If you like food like I do, if you like reading about food like I do, if you like talking about food like I do, and if you like reading about wacky, idiotic, fantastic or asinine things people did with food throughout history like I do, then you will enjoy the site called “Restaurant-ing Through History” like I do.
This well curated, entertaining and cleverly composed blog includes the features “Menu Art”, “Taste of a decade: 1870s restaurants” and “Dining in Shadows” which sheds light on the fact that up until the early 20th century, going places with bright light was fashionable, as it it turned restaurants into “stages” on which to be seen and on which to ogle others. It illuminates the fact that dining by candlelight was not thought of as the least bit “romantic”, until electricity became commonplace.
“He-man menus” questions whether – despite overwhelming evidence that menus are marketed on the basis of gender – there really are huge gender differences in food preferences. In manly, mid century eateries that featured “business men’s lunch,†the favorite meal was meat and potatoes, pie, and coffee (The Haunted Library readers will remember this to be Nancy Drew’s favorite meal, when eating at home. And she was very much a lady). Gilded age candyman (violet candy tins) Louis Sherry said that female diners in his deluxe Fifth Avenue restaurant (“Sherry’s”),  did not like to draw blood so they avoided red meat. A 1934 New York guide book is cited as tipping off men to places where they could enjoy “man-sized†food “served without fancy gegaws.â€
“Theme Restaurants : Prisons”. Surprisingly, this did not stick and has not made a comeback in Echo Park or Bushwick. Apparently, Los Angeles was host to several prison theme eating and entertainment venues. In the early 1920s, LA entrepreneurs – trying to capture the magic of the wacky eating places that were popular in Greenwich Village at the time – opened a coffee shop that was largely patronized by sailors which had walls painted to resemble stone prison cells on which patrons scrawled their names. “The Jail”, a cafe/bar on Sunset Boulevard had tables set up with their own barred cells and, as the author points out in her characteristically pithy voice: “Just like in Montmartre of the late 1800s, waiters dressed as convicts — the bitterly ironic yet unconscious American twist being that they were black men”.