Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York - Softcover

William Grimes was the restaurant critic for The New York Times from 1999 to 2003. He is the author of Straight Up or On the Rocks (NPP, 2001) and My Fine Feathered Friend (NPP, 2002), and the coauthor of The New York Times Guide to New York City Restaurants 2004.

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The City Without a Restaurant

In the late 1820s, a Columbia College student by the name of Sam Ward often stepped into a small café in lower Manhattan for a bite to eat. Ward, the son of a prominent banker, would later achieve fame as a big political fixer in Washington and eventually go out in a blaze of scandal. This was no mean feat in the lax moral atmosphere of the Gilded Age, but Ward had great flair.

He also had, even as a young man, a highly developed taste for the finer things in life. Unfortunately, the finer things were in short supply in the New York of his youth, especially when it came to the pleasures of the table. The city, awkwardly poised between the Dutch village it had so recently been and the teeming commercial city it was soon to become, offered little more than the basics to the New Yorker in search of a meal, or the traveler in need of a place to stay and a decent dinner. Visitors and residents alike, their numbers increasing daily, made do with the grim fare served at the city’s boardinghouses, or dined on plain English-style meals at the handful of taverns and chophouses scattered around town. The city that would one day boast many of the finest restaurants in the world was, in the early nineteenth century, a culinary desert.

The old Knickerbocker families, solidly conservative in their manners and their tastes, did just fine. They ate at home. Meals usually were made in the kitchen, but coffeehouses and taverns also functioned as catering shops. When John Battin opened the Eastern Coffee House at Burling Slip and Water Street in 1813, he took out an advertisement in the New York Post that itemized the fare—beefsteaks, mutton chops, broiled chicken, and oysters—and noted pointedly that "families can send servants with dishes to pick up cooked items." This was, in effect, take-out food, a category that would eventually become one of the city’s hallmarks.

The commercial travelers, foreign merchants, and ambitious young men pouring into New York from the hinterlands found the culinary landscape forbidding. The handbooks for visitors that first appeared in print around this time offered scant hope for the hungry. The purportedly comprehensive Blunt’s Stranger’s Guide to the City of New York, published in 1817, listed no restaurants at all, just boardinghouses and hotels: the City Hotel, the Merchants Hotel, and Merchants Hall.

All the more thrilling, then, for a young dog like Sam Ward to discover a little French confectionery and café on William Street, in the heart of the commercial district. It was called Delmonico’s, and it was run by two French-speaking Swiss brothers of that name, John and Peter. "I remember entering the café with something of awe, accompanied by a fellow student from Columbia," Ward recalled in the 1870s. By then he was a legendary bon vivant, and an inspiration for a generation of younger men keen to receive instruction in the arts of fine dining and sophisticated conversation. Delmonico’s, now in its prime, was universally regarded as the finest restaurant in New York, which had also undergone a remarkable transformation, evolving into a restaurant city to rival Paris. But even from this distant vantage, Ward remained enthralled by the humble café that set him on the path of pleasure, a little temple where, he wrote, "the dim religious light soothed the eye, its tranquil atmosphere the ear."

Innocent impressions, recollected in sentimental old age, might have influenced Ward’s description. In his private papers, which include an attempted history of Delmonico’s, he characterized it as "a very primitive little café," an opinion seconded by the New York brahmin Abram C. Dayton. "The little place contained some half dozen pine tables with requisite wooden chairs, to match, and on a board counter covered with white napkins was ranged the limited assortment of pastry," wrote Dayton, the son of a prosperous merchant. "The silverware was old-fashioned two-tine forks and buck-handled knives, the cups and plates solid earthenware." In Delmonico’s early days, the chef himself brought the food to the table.

Primitive it may have been, but from the outset, Delmonico’s struck a distinctive note. Like the spire of Trinity Church, it towered over its surroundings. Service was prompt and deferential, for one thing, a marked departure from the "democratic nonchalance" of chophouses and lunchrooms like Clark and Brown’s on Maiden Lane, George W. Brown’s Auction Hotel on Water Street, or Holt’s Ordinary on Fulton Street, where diners had two choices: a shilling plate (a shilling was worth twelve and a half cents) or a two-shilling set menu known as an ordinary. This was the "meat and two veg" special of its day, a slab of beef or mutton with potatoes and gravy, served up fast with no frills. At its best, the chophouse could be excellent, in the British way, but a steady diet of meat and potatoes, day after day, did have its limitations.

Delmonico’s brought a whiff of Paris into the crude, bustling streets of a city long on ambition but short on amenities. Ward was smitten. "I reveled in the coffee, the chocolate, the bavaroises, the orgeats, and petits gateaux and bonbons," he wrote. The "foreign element," as Dayton described the patrons, only added to the attraction for young New Yorkers in search of atmosphere and romance. The youngbloods made their way to Delmonico’s on Saturday afternoons to indulge in a cuisine that their parents regarded as pretentious and possibly health-damaging. There they mingled with European traders and merchants keen to make a killing in the promising New York market, attracted by "the filets, macaroni, café, chocolate, and petit verre"—the last an aperitif.

Dishes like these came as a revelation. The Bank Coffee House, run by the Irishman William Niblo, ranked at or near the top of the city’s eating houses, also known as refectories, but that was not saying much. Thomas Hamilton, a Scottish visitor, remarked that the fare was "more excellent in point of material, than of cookery or arrangement." The Bank menu sounds enticing enough, though plain, with the inevitable starter of oyster soup followed by a choice of meat or fish: shad, venison, partridge, grouse, "wild-ducks of different varieties, and several other dishes less notable." Unfortunately, Hamilton wrote, "there was no attempt to serve this chaotic entertainment in courses, a fashion, indeed, but little prevalent in the United States. Soup, fish, flesh, and fowl simultaneously garnished the table; and the consequence was, that the greater part of the dishes were cold, before the guests were prepared to attack them." The Delmonico brothers sensed a need, and they addressed it with distinction.

Ward remained a regular at Delmonico’s for the rest of his life, watching with approval as the café prospered, grew into a full-fledged restaurant, and followed the movement of wealth and power farther and farther uptown. By catering to the tastes of Manhattan’s leading businessmen and the social elite, the restaurant quickly became an emblem of New York sophistication and cosmopolitanism. Not just a gastronomic shrine, it functioned as a clearinghouse for anyone aspiring to the upper reaches of society. To have an account at Delmonico’s meant that you had arrived. For nearly a century, it reigned supreme among New York’s restaurants. This meant little in the 1820s but quite a lot as the century wore on and New York evolved into the undisputed dining capital of the United States.

In 1827, when John and Peter Delmonico opened for business, the glory years lay far in the future. Their fledgling venture, originally a wine shop serving foreign traders and merchants, was a risky proposition. It assumed that New York could support a real restaurant run along French lines, with a serious kitchen, a printed menu (in French), and an atmosphere of refinement and leisure. In other words, a restaurant such as might be found in Paris, where diners entered expecting to spend two hours or more savoring fine food served by attentive and knowledgeable waiters.

This was a big assumption. Local tastes ran to beef, beer, oysters, and bread. Moreover, dining was not thought of as a leisurely activity. Americans ate fast—they still do—and New Yorkers ate even faster. Time spent eating was time wasted, distraction from the serious business of making money. It was not at all uncommon for a broker or clerk to wolf down lunch in less than twenty minutes at a downtown eating house, standing up if there were no seats to be had, which was often the case. The dominant dining philosophy was simple: feed as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. At the Auction Hotel, pies were spread out on a counter, already cut into slices, so that customers could grab lunch on the run. Table manners remained a work in progress. A fastidious New Yorker, reminiscing about the city of his youth, recalled with amusement diners who liked to crumble up their apple pie and drop it in a glass of milk.

If dining in New York was a commercial rather than a leisure proposition, it was also, more than in any other city, public rather than private. Early on, as businesses proliferated at the tip of Manhattan Island, residents began moving uptown. Elsewhere, Americans walked home for lunch, but in New York, most laborers lived too far away from their jobs for a home-cooked meal. This created a booming lunch trade for the handful of plain-fare establishments serving crowds of customers at lightning speed and rock-bottom prices. Most closed in the afternoon, their work done for the day.

Clark and Brown’s, at the Franklin Coffee House on Maiden Lane near Liberty Street, was typical of the breed. The proprietors, both English, had made their mark at the Auction Hotel, which pioneered the shilling plate and sold pies and pudding at sixpence, drinks the same. At their chophouse, the men presided over a n...