Paul Freedman in conversation with John T. Edge
If we could, we would be there to hear this conversation; no less a part of the attraction is to do so at an institution worthy of everyone’s book orders:
Whether charting the rise of our love affair with Chinese food through San Francisco’s fabled The Mandarin, evoking the richness of Italian food through Mamma Leone’s, or chronicling the rise and fall of French haute cuisine through Henri Soule’s Le Pavillon, food historian Paul Freedman uses each restaurant to tell a wider story of race and class, immigration and assimilation. Freedman also treats us to a scintillating history of the then-revolutionary Schrafft’s, a chain of convivial lunch spots that catered to women, and that bygone favorite, Howard Johnson’s, which pioneered midcentury, on-the-road dining, only to be swept aside by McDonald’s. Lavishly designed with more than 100 photographs and images, including original menus, Ten Restaurants That Changed America is a significant and highly entertaining social history.
In case you missed it, a review of this book is finally available from one of the great food writers of our time:
Freedman’s restaurants serve as emblems of the racial, regional, class, and immigrant realities of America’s kitchens.ILLUSTRATION BY GREG CLARKE
DINING DOWN MEMORY LANE
Nostalgia and Paul Freedman’s “Ten Restaurants That Changed America.”
…Given that Paul Freedman’s new book, “Ten Restaurants That Changed America” (Liveright), is largely a history of eating out in this country, it’s worth noting that the word “restaurant,” at least as food scholars define it, is as recent historically as the experience it describes. It comes from the French restaurer, to restore, and was coined in the seventeen-sixties, supposedly when a nutritionally minded Frenchman known only as Boulanger (his first name has disappeared from the annals of gastronomy) decided to open a place in Paris offering a menu of “restorative” meat broths, along with tables to sit at, wine to sip, and, possibly, a bit of cheese or fruit to end the meal. (“Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods,” the sign on the door said.)…
Organikos 