Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920

by A.P. Haley

In the nineteenth century, restaurants served French food to upper-class Americans with aristocratic pretensions, but by the twentieth century, even the best restaurants dished up ethnic and American foods to middle-class urbanites spending a night on the town. In Turning the Tables, Andrew Haley examines the transformation of American public dining at the start of the twentieth century and argues that the birth of the modern American restaurant helped establish the middle class as the arbiter of American culture. Early twentieth-century battles over French-language menus, scientific eating, ethnic restaurants, unescorted women, tipping, and servantless restaurants pitted the middle class against the elite. United by their shared preferences for simpler meals and English-language menus, middle-class diners defied established conventions and successfully pressured restaurateurs to embrace cosmopolitan ideas of dining that reflected the preferences and desires of middle-cl

Genres: Food, Food History, Nonfiction

376 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2011

Reviews

[Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

As one might expect from being friends with current and retired history and humanities faculty members I cover ground on numerous topic. Most recent we have been musing on the topic of food, culture, and its shaping of national identity and class structure in the US. Haley repetitively argues and centers the narrative around the how late 19th and early 20th century dining norms were clingy to the snooty French/European aristocratic ways but subtly trying to be being more open and accessible to common people. Additionally topics around tipping norms, women’s issues in restaurant dining, and language choices were covered. An obscure read, but an interesting one to say the least. Off to go be a nerd about who knows what next.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really fascinating look at the un-aristocratizing—the Restauration—of the late 19th and early 20th century as it was made by—and made—the American middle class. Haley traces the shift from the era of Delmonico’s and the elite hotel dining temples of the major metropolises to the emergence of a distinctly middle-class system of dining, one defined by its pursuit of democratized access and cosmopolitan tastes. If the public space of dining in restaurants was the way by which the aristocracy guarded the distinctions between themselves and the middle class, then breaking into restaurants was a key mechanism of rupturing those distinctions. By waging war on the excesses of the European menu, the gendered separation of dining spaces, the prevalence of tipping as a way to solicit better service for some than others, and the obsequious habit of putting all menus in French, the middle class consumers articulated amongst themselves a set of values that stood in direct opposition to the put-upon airs of the elite, imagining a different kind of public experience in which value was not defined by proximity to European elegance or Gilded Age abundance. Haley does amazing work to lay out this argument, but there are a few key points in the text where one has to question the validity of his evidence. For one, he makes the case in Chapter 4 that the middle class promoted the ethnic restaurant as an alternative family-friendly space for dining, a push that in turn made the dining experience at those establishments less hole-in-the-wall and more well-respected. The fact that he does not map this against prevailing attitudes about immigrants (“white” and non) is a gaping hole in his argument. This same gap repeats itself in Chapter 7, on the critiques of tipping leveraged by middle-class diners against what they perceived as judgmental servers—the fact that no material is included from the servers themselves only validates the diner’s perspective, in seeing the server as an intermediary only there to remind them of their place. (The fact that the anti-tipping critique had within it a desire for an automated server-less experience pays no attention to the kinds of etiquette used to train servers to behave as though they were invisible, as was especially the case among African-American servers of the era.) Nevertheless, this fills a valuable gap in the literature between the era of Delmonico’s and the era of McDonalds.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit disappointing, but perhaps I went in with the wrong expectations. It read like a dissertation to me, with a lot of focus on arguing a specific, narrow point about class distinctions. It was also quite repetitive. Some really interesting information, but not presented in an especially compelling way.

[Carol Fischer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glad I read - useful to better understand the factors that led to middle class ( esp. in urban areas) to dine out so much, and why French language/cuisine considered so posh.

[Jason S · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting piece of cultural history that argues that the restaurant industry changed to accommodate the rise of the middle class and its increased consumerism.