A History of “Lunch” Restaurants
When Just Lunch—Quick, Cheap and Hot—Was an American Restaurant Model; Plus a Visit to Theodora; and Odds and Ends.
I first clapped eyes on a “lunch” restaurant in summer of 2008. I was in Troy, New York. I can’t remember why I was there. I don’t even remember how I got there—I owned no car at the time. But there I was, standing in front of a place called Famous Lunch. I was there to try the miniature hot dogs, a specialty of the Troy area, something Famous Lunch had been serving up since 1932. (Yes, even back then I was intrigued by hot dog history.)
But just as fascinating as the tiny frankfurters was the name of the place. It was in letters two feet tall on a sign that was nearly as big as the storefront itself. “Famous Lunch.” It was less a name than a noun, a boast.
Who names their eatery after a meal?, I wondered. And who emphasizes lunch when they also serve breakfast and dinner, as Famous Lunch did?
Whatever. I went in, ate my hot dogs, drank my RC Cola, and left, thinking Famous Lunch was an outlier with a name as weird as their food specialty.
I didn’t encounter another “Lunch” place until years later when I drove into Scranton to eat at Coney Island Lunch, in business since 1923. Again, I was in search of hot dogs and, again, I found an old place called “Lunch.”
Soon after, I was in New Britain, Connecticut, at another hot dog destination. This one was called Capitol Lunch, in business since 1929. Why did these old hot dog places called themselves “Lunch”?
Since then, I have been to New Way Lunch in Glens Falls, New York (since 1919); and Newest Lunch (since 1921) and Broadway Lunch (1967), both in Schenectady. I was no longer fazed by the names of these places. But I was still curious. Once upon a time, in the early decades of the 20th century, a lot of new eating establishments—humble places that were basically what we’d call diners today—named themselves “Lunch.” And then, beginning in the middle of the 20th century, nobody did anymore.
What happened to cause this change? I started digging and found a story that had to do changing labor requirements, tight food budgets, tighter dining schedules, cheap eats, modern convenience and Prohibition.
On March 29, 1910, Frederic J. Haskin, a well-known reporter and columnist of the time, published a rather jingoistic piece in the Pittsburgh Gazette titled, “Quick Lunch Rooms Are Truly American.” He wrote of lunch places:
It is the creature and the symbol of that Hustle and Hurry which has enabled the American business man to do 10 times as much work in a decade as can be done by all his foreign competitors together.
The American quick lunch room offers better food for the money, quantity and quality both considered, than can be obtained anywhere else on earth. The American restaurant may be inferior to those of Europe, and it certainly is higher priced, but the quick lunch room stands unexcelled in its field.
In the 19th century, eating lunch out wasn’t really a thing for working Americans. Some brought their lunch to work and ate it there. Others returned home for lunch, where their spouse had a meal waiting, before going back to their job. But by the 1900s, things were changing.
“There is a great and yearly increase in the numbers of men and women who have to eat their noonday meal away from their home, and who for financial reasons cannot expend more than a quarter at the most for the meal,” reported the Hartford Courant in 1914. “More often it is 10 or 15 cents. To satisfy and to provide for the wants of these people the modern lunchroom has grown up.”
This development explains the existence of these surviving old “Lunch” restaurants. They did indeed specialize in lunch. It was nothing but smart marketing to include the word “lunch” in their names, because that’s explicitly what the workers at the neighboring factories and mills were looking for.
The lunch restaurants had to meet certain customer needs. They had to be cheap; they had to provide speedy service; and it was apparently important that they be spotless. Time and again, articles and advertisements about new lunch places emphasized the place’s cleanliness and use of the most up-to-date cooking equipment. It could be that the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919 was still very much on people’s minds and having a restaurant be super sanitary was vital to guests.
The modern lunch counter, the Courant wrote, embodies “the idea of impeccable cleanliness, shown in tile and glass walls and counters, clean napkins and white clothed employees.”
In 1939, when John Karagianis opened Famous Texas Lunch in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he bragged about his equipment and the fact that you could see the food being prepared. “The kitchen is equipped with the most modern facilities to ensure the utmost cleanliness in the preparation of foods,” claimed an ad for the place.
This focus on the new and the modern explains the overly optimistic names given to many of these old restaurants. By calling themselves Newest or New Way or Capitol—and these were all common names, as were Quick and Broadway—they were telling the world that they were the best and the latest in the line of hot lunches.
An ad in a Rochester newspaper in 1928 read, “Eat! at Rochester’s Newest Lunch Rooms.” The ad didn’t even give the name of the new place. Just an address and the proprietors. All that mattered was it was new—in fact, the newest!
Time was of the essence at these businesses, because most of the workers who patronized lunch places weren’t given many minutes to eat.
“Whatever the system, whatever the menu, whatever the service,” Haskin wrote, “10 minutes is a long time to eat and 25 cents is not at all a small check.” The Hartford Courant printed a funny account in 1914 of trolleymen halting their cars, dashing in and coming back with multiple lunches for the crew. They would then stow the food under the trolley car floor until they had a moment to eat.
Providing a satisfying meal at such prices was a challenge for the proprietors of lunch joints. It is only natural, then, that many of the restaurants ended up specializing in the hot dog, which could be sold cheaply and made quickly. Frankfurters quickly became a favorite of workers with little time and little money. In time, they became popular with the middle and upper classes as well.
On Sept. 26, 1921, the Montgomery Advertiser declared that the “once lowly ‘hot dog’ has become popular dish of high-brow epicures. The hot dog has done away with the old-time bar-rail instep, but in the absence of this token of good-fellowship has appeared the onion-breath, which while keeping friends at bay yet marks the bearer of this breath as a man of the people.”
The Dearborn Independent of Michigan, reporting on Dec. 4, 1926, said, “The extraordinary demand for hot-dogs has become national. They are the mainstay of more and more quick service lunch rooms and concessionaires at outing and amusement places.”
Lunch places were sure to let customers know that they carried the exact kind of lunch food they craved. “We have always served you the best weiners obtainable,” promised First Famous Texas Lunch, which opened in 1925 in Pennsylvania, in an advertisement.
You may had noticed that many of the articles and ads quoted above date from the 1920s. There’s a reason for that. Interestingly, lunch restaurants appear to have been, in many cases, direct descendants of the saloons that were shut down by Prohibition in 1920. When the bars were put out of business, the buildings and storefronts remained. Many of these were converted into soda fountains and lunch counters.
In August 1924, the New York Times published an article titled, “Hot Dog Most Popular Lunch.” It read:
In the past few years, according to this manufacturer, the trade [of hot dogs] has more than doubled. ‘Prohibition has a lot to do with it,’ declared A.S. Davis, assistant treasurer of the Adolph Gobel Company. [Gobel was a great seller of sausages based in Brooklyn.] It is since prohibition that the big increase has come. When all the soft-drink stands began to appear and old cafes were reopened as quick-lunch counters, people wanted something to go with their drinks. They saw hot dogs there and ate them because they happened to see them. The special demand for them grew from that. In fact, the hot dog has taken the place with soft drinks that pretzels had with beer in the old saloon.
Prohibition ended in 1933, and in the ninety years since most of the old lunch-focused eateries have vanished, along with the mills and factories they catered to. But for those few dozen that remain, not much has changed since the 1920s. They are still modest operations composed of a lunch counter, a grill or small kitchen and some booths. Many are still open only for breakfast and lunch. They are favored by the working class. The prices remain low. And hot dogs remain a specialty.
Newest Lunch, Famous Lunch, Broadway Lunch, New Way Lunch and Coney Island Lunch all still sell more hot dogs than anything else. They all basically make the same style of dog, topped with mustard, chopped onion and a secret meat sauce whose recipe varies from joint to joint.
Newest—which still has its original counter stools—uses White Eagle frankfurters, a beef-and-pork brand made in Schenectady. Broadway Lunch steams their buns and use a frank that is specially made for them by a meat packer in Chicago. Their dog was a particular favorite of ours during a recent trip to Schenectady.
I’ve written in detail about the dogs at New Way Lunch and Coney Island Lunch on the newsletter in the past, so I won’t go into their styles again here.
As for Famous Lunch’s name, the luncheonette was founded in 1932 as Quick Lunch. It became “famous” when a Troy Marine stationed in Moscow got a hankering for the dogs and had some flown over. The stunt was reported on in the papers. After that, Quick Lunch was rechristened as Famous Lunch.
But it was still Lunch.
In their early days, lunch restaurants were highly rated as emblems of American ingenuity, ranked right up there with baseball, apple pie and the flag. The hopelessly patriotic Frederic Haskin wrote, “The crowing glory of the quick lunch room as an American institution is its democracy. The Wall Street banker and the Wall Street newsboy regularly eat ‘beef and’ at the same place.” (“Beef and” was shorthand for a popular meal in New York. The “and” was usually cabbage.)
Some supporters were so enthusiastic, they expressed their admiration in verse. Here is a poem that appeared in the Buffalo News and Feb. 18, 1905. It was written by John D. Wells and was titled “From Grave to Gay”:
The leveler of all mankind, was the grave, they used to say—
Declared all men where equal only on that final day,
But in the speedy day and age men rub elbows twice as soon—
It beats the grave a million ways—this modern quick-lunch room.
Do you have an old “Lunch” restaurant in your town? Please let me know in the comments. I’d like the check it out.
Odds and Ends…
THE LEDE One of the best and more consistent dining destinations in my area is Miss Ada, the Mediterranean restaurant on Dekalb Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. When I heard the owner and chef, Tomer Blechman, has just opened a new place nearby, Theodora, I was immediately intrigued. Miss Ada had made me excited about Mediterranean food in a way no restaurant in New York had before (Shaya had done the trick in New Orleans); I expected Theodora would lead me further on that journey. The place is tucked behind a subway entrance on Greene Street. The narrow storefront belies a deep space within that seems to go the length of two subway cars and was, that night, just as packed with people. I passed two bars, one in front of the enormous Josper open-fire oven, before settling into our nook in the bright white space, which boasted skylights and light flowing from various crevices and holes in the walls and ceiling. Above that fire were hung the impressive bones of various fish—chef trophies at a restaurant that emphasizes seafood. Theodora’s primary focus is dry-aged fish, something I’d never heard of until stepping into the room, as “dry-aged” is a term typically associated with meat. But there they were halfway down the Theodora corridor: several large fish carcasses aging in, well, an “ager,” which looks like a refrigerator. The fish spend three to seven days there before being cooked. According to the chef, dry-aging leads to a firmer fish, concentrated flavors and crispier skin.
The waiter suggested we order an item from each other menu’s five sections (Crudo, Bread, Vegetables, From the Sea and Large Format), so that’s what we did. The Za’atmar Kubaneh came first, a Lebanese pull-apart bread with three dipping sauces: schug (a spicy green sauce from Yemen), tomato aioli and harissa. Think of a savory, cinnamon roll. Next arrived the crudo, a nightly special of steelhead trout with dill schug and preserved lemon. Nine chunks of trout swam in a mesmerizing, piquant sea of deep green and white. (All Theodora dishes are beautifully plated.) The simple wood-fired broccolini was crisp and perfectly accented by basil and dill dressing, shallots and manchego. We returned back to the list of specials for the irresistible Moroccan fish stew, made of tilefish, tomato, olives and cassava, a tropical root vegetable. It came with sourdough crostini with which we scooped up the flaky fish and its fragrant surrounding sauce. The centerpiece of the meal—and of the menu—was the Bronzino, which came stuffed to the gills with rosemary and lemon slices and lying beside a bed of greens. (The rosemary was introduced a day into its aging process, so the two got to know each other well.) Blechman once told an interviewer that this was the dish that best described his personality. Well, that’s quite a boast, because the Bronzino was magnificent, beautifully crisp on the outside and tender, yet firm, on the inside; one of the best fish preparations I’ve ever had. Whole fish is treated with a gravity here that most restaurants reserve for steak. The cocktail menu focuses on agave spirits (Blechman’s favorite spirit is mezcal and it shows here) and garden-to-glass items like caperberries and cucumber. The Nammu Nammu, made with gin, sherry and caperberry, was Theodora’s answer to a Dirty Martini; and the Mara Cuyu (mezcal, vermouth, Suze, passionfruit) is a juicy, grassy White Negroni. We ended the meal with a lemon posset. Like every dish that preceded it, it was perfectly precise in its detailed command of what could be called complex simplicity.
Hot dogs seem to be the bar food of the moment in New York cocktail bars. They are popping up on menus at both fancy and humble new drink dens, including The Portrait Bar, Romeo’s, Jeremy’s and Little Ned. I wrote about this phenomenon, and rounded up the best of the city’s franks, for Grub Street. Notable bar hot dogs not included in the article are one at Subject on the Lower East Side, Milady’s in SoHo, Swift Hibernian Lodge in NoLiTa and Emmett’s on Grove in the West Village … For Vinepair, I wrote about the prevailing trend in today’s cocktail bars, which is, well, every drink, everywhere, all at once. All the cocktail trends of the past 20 years have converged… Bar Louise, an offshoot of the Park Slope Italian restaurant Pasta Louise, will open on March 20. All the drinks are named after roses found in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden… Information on my March 25 appearance at the Boston bar Equal Measure has been made live. See here for all the details. There is no cover, and the first 25 people through the door get a free copy of my new book The Encyclopedia of Cocktails… Red Hook Tavern just added a Beef on Weck sandwich to their menu. Beef on Weck, a rare-roast-beef sandwich served with horseradish is a regional specialty of the Buffalo area. The necessary kummelweck rolls come from the Winner bakery in Park Slope… The bar at Book Club in Alphabet City—a combination book store and bar—has a drink called the Murder on the Orient Espresso Martini… Mischa, the Alex Stupek restaurant in midtown that had one of the best hot dogs in the city and a stellar cocktail program by Noah Small, sadly closed last week after less than a year in business. It will be missed… The Richardson, the longstanding cocktail bar in Williamsburg, has done the impossible. It has used its slushy machine to make a frozen Bloody Mary. The drink, called The White Whale, is made with American corn vodka, Minnesota gin, horseradish, black pepper, black cardamom, Worcestershire, agave, Mexican and Louisiana pepper sauces and Pasilla Mixe Chile Liqueur. It is topped with a spice blend (celery salt, celery seed, sumac, chipotle, Old Bay), guindilla peppers, wasabi peas, horseradish chips, castelvetrano olives, and a mini Tabasco Bottle. It comes with a 5-ounce snit of lager. Cost is $15. Get it while you can!
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I love the poem about the lunch. Still true now!!
I don’t know about you, but I could use one of these places near my job- it would be so much better than paying $18 for a salad.