http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/dining/ten-restaurants-that-changed-america-book-paul-freedman.html 2016-09-20 21:12:26 The Magnificent 10: Restaurants That Changed How We Eat From HoJo’s to the Four Seasons, a Yale professor picks the groundbreakers in America’s culinary past. === Paul Freedman was having lunch at “But the sauce used to have much, much more brandy in it,” Mr. Freedman said. “The style now is less severe.” Whatever the brandy content, this plush dish and its environs hardly seemed the stuff of revolution. But to hear Mr. Freedman tell it, Delmonico’s fired the first real shot for American dining, giving rise to a huge, diverse industry that would thrive and adapt to every major shift in the nation’s identity. In his navy suit and thin-rimmed glasses, Mr. Freedman, a professor of medieval history at Yale University, doesn’t look the part of a provocateur, either. But for his new book, The list is brief, but Mr. Freedman marshals deep research to map the changes each restaurant made to American culture. Howard Johnson’s Though Howard Johnson’s wasn’t able to keep up with chains that followed in its footsteps, like McDonald’s and Burger King, this was the restaurant that pioneered franchising as an expansion plan, strategically opening along highways and ushering in the era of big fast food. “Uniformity in everything, not just food, was enforced by a manual,” Mr. Freedman writes, “a ‘Bible’ of rules and procedures covering kitchen equipment, décor, maintenance, uniforms and cleaning.” Chinese restaurants had been in business here since the mid-19th century, after the California Gold Rush, but Mr. Freedman zooms in on the Mandarin, which opened in San Francisco in 1961. At a time when most Chinese restaurants were identified with a single dish, chop suey, the Mandarin showed off the cuisine’s nuance. Its owner, Mr. Freedman devotes a chapter to Though in later years, Sylvia’s would become world-famous, a shorthand for the very meaning of soul food, for decades it was a prime example of how a neighborhood restaurant could thrive as a social center. Mr. Freedman writes, “It developed a group of regulars, whom Sylvia Woods and her family called by their occupations: ‘Coca-Cola man,’ or ‘Con-Ed man.’” At Delmonico’s, a jacketed waiter appeared (“Excuse me?”) and asked to know if Mr. Freedman would care for some freshly ground black pepper for his pasta with lobster-cream sauce and peas. Mr. Freedman’s book begins here. When Delmonico’s opened, as a pastry shop in 1827, the restaurant scene in New York was wobbly at best. A hustle of street stalls specialized in cheap, fast oyster preparations. Rowdy taverns served a limited number of simple dishes to people at common tables. That was about it. Americans ate at home, and rich New Yorkers ate and entertained at home. But within a few years, the ambitious Delmonico brothers, from Switzerland, had expanded their pastry shop into a serious French restaurant that modeled itself on Parisian-style fine dining. It was, as Mr. Freedman tells it, America’s first true restaurant, in that groups could make reservations and order from a deep menu. The kitchen imported black truffles from the Dordogne region of southwest France to bake in pastry, and served soft-shell crabs from the Eastern Seaboard, bluefish and turtle. The fare was a prototype: the kind of expensive, endlessly reproduced French cuisine that would rule in American cities for well over 100 years. “I asked the chef if he would recreate an old turtle dish,” said Mr. Freedman, who started the research for his book three years ago, “but he never did get back to me on that.” Mr. Freedman, who is 67, was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father was a psychiatrist and the president of the American Psychiatric Association in the early 1970s (when it declared that homosexuality was not, in fact, an illness). His mother was a labor economist. The family went out to eat French food occasionally, and to Tien Tsin, a Chinese restaurant in Harlem, almost every Saturday. As a treat, Mr. Freedman’s grandmother took him to Schrafft’s, where he ate club sandwiches, chicken potpie and butterscotch sundaes. Schrafft’s In its early days, before it was considered a stodgy place for little old ladies, it was radical: a safe, affordable space for women to socialize on their own, in an era when women without male escorts were not welcome in restaurants. Schrafft’s also hired many women, not only as waitresses, but also as cooks and managers, and offered maternity leave. Half a dozen of the restaurants in Mr. Freedman’s book could be found in New York, though most are no longer around. It’s hard to imagine today, but luxury dining up until then had been built on the notion of consistency throughout the year, and on shipping out-of-season ingredients, regardless of their quality. A menu that did not change was considered a luxurious menu. Mr. Freedman made it to the Four Seasons before it One of his choices he snubbed on principle. “Everyone who lived in New York knew that Mamma Leone’s was a tourist trap,” he said. It was also, as Mr. Freedman explains in the chapter devoted to it, much more than that. A giant moneymaking machine, Founded by Luisa Leone in 1906, it provided a model for the success of an immigrant-run restaurant on its own terms, expanding its clientele well beyond Italian-American diners. Mr. Freedman rounds out his Top 10 with two restaurants that endure: Though Mr. Freedman is a medievalist and does not consider himself a food writer, food culture was also the engine of his 2008 book, Though he lives in Pelham, N.Y., with his wife, Bonnie J. Roe, a lawyer, he often travels to Queens to eat noodles and dumplings at the excellent Taiwanese, Indonesian and Sichuan restaurants in Flushing and Elmhurst. In New Haven, Mr. Freedman’s pizza loyalty lies with Of the young, ambitious restaurants on the scene now, Mr. Freedman thinks a few may just be in the same league as his 10: For dessert at Delmonico’s, Mr. Freedman ordered a baked alaska. It wasn’t just dessert, but a carefully preserved artifact from one of Charles Ranhofer’s old menus: banana ice cream sandwiched in walnut cake, sticky with apricot jam, swaddled in a thick layer of spiky torched meringue. One of the more remarkable things about Mr. Freedman’s book is the way it shows how culinary history repeats itself. By 1867, Yes, even America’s first restaurant cycled through the Brooklyn farm-to-table thing. Here are