fare, judging by the reaction of a woman who had been reared on early-American food. “Vile greasy compounds,” she called them, warning her grandson that he would poison his stomach eating at Delmonico, or Del’s, as the rakes took to calling it.

Delmonico instigated so much change in American dining that the history of restaurants in this country divides across its birthday. Boiled meats and bread made up the unvarying sustenance of the earlier era, and practically all meals were taken at home, to the extent that when, in 1750, a New York tavern began to serve an “ordinary,” or a standard lunch, so that businessmen wouldn’t have to go all the way home at lunchtime, it not only was news across town but was attacked as leading inevitably to the dissolution of family life. Whatever it is that restaurants purvey in terms of variety, fantasy, or power, early Americans apparently didn’t require it. Most people simply ate their meals at home or went visiting to have boiled meat and bread at somebody else’s house.

When people were traveling far from home, they might well have to eat out—but only if they couldn’t wangle an invitation along the way. According to custom, invitations for dinner were expected, along class lines, and were freely given, further precluding the need for stylish places to eat. Taverns, or inns, were mainly necessary on stagecoach routes, such as the one from the South Jersey shore to Philadelphia, where the establishment now known as Ye Olde Centerton Inn in Pittsgrove, New Jersey, opened for business. Such places didn’t stage grand openings; they eased into existence, most of them starting as mere warehouses or inventory stations. The Centerton Inn may have begun serving meals as early as 1706; it is definitely known to have been in business by 1731. Depending on which date is right, it is either the oldest or second-oldest continuously operating dining establishment in America, though it has not offered overnight accommodations in many years.

The Centerton Inn is a stout clapboard building, smack at the corner of two state routes. Inside, it re- tains the aura of the early nineteenth century, not that of its earlier, rougher era. A place would not last long today if it were a truly authentic eighteenth-century tavern. “They were mostly log huts, or a frame weatherboarded,” wrote a traveler of the taverns he stopped at in the Carolinas. “As to edibles, whether you called for breakfast, dinner or supper, the reply was one—eggs and bacon. Ten to one you had to cook the meal yourself.” The Centerton Inn is much more hospitable than that these days, with a long menu and a Mediterranean sensibility in the specialty seafood dishes.

This makes its mark most notably in the way that it has reinvented dessert. The three things usually wrong with

dessert are that sometimes the portion is too big, sometimes the portion is too little, and most times as soon as the server brings the cheesecake, you realize how badly you wanted pie. At the end of a meal at the Centerton Inn, no one comes by to take a dessert order. Instead the house sends over a tray with about fifteen miniature portions of all different cakes and pastries; those at the table can sample from it at will, no extra charge. To my mind, that tray compensates for anything that the Centerton Inn may have put its guests through at mealtimes 250 years ago.

Early America, being America nonetheless, had to have fast food. People who didn’t enjoy good home lives had to eat out; others, who didn’t plan their days very well, found themselves on the street at mealtime. In either case a person could always grab a quick oyster. Oysters were just like hamburgers today: They were cheap, they were readily available, and however lowly, they could be very good. Oystermen had stands at street corners, serving food in a matter of seconds. The oysterman had a big knife, and he would pry open the number of oysters that a customer ordered and slide them across a board. Customers stood around the board, eating and ordering until they were full.

John W. Faidley Seafood, in downtown Baltimore, was started in 1886, but as an oyster stand it is timeless. Far from being quaint, it has all the charm of a busy workroom, and since that is all that it has ever been, tile-lined and noisy, it is charm enough. All the way around the walls of the one large room, workers clean fish, cook it, or weigh it up to sell raw. A blackboard lists the sources of the day’s catch, typically including every body- of water in eastern Maryland bigger than a horse trough. (A historic restaurant ought to be a bastion of local ingredients. My local supermarket at home in upstate New York boasts that its seafood comes from Thailand; I boast that Faidley’s does not.) The specialty at Faidley’s is the All Lump Crab Cake, “All Lump” referring conveniently to both the exact type of crabmeat used and the shape of the thing when it is done, jumbled up with cracker crumbs, mayonnaise, and a little mustard. Broiled or fried, it is a delicacy at ten bucks for a crab cake about the size of a baseball, but no matter about that; you eat it standing up, elbow to elbow with the other gourmets at the high wooden tables crossing the room.

The all lump crab cake is not, however, the most fun you can have at Paidley’s. The life of the place is the oyster stand in the middle of the room, where customers array themselves and their oysters around a square, eating and talking, while the oystermen in the middle keep a sharp eye on the

progress of each, the customers and the oysters. It is choreographed with commotion, a big feed that has been going on a lot longer even than Faidley’s.

Faidley’s is part of the Lexington Market, supposed to be the oldest indoor market in the country, having itself started in 1782. It goes without saying that people could always get something to eat at a market, and many early dining spots grew straight out of such places. The Old Homestead in Manhattan started in 1868 in the meat section of the old Washington Market (most of which has since moved to another borough). After handling giant carcasses all night, preparing them for the rest of the city, the butchers and meatmen dropped into the Old Homestead for their steak dinners at breakfast time. Amateurs followed, at normal mealtimes. Like a lot of New York steak houses, the Old Homestead serves enormous portions. Any place can serve a towering beefsteak, but the Old Homestead even has a nice, big, thick, juicy . . . salmon fillet. The roast beef weighs in at about two and a half pounds.

It’s a ceremony of abundance, even down to the grating fact that one plate after another goes back to the kitchen laden with a slab of meat out of which a small corner may have been gnawed. The Old Homestead was brightened up in time for its hundredth birthday, and so it has the air of 1868 as ventilated by 1968. The date that matters to me, though, is 1956, when a little party made up of my relatives had tickets to see the opening night of My Fair Lady. Some families hand down tried and true recipes. Mine handed down the Old Homestead (itself named after a hit play) as an opening-night restaurant; it was theirs then.

Durgin-Park also grew out of a market, the Quincy Market, not far from the wharves in Boston. Nobody even knows its real founding date, the date when somebody first looked down from the second story of the gray warehouse at the market and realized that if food were cooked right there, customers would wait in line for it, shifting from one foot to the other on a nondescript staircase, for, say, one or two hundred years. It was early in the nineteenth century. In about 1873 two local merchants, John Durgin and Eldredge Park, bought the market restaurant and renamed it after themselves. Having done that, they both died, and John Chandler took over. He instituted good, plain Yankee cooking, as described by one of his cooks:“We make our food taste like it’s supposed to be.”

The prevailing curse of the historic restaurant, in America or overseas, is that it is presumed, de facto, to be a tourist place. Durgin-Park is the one where I draw the line. Beyond the specific point, by way of example, that it has succulent chicken potpie for only $4.95 and the freshest seafood in the city, the

broader point is that Durgin-Park has been a famous place to go for most of this century, without yet taking advantage of the fact and bending its standards. Because of that, a description of it written for The Craftsman magazine in 1910 is still perfectly accurate:

“The plain tables are laid with clean but unpressed cloths and napkins. The prices are those often described as within the scope of the most modest purse, yet not suspiciously cheap, for the food is of the freshest in the market. . . . To begin with, some fresh butter and a long, low, well-browned piece of cornbread are laid at your plate. Then you brood—perhaps gloat would be a better word—over the possibilities of the bill of fare, trying to decide whether you will have broiled live lobster, swordfish or mackerel. The women of the party decided upon swordfish, the solitary man took lobster. The democratic but efficient server had seemed severe at first, but it proved to be only New England concentration for when she deposited the fish she labeled it with relish: ‘Broiled swordfish. Looks good. He’ll wish he’d taken it.’”

That was almost 90 years ago. I go to Durgin-Park a few times a month, and the last time I took her advice and ordered the broiled swordfish. He should have taken it.

In any sense of philosophy or science, there is no such thing as the passage of time in the three rooms that house the Durgin-Park restaurant. It really wouldn’t surprise me if it became a tourist place someday.

The taverns, the oyster stands, and the market restaurants just turned up—developing out of some immediate need—but Delmonico was the first in the new epoch in which restaurants were conceived. Peter and John Delmonico thought everything out carefully and set their twelve tables up in full view of the confections and desserts but out of sight of the kitchen in the back. They printed a menu, listing dishes in both English and French. They trained waiters—some of them minor members of the Delmonico family—to care for diners the way that servants tended their masters. Once the place began to draw crowds, the Delmonicos became the first to discover that the successful restaurateur has powers normally vested in gods over life and tables. However, it was the Delmonicos’ policy to let anyone at all into their restaurant—that is to say, they were not old-fashioned snobs, concerned with origin or religion. They were new-style snobs, in step with the egalitarianism of their age, and they’d give a table to anyone who had lots of money.

A generation after Delmonico opened, lonely outpost that it was, New York City had more than 5000 restaurants. Social life was changed just that quickly. Many reasons have been offered for the success and influence of

Delmonico and for the fact that the whole nation seemed to wake up hungry on December 13, 1827—hungry and in no mood to cook. The Industrial Revolution, the influx of immigrants, the growth of the cities, the growth of the leisure class: All of them ring true. But Delmonico was the little straw that got a huge boulder creaking forward, because it was a good idea from the start, from the start until the last of the 11 succeeding Delmonico restaurants closed in 1923.

Delmonico, Sherry’s, Louis Martin, Bustanoby’s, and a few others were the “lobster palaces” that became central to New York’s social life in the Gilded Age. Laden with marble and velvet, potted palms, and string orchestras, they were gorgeous and always tasteful. Unfortunately they also spawned Lobster Palace Society, as it was known, a convivial part of the upper class that prided itself on doing idiotic things. C. K. G. Billings gave a banquet at Sherry’s in 1900 at which the guests sat at their places on Thor- oughbred horses, sipping champagne from the saddlebags through long straws. Fun is fun, but that’s an insult to the horses, not to say to the champagne, if it was any good. And it surely was: On the main floors of the lobster palaces, dining became just another word for showing off, and the reputations of the great restaurants have been connected ever since with pathetic excess, by way of social climbing.

One of the few restaurants to survive from the grand day of Delmonico is Antoine’s, in New Orleans, which opened in 1840. Antoine’s was no lobster palace, though; its decor and its atmosphere have always been mellow. It is the cooking, like that of Delmonico, that has always been surpassing. “Imagine,” Will Rogers said of Antoine’s, “a restaurant existing and making a world-wide reputation on just food.” I know how great Antoine’s is, because I have been there only once. I have been there only once almost twenty years ago, and I remember every aspect in detail. They just didn’t serve food like that where I came from. The impression that remains to this day is that they don’t serve food quite like Antoine’s anywhere: a blend of French and Creole, of course, and myriad other regional influences. Mainly it is precocity, though, even at the age of 157: Antoine’s likes to do things its own way, including, for example, its invention of the hollow French fry, or “les pommes de terre soufflées.”

The first great restaurants were French, like Antoine’s and Delmonico. The next wave of restaurants, in cities at least, were ethnic, and the first to hold sway was one rarely seen anymore, the English restaurant. The genre arose in reaction to the very sociability of the prevailing French restaurants, as a writer named Richard Duffy observed for a magazine in 1909, praising English restaurants for “The absence of chattering women, of a clattering orchestra, or garish lights and decorations. . . .

Peace and plenty are here.”

“On the table,” he wrote (with a certain resignation that sounds remarkably like relief), “are the half-dozen bottles of condiments which English cooking requires, because their cooks lack imagination and inventiveness.”

Keens Steakhouse—started in 1885 as Keen’s English Chop House—was so ultra-Anglophilic that even the Londoner’s New York thought it a bit aggressive, charging it with “anxious emulation.” Keen’s (as it was soon renamed, for the first owner) grew out of a part of the Lambs, an actors’ club in Manhattan. It had no chattering women (or any women), no orchestra, and subdued lights. For decorations, there were pictures of actors and there were long-stemmed pipes. The idea behind the pipes was that a customer could buy one for a quarter and leave it at the restaurant for his exclusive use. There are seventy-two thousand of them now, many thousands of which line the ceiling in a pleasing way.

One night in 1901, the English actress Lillie Langtry decided she wanted a mutton chop. She didn’t want companionship, she just wanted a muttonchop, and for it she took herself to Keen’s, where she was duly denied her chop or even a table, on the ground that a woman couldn’t dine there without a male escort. Langtry sued and won, because Keen’s had not offered her any seat at all. “Ladies are in Luck!” the restaurant graciously conceded after the verdict. “They can dine at Keen’s.” At most other high-class places of the day, one dining room would be for males only, one would be for females accompanied by a male, and one, perhaps, would allow females even without a male escort.

This system wasn’t merely based on chauvinism or misogyny. As an invention, the restaurant proliferated very quickly in the mid-nineteenth century, and it represented dangerous new territory to a society wherein male-female relations had once been fairly well controlled. Just as millionaires had abused their new toy—practically drowning it in bubbly—people with a mind for intrigue lost no time in exploring its possibilities in their own way. In 1872, a reporter named James McCabe visited restaurants that admitted unescorted men and women; what he found would surprise almost no one of today and almost everyone of 1872. “A quiet but close observer,” he wrote, “will frequently see a nod, or a smile, or a meaning glance pass between the most respectable looking persons of opposite sexes, who are seemingly strangers to each other, and will sometimes see a note slyly sent by a waiter, or dropped adroitly in the hand of the woman as the man passes out, while her face wears the demurest and most rigidly virtuous expression. Such women frequent some of the best known up-town establishments to so great an extent that a lady entering one of them is apt to be insulted in this way by the male habitués of the place. These wretches hold all women to be alike, and act upon this belief.”

Many more rules about such behavior have collected since the days of the first restaurants, obviating the segregation; it was a makeshift solution, indefensible, all things considered. But it proved what a powerful thing was the restaurant.

Keens still serves its most famous menu item, that gigantic mutton chop, along with other dishes that show a finer hand in the kitchen than at most chophouses. I dined alone the last time I was there, without faring too much better than Lillie Langtry, if the truth must be known. The waiter, when pressed, brought some food, but nothing else, such as, say, something to drink with it. It wouldn’t occur to me to sue, as Langtry did. If it happens again, though, I am going to ask them to locate my pipe. (I don’t have a pipe.)

St. Elmo, in downtown Indianapolis, is the American version of the chophouse. It’s just a narrow room, with a simple kitchen lining one side, near the entry. If you care to, you can point out the exact steak that you want as you pass the refrigerator case. If you really consider yourself a connoisseur, you can also point out your salad, but anyway, the restaurant has no secrets, because it doesn’t have a back room, other than for storage, and it hasn’t had any since it opened in 1902. The bill of fare could fit on an index card; it is dominated by half a dozen steaks, plain and honest, and the simplest of American dishes. It is a completely authentic old chophouse, no less so because the walls are plastered with pictures of the latest racing cars from the Indianapolis Speedway.

Italian restaurants followed the chophouses, as the restaurant fad of the 1890s. They have remained popular, of course, while German restaurants have flagged since their own heyday at the turn of the century. Milwaukee still has a handful of German restaurants from that time, but then Milwaukee is one of the country’s best cities for ethnic restaurants of all types. Karl Ratzsch’s (pronounced Rosh’s) evolved out of a café that started in 1904, and it still has the friendly personality of a café, even though it grew into the formal dining room that it now occupies. It’s very German, and in the vernacular of restaurants at the turn of the century, that meant it was hospitable and unpressured. I go there only about every other year, yet I have the impression that I’m its best customer. At least, everyone acts that way. Ratzsch’s serves the schnitzels and Sauerbraten popular in German-American cuisine but with enough respect paid to Wisconsin ingredients that you can also have a meal there that could have been served long, long before the first German ever set foot in America: Lake Superior whitefish, for example.

Jacob Wirth (1868), a German restaurant

in Boston, once summed up its own long history in a pugnacious sort of haiku that appeared on a poster there: “We haven’t changed for the better. We haven’t changed for the worse. We haven’t changed period.” Wirth’s certainly hasn’t; it hasn’t been redecorated since Chester Arthur was president (his is the sole portrait, hanging from a string tacked into the molding, in the large hall that serves as the dining room). While the fringes of the menu may jostle along the latest fads, the core cuisine is as homely as that in a Kneipe, a German pub, where lunch is a couple of wursts on a pile of sauerkraut, with potato salad and dark rye bread on the side. Wirth’s, however, is planted in downtown Boston: Of course you can have corn bread, instead of rye.

Hattie Gray Austin grew up in rural Louisiana without a mother in the 1920s. She was raised largely by her grandparents, and she learned to cook from them. What she learned apparently was to treat good ingredients with a delicate hand. As a teenager Hattie visited her sister in Chicago and stayed on, taking a job as a maid with a rich family that summered in Saratoga Springs, New York. Saving her money and watching her chances, she remained behind in the autumn of 1938 to open a restaurant straight out of her family’s past. Hattie’s Chicken Shack, it was called. There is a photo of her in her apron, standing out in front, and it really wasn’t much more than a shack on the edge of town. But that wasn’t the restaurant.

Sometimes, a historic restaurant is made of bricks and things; in Hattie’s case it was made of her recipes and her ways. Eventually Hattie’s moved to the middle of Saratoga Springs, but the menu remained the same as ever: chicken that becomes lighter, not heavier, for being fried; steamy biscuits; mashed potatoes with a savory air; succotash; and gumbo. Hattie, who has been widely honored as an African-American businesswoman, has finally retired in her nineties, but she still visits the kitchen, to make sure that the food remains true.

As the idea of dining out spread to the countryside, opening a restaurant became as easy as opening the door. Families—especially those in which a mother was fending by herself—had the option of pushing the furniture around in the front room and simply charging for meals there. The Krebs, which is also in upstate New York, has the feel of just such a place, though it actually started on a slightly firmer basis in 1899, having been opened by a couple named Fred and Cora Krebs to augment a hotel that they operated nearby in the lakeside town of Skaneateles. Mr. Krebs came originally from Germany, but it would be hard to think of a less ethnic restaurant than his; it seems to have pushed straight up out of the ground, to serve American food in an American way.