Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century, 1900-1910

by Michael Lesy, Lisa Stoffer

What we ate, how we ate, and how eating changed during America’s first real food revolution, 1900–1910.

Before Julia Child introduced the American housewife to France’s cuisine bourgeoise, before Alice Waters built her Berkeley shrine to local food, before Wolfgang Puck added Asian flavors to classical dishes and caviar to pizza, the restaurateurs and entrepreneurs of the early twentieth century were changing the way America ate. Beginning with the simplest eateries and foods and culminating with the emergence of a genuinely American way of fine dining, Repast takes readers on a culinary tour of early-twentieth-century restaurants and dining. The innovations introduced at the time—in ingredients, technologies, meal service, and cuisine—transformed the act of eating in public in ways that persist to this day. Illustrated with photographs from the time as well as color plates reproducing menus from the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Menu Collection, Repast is a remarkable record of the American palate.

Genres: Food, History, Nonfiction

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 28, 2013

About the author

Michael Lesy’s books include Angel’s World and Long Time Coming. In 2006 he was named one of the first United States Artists Fellowship recipients, and in 2013 was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. A professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College; he lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Leslie Goddard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the vintage menus with their lavish food selections and often-intricate (or even charmingly homemade) graphics. Simply having these menus in print makes this book a real treasure. But I'm not entirely sure who the audience is for this book. It's not really for academics, since it doesn't have a lot of in-depth analysis into the topic nor does it put its topic in the context of academic histories of similar topics or the framework of current historical thinking. But it's not necessarily a popular history either. I think that's what it's trying to be -- but the topic is rather narrow for a popular audience more than 100 years later that hasn't heard of most of these restaurants and banquets, and Lesy only makes a modest stab at explaining why people today should care about or draw insight from them. Yes, he's done a heap of research and it can be interesting to read in-depth histories of various restaurants (the vast majority New York restaurants). There's lots of details but not much to explain "why should I care?" More thoughtful analysis and intelligent insight would have been more satisfying.

[Gail · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave this book one start mainly due to the amount of errors. There were so many typos, missing punctuation, incorrect words used, etc., that it started to become annoying and I just gave up reading it by page 104. It's obvious that no proofreader even looked at it. I actually wrote down all of the pages beginning with page 56 up to page 99, with the paragraphs and sentences that had the errors and e-mailed the author. So far, I haven't heard back.
It's really too bad, because the subject matter was really interesting.

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

That this book ever wound up on a TBR list is an artifact of a time when food TV was an enthusiasm of mine, and anything involving Tony Bourdain was not to be missed. Having finally gotten to this book, I was initially not that impressed, as with a grab bag of chapters dealing with such topics as the period crusade for food purity, how working men and working women went about procuring food in public, and the plight of restaurant workers, the overall impact was that the parts were not aggregating into something greater.

Then, embedded in a chapter dealing with how dining out became an adventure for Americans, there is an account of Teddy Roosevelt publicly celebrating the American ideal in the company of a group of Hungarian Jews on February 14, 1905. The event itself was rather poignant, but at this point Lesy & Stoffer's real concern snaps into focus, as they are covering the beginning of an epoch of American eating that we are still in the throes of, and I finally found myself impressed.

That said, I'm still happy that I read "Three Squares" by Abigail Carroll and "Ten Restaurants that Changed America" by Paul Freedman before I got to this book.

[Crysta Coburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very useful information!

[vvb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating history reference in regards to American eating habit transition during the early 1900s. I specifically liked learning about how women fared during those days and how they influenced eating establishments as more and more of them entered the work world.

The various menus included were interesting to look over. Some of the dishes were amusing to see.

[Barbara Melosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written history that is attentive to class, sex, and ethnicity, and enhanced with photographs used as evidence, not simply illustration. Beautiful production too, great design and high quality paper.