverns were the Salutation and the Green Dragon (today, there is a Green Dragon at 11 Marshall Street, but it has no direct connection to the Revolutionary-era tavern). The Green Dragon was a gathering place for patriots who were planning resistance to British troops and tax officials.

Boston’s taverns and inns were given colorful names and wore signs illustrating these names, much as in England. Many Boston taverns, in fact, were named after taverns in England. It is interesting that Boston restaurants in the nineteenth century never took the colorful names of colonial taverns, such as the Castle, Liberty Tree, Sign of the Grand Turk, Three Horse Shoes, and White Horse. Most nineteenth-century restaurants were instead simply named after their owners, such as Durgin-Park, Frost & Dearborn, Ober’s, and Parker’s.

Boston’s taverns served alcoholic drinks like ale, cider, Madeira, rum, and punch, but they also served meals to travelers, local boarders, and others. Taverns offered meals three times a day, with the main meal, called dinner, served in the early afternoon. Suppers were usually cold leftovers from dinner. Meals were served family style at a public table, where diners received an array of dishes, whose variety and quality depended upon the class of customers being served.⁴ Diners did not order specific dishes. Since eighteenth-century taverns did not print bills of fare, it is difficult to describe the complete range of dishes served in that era. The English traveler Henry Wansey provided a description of tavern dining at the Bunch of Grapes in 1798: At two o’clock dinner was announced, and we were shown into a room where we found a long table covered with dishes, and plates for twenty persons. We were served with salmon, veal, beef, mutton, fowl, ham, roots, puddings, &c., &c. each man his pint of Madeira before him and for this and our breakfast, tea, supper and bed, we paid five shillings currency.⁵ The dishes at the Bunch of Grapes and at other taverns resembled those of the mother country. They included meat pies and stews, with adaptations of local foods, such as cornmeal, squash, codfish, and wildfowl. Staple foods like Indian pudding (not sweetened) and baked beans, both served with bits of meat, would have sufficed as main courses in less refined taverns. At this time, Bostonians tended to eat one-dish meals in which the ingredients were mixed together.

Given the dearth of information on how people dined in Boston’s late eighteenth-century taverns, it is worth looking to other American cities with comparable taverns. One of the most thoroughly researched colonial-era taverns was Philadelphia’s City Tavern, which was rebuilt for the American Revolution Bicentennial of 1976 and which serves colonial-style dishes today. The City Tavern was opened in 1773 and was Philadelphia’s leading hostelry through its epoch as U.S. capital, between 1790 and 1800.⁶ The City Tavern served meals to its guests three times a day, but was best known for serving group dinners. During the Revolution, members of the Second Continental Congress dined there every Saturday, and most civic celebrations featured a banquet at the tavern.

Walter Staib, the City Tavern’s current proprietor, maintains that the food at the tavern in the late eighteenth century was of a high quality. Philadelphia was a major port that received voluminous imports. Its agricultural hinterland was the country’s richest. Philadelphia had broad ethnic diversity and varied food traditions, from England, Germany, and France, as compared with Boston’s Anglo-Saxon monoculture. Since Philadelphia was the capital and gathering place for all the colonies, it could be the scene of lavish entertainments and bounteous banquets.⁷ Staib’s research in eighteenth-century menus and recipes reveals that the City Tavern served a surprising array of dishes at daily meals and at special banquets.

According to Staib, the City Tavern served its meals French style (à la française). The host put out a broad range of dishes from which diners helped themselves. Relatively small portions of sliced roast meats were served with vegetable garnishes. Savory pies, which recycled cooked meats and incorporated blemished vegetables, were popular because of their ability to preserve food. Composed salads (lettuce was perishable and rare) featured beets, carrots, lentils, root vegetables, and cucumbers and were closely related to relishes. Well-cooked stews and soft foods, like puddings, were popular because people had bad teeth and had difficulty chewing. Upper-class diners had the worst dental hygiene because they could afford the most sweets. Sweets, which relied on costly ingredients like sugar and nuts, were a high point of the meal, with great spreads of puddings, custards, cakes, pies, cobblers, candies, and candied fruits.

Although the basic cooking was British in style, the cooks also tried to impress diners with recipes from France, the new nation’s ally, mimicking its style of service. To win favor with their elite clientele, the cooks at the City Tavern used an age-old gastronomic method—preparing good seasonal ingredients in the most appropriate fashion.⁸ The food at the City Tavern was probably more elaborate than at most inns in Boston, but the types of dishes were comparable.

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JULIEN’S RESTORATOR

Boston’s first stand-alone restaurant was Julien’s Restorator, established in 1793 by Jean Baptiste Gilbert Payplat (in Boston, he called himself Julien). Having served as a cook for the archbishop of Bordeaux, Julien was a refugee from the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Julien’s Restorator was modeled on restaurants that had been developing in Paris during the late eighteenth century. They were a complete novelty in the New World.

There is a popular belief that restaurants in France developed as a result of the French Revolution, when chefs for the aristocracy lost their positions and ended up opening eateries for the general public. This myth has been debunked by historians like Rebecca L. Spang, who explained that French restaurants actually began in the 1760s. The original restaurants specialized in serving restoratives, particularly bouillons, which were concentrated meat essences—usually made from ham, veal, or fowl. Consommés, wines, and cordials were considered to be restaurants.⁹ The person who made the consommés or bouillons was called a restaurateur, the term still used for a person who runs a restaurant.

Just as Parisians prior to the French Revolution frequented cafes for a caffeinated jolt, nutritional fashion led sickly and delicate people, particularly women, to seek out restorative drinks at restaurants. At first, light, easily digested dishes like puddings, eggs, cheeses, and fruits complemented the bouillons. By the 1790s, Parisian restaurants began to serve a full range of dishes. Like cafes, restaurants were popular centers for socializing, particularly during the tumultuous years of the Revolution. They were places where people could restore both body and psyche.

Boston, like the ports of New York