Ice Cream at Howard Johnson’s

In the epilogue of Restaurant Republic, the author traces the story of commercial dining in Boston into the early twentieth century and reviews the major points of the previous chapters. The findings will be useful to those interested in exploring relationships between food, culture, and identity in other cities, as well as in our own time.

Roast, Chop Suey, and Beer

The fourth chapter discusses how, in the last decades of the century, as shifting mealtimes successfully postponed the main meal until after the workday was complete, a wider range of mixed-gender cafés opened that specialized in providing more relaxed evening meals to working- and middle-class Bostonians eager to take advantage of new opportunities for commercialized leisure. Many establishments, owned by the city's now even more heterogeneous population of immigrants, specialized in “ethnic” or foreign foods, fostering ethnic-class enclaves within a larger urban environment. Indeed, opening a restaurant represented an entrée to entrepreneurship and an avenue of economic mobility for immigrant proprietors. The city's growing assortment of ethnic restaurants helped to expose Bostonians of all backgrounds to new tastes and dining rituals. Throughout the nineteenth century, Boston's restaurants thus contributed to a dynamic consumer-oriented public culture and shaped a new understanding of the role of difference in American society and culture.

Charlotte Russe in the Afternoon

The third chapter presents that nineteenth-century dining venues, including eating houses, were male spaces and typically inaccessible to women. But middle- and upper-class women, through their expanding roles as the main consumers for their families and their participation in women's associations and reform activities, increasingly found themselves downtown in the middle of the day and in need of dining options of their own. In this chapter, the author turns to the growing number of dining establishments earmarked specifically for respectable, affluent women. These ladies’ dining venues strove to uphold mainstream gender ideals and distinguish themselves as appropriate for female use through their location, décor, and menu, all gendered as feminine. Nevertheless, by providing semipublic spaces for women to patronize, ladies’ eateries helped to draw women into the public sphere, thus posing a fundamental challenge to gender norms. The public and commercial dining activities of respectable women also became a vehicle for the discussion of anxieties associated with the rise of consumer pleasures.

Bolted Beef and Bolted Pudding

In the second chapter, as economic opportunities in Boston continued to proliferate and diversify, men in various occupations–from factory workers to bankers–turned to eateries to provide convenience meals during the workday. It considers Boston's eating houses, which all aimed to provide straightforward noontime meals to men in a hurry. But there were many grades of eating houses, each catering to a different economic class of male diner. Class was also tied importantly to ethnic and racial difference. Distinctions in location, décor, service, and menu among various eating houses were all central to the standing of the patrons a particular establishment attracted, therefore significantly shaping a customer's dining experience. At the same time, all eating houses helped to construct new notions of urban masculinity and contributed to the creation of a more consumer-oriented society.

Filet de Boeuf at the Tremont House

The first chapter deals with Boston's wealthy elite. They were the first to demand new kinds of public dining options. Though Americans had been scornful of European cultural models as enervating and corrupting, wealthy Bostonians increasingly looked to French modes for inspiration when it came to sophisticated dining. In the 1820s, Boston's upper class, in their role as “patrons of culture” organized the construction of the Tremont House in Boston. The main attraction of this Boston institution was its dining room and the opulent, heavily French-influenced cuisine it produced. In this chapter, the author examines the venue of the Tremont House and other luxurious public dining rooms that soon arose to compete against it for the patronage of the elites. In such venues, the Boston elite demonstrated itself to be a republican aristocracy and strove to enact social and cultural codes that, it hoped, would stabilize society. But these very codes also underscored, and in some ways facilitated, fluidity and mobility and thus undermined social and cultural hierarchies.