Blog #10
With food being the great congregator around which society is grounded, we are able to gather the “fingerprint” of a particular place in time. By looking through New York’s restaurant menus throughout the last century and a half, I was able to see the changing landscape through changing tastes. These changes were the result of new influences on our always evolving American palate, or came of the influx of new arrivals to the city.
This sample menu from a popular New York lunch/dinner spot in 1858 reflected many traits about life in the city from this time. The menu shows how America was still in its formative phase and foods were kept simple. In today’s New York you have hundreds if not thousands of cuisines and food types to choose from for your meals, but in the 1850’s, you were limited to mutton leg and turkey with giblet sauce.
This menu dates back to 1907 and hails from a ninth floor restaurant serving a high-rise building. The most interesting part of the menu’s I was browsing from this time period is the lack of international dishes. This shows me that although New York has always been an international city, it was not always a place that warmed up to foreigners. Where today New York feels like a mix of the worlds 20 biggest cities rolled into one, before the nativist sentiment spilled over even into food. And as Nativism always does, the country missed out on some great grub!
This menu goes back to 1959 and is from the food hall that served delegates of the U.N.. What drew my attention was that this menu typified American sentiments of the time. Although catering to a diverse, international audience, the menu is almost exclusively based on classic American cuisine. This encapsulates the feelings of the times as this was when America was on the world stage, but it still did not become one with the rest of the world. Nowhere are foods found to make the guests feel more at home, instead the very American idea of “my way or the highway” is seen at play.
What brought my attention to this menu from 2003 is that the restaurant is considered an “old school” Italian restaurant when cumulatively speaking, Italian food is quite a new to the city. In the 400 years of New York’s existence, Italians have been here for less than 100 of those in mass amounts, and already they already an “old immigrant” group. This to me gives the idea of the rapidly changing times upon us; the change of pace in this city now is greater than ever and things stay “young” for a lot less in this New York for good or bad.
I totally agree with you that the trend regarding international influence on New York City’s restaurants has shown a steady increase as the state became more of a cultural hub of the world. I also thought it was interesting how you mentioned the perception that Italian Americans are considered an “old immigrants” group, is that they have already been famed for making pizza and other New York City staples, but they have only existed in the country for so many decades. Great job noticing these aspects of NYC’s history!