thank you ok thank you thank you it's been nice to chat with some of you a head of time and i know that there's some real interest here in restaurants hold on her for us and i think i know how you're going to answer this question now how many of you when you're walking down the street you walk past a restaurant and they've got a menu posted in the window do you kind of take a look at that menu and kind of fantasize what the meal would be like ok or maybe go on the internet before you're going out and check out the the website ahead of time and see what's on the menu to kind of think what you might want to have i'm sure you would be interested in that too well i'm going to show you and talk to you about a bunch of menus today which go back a couple  hundred years and i want you to go back and imagine what those meals by the been like in the period between the seven hundred ninety s and today and how people's enjoyment of restaurants has evolved now i would like to tell you how my book got started i was asked this a little earlier i worked downtown and in fifteen states traded in our building is the bostonian society you're familiar with the boss own society store society for boston and they run the start taking them out here's a boxes box hundreds of these thorton and use going back in their collection the eight hundred twenty s so i couldn't read them all in one day but took me a while a few days and after today so the the first restaurant in america was in boston and we've always got this competition with new york and maybe philadelphia and whatever and because if you read the history of restaurants that i've read them all the yorkers really say that that's the great restaurant city in america and that the boss you can quite compare with that by i think i'm going to show you a lot of firsts a lot of extraordinary developments that have come out of boston the first restaurant you might realize were developed in paris before the french revolution and they started off there called restorer tours a place you'd go to restore yourself they specialize in soups and light meals you could get a glass of wine maybe a pastry and if you're kind of in the week or a little sickly side you might go there not have the food but by the time the french revolution then afterwards it became more full scale restaurant in the think about the store tours they had this bill of fare where you could go and you could pick something that would have an item and then a price and that's what you would order and that was in paris before anywhere else now if you ate out let's say in boston you go to an inner tavern and they would just put out the for the day and they would say today we have stew or today we have chicken and that would be that so in seventeen ninety three you have this julianne who's escaping the reign of terror he was a chef to aristocrats and he lands in boston and he opens up this restored toward this old colonial house and you can see the little ad that he had in the the seventy ninety three but here's one here he got a first supply of green sea turtles who's going to be killing one each day to make a special turtle soup now he was not the only person escaping from paris there were three others that i've been able to five from the seventeen who open these threat style restaurants and i've been scouring the waterfront ever since the city of new york had been in the it was discovered in new york so imagine if you had three or four of these restaurants in boston before you were all sort of america so just a starting point for this now the oldest menu that i've been able to find printed menu anywhere in america for any sort of place is this dinner for the marquis de lafayette who came to boston eight hundred twenty four the store of america and the exchange coffeehouse was the lead hotel in boston at the time and they had this big banquet these are little hard to read if you get my book the wall in there easier to read ok well explain it it's a little hard to read anyways but i just want to make it clear so the way they serve this meal was the kind of a typical big banquet the kind of shows you the sorts of dishes which they had so this was a deluxe meal served in boston at this hotel so the server style a service was the french service so the first course  just be here they put out all these dishes about twenty different dishes they put them out in the table and then the waiters would serve around to each diner and say would you like a little how but or boiled tongues or roast lamb and then they had all these french name dishes down here at the bottom but they would have had them anyways not just because a frenchman was here but the vote or you know these are  since boston was a port it was an international city if people knew about food in especially the elite they wanted to have it here in boston and they wanted to impress lafayette that they knew good french food so when the first course is done they take away all the dishes and then the second course in it's all the roasts chicken in then all the game birds and you're going to see this through out right through the nineteenth century you didn't have a good ban a less you were serving pigeons and snipes and woodcocks and all kinds of ducks then they clear that away then they bring out they weren't called desserts they were called puttings or pastries they put all those out then they clear those away and they bring out the ice cream and dessert back then meant fruits and nuts basically so but they had ice cream boss was a real pioneer in ice cream so that gives you a sense of this is going to see this kind of menu go through this was a special dinner but these were all dishes that you could have got at the top hotel restaurants in boston now this is you can't read this but i have to show it to you now the hotel is considered to be the first modern luxury hotel in america it was torn down the eight hundred ninety s it was across the street from today's parker house and it was the first hotel to have locked doors keys to lock the doors first hotel to interior plumbing not an individual rooms but where you would have water closets in the hotel first hotel to have gas lighting and it and it always had top menus and this is the opening day and eight hundred twenty nine it always had a frenchman you could look for it to be news from the thirty's and forty's there in every dish is in french it's quite amazing and again it's got the first course the second course here it's a third course and again it it starts off with the fish dishes i think it starts off with soup then fish dishes then various kinds of meat dishes in these french entrees in then the roasts in the game in the fourth course which of the put in pastries in the desserts which of the fruit so again it's this the sequence it would be so it was almost like the buffet they would put out all the dishes on the table in the waiters to hand around so you you could get a taste of all these different dishes  if you were get into the game you would probably just take one game bird would say well of pigeon and you know my friend will have sniped whatever now i'm going to show you the adams house and there's the adams house w located in till the one nine hundred twenty s and washington street kind of in the theater district in the reason i want to show you the adams house is it's got a great story connected with it it's a great source of figuring out what the food is really like in boston and america this is a book a guide was written by tunis campbell who's a free black who was the head waiter at this hotel and this is the only book that i've been able to find for and again and again the city are always think it is new york washing philadelphia the older east coast cities the only book which really talks about how a hotel dining room would operate in the top of that it has a complete recipe book are all the recipes from the hotel so you could go through it you could read it and i didn't copy them then they could but i'm a good enough of a cook to be able to figure out what the recipes would have been in this is different food from what they serve the house this was kind of more the anglo american tradition so even though they had sauces it was more roast meats and boiled meats and things like that in that kind of the high cuisine french theirs is that you would have had at the tremont house but this is an incredible resource as i said i don't is anything for american hotel or restaurant from before the civil war except for this  hotel in america to go by the european plan and you might realize that the older plan the american plan was you got a complete set of meals with the cost of your room and let's say if you were from the city and you were just going there to have your noontime dinner you'd pay whatever is you pay your dollar and then you get a selection of all these courses that i just showed you you know even though this was for a banquet they would generally put out all these different courses the hand get your choice but this is the first hotel they have the european plan you only paid for what you ordered and they have a complete all a carte menu which will now show you this is too hard to read but i'm going to explain it to you a bit this is from  five and everything is all a cart so you order your meat or fish and whether it's your pickles on the side or relishes whatever it might only be five cents but everything's all the cards are potatoes or vegetables so this is something that's really pioneered the part of house of the parker house was famous for years for being one of the best restaurants in boston so so another first here now i'm going i'm starting to get into places that you know and here we are the nineteenth century restaurants recall after the names of their owners and i'm going to show you the menu right now at wooden bacon if you think it's a lot go bergen park those are all named after the owners they didn't have like the hungry pilgrim or whatever it was of the blue dolphin they didn't have those names like essentially just named after the person who ran it so here we are at with the bacon why it's so important to talk about the oyster bars of the nineteenth century these were the fast food eateries of american cities in those days again was here in new york over and over and at the time a civil war there about fifty of these in downtown boston were in every corner working men could go there i should say about restaurants in general men particular before the civil war men were basically the patrons if you were staying at a hotel and you were a woman you ate in the separate woman's dining room you could bring a male escort but women would never eat in the main men's dining room they were always separated it's only after the civil war that begins to open up a bit so if you're going to what he's always there bars would almost always been just mainly men and often just standing up and having a quick bite so you might have your does it or easters they'd have their shot of whiskey or something maybe a cup of coffee and then go on their way so they only be a couple minutes menu fight claims and you had your choice either problems or batter so i don't know why i wouldn't say they invented it because you'll see it everywhere and then if you didn't want that if you didn't like claims oysters you might go for the crackers and bel fifteen cents you have to realize the dried syrup we have today are twentieth century invention so this was always a quick meal breakfast lunch dinner cheap you'd have your bowl of milk to break up some crackers in it and that would be your lunch main course vegetables potatoes ice cream coffee in i have a cousin who went to boston college law school back in the fifty's in boston college law school i don't know if you remember w that an office building was downtown and he ate there every day for three years and here was a very picky eater and he ate the hash every day for three years for sixty five cents and he reminisce with me a reminisced with me about this story and i get into it in the book about the at the seeds and all the food and why they're really uncertain there's at certain times but a lot of the picture i'm showing you although ober starts a restaurant here in the eight sixty s the eight hundred eighty s is when it takes the appearance here this is a postcard but it starts to look like this he remodels it to look like this in your recall a kind of look like this and to look close in two thousand twelve it's been redone it's called the let me show you a menu there's the menu from when he remodel eight hundred eighty four and i'm not going to show you what was on the menu so little hard to read but the menu is kind of like the park nine is this one does have a lobster savan on it which was a great favorite over the years the price on that was a dollar a dollar looks like a small menu but as you might recall they would change the menu all the time this was for a particular date in they they had a lot of dishes lot more than they're showing here so the flock over the keep going so the the great started to let women in so here's one here the two sorts of bank was talking the talk about what is great civic occasions when important person comes to town in the lead comes out this was held at the revere house major hotel and bo jelly now it's very interesting they really thought refinement was very important in the nineteenth century so they never had people cracking lobsters in the shell that's a twentieth century thing you put on the bit so the only way you ever see lobsters served in bring the charlotte roosts and the different brands and pastries then they'd clear the table again and they'd put out the ornaments which would be flowers or maybe spun sugar which be sculpture and they curves and you kind of wonder you look at the pictures of men particularly in the nineteenth century by the victorian era and they're all kind of big and overweight they're all dying at the age of fifty three it's because they were eating and drinking and smoking like this all the time social group and you realise that back in the day even maybe even up to world war two lodges and social organizations were really important men and women belong to a number of them and they all had at least one two or three major even a working class can have these fabulous meals at least a few times a year in these hotels that now i just want to show you this one in there i can show you these just banquets i can show you them all afternoon they had about forty five minutes because they had to get out to towards a bridge of going to take a right through this that or that they all had to had the right so they start with their voices then have shelled the puree of celery the shrimp patties the baked turbot then they have the roast turkey then the tenderloin the beef then the sweet breads then they take a little break for sure but then they have the choice of the can respect doc which was the great pristine this is the best of all the the game birds prairie chicken woodcock then they take that away and then they have all the pastries in the creams the cheese the coffee and they had that in forty five minutes so they could get out to the parade so joe's support you had to get a meal like this in or you weren't having a legitimate presidential choice of soup chicken potatoes and peas ice creams and coffee wow things really change so i want to show you how things change you have one set of food almost throughout the nineteenth century there are even same types  in things are changing in the early twentieth century researched which one would you most like to go to young so tel going to show you why this was it here and we'll show you this is the old state house this is the corner of washington street coming up court kind of what they call one boston place today it's the menu now i'm just showing you a menu this is for lunch today the harvey o game one nine hundred fifteen and the game started at twelve noon right so i don't know how they're having a lunch like this a getting over the game i talked to people and they said well i think my father used to go those games and they know what the game they just had the dinner and then they had the cocktails and that was it so now what is it that they had they had a whole english sold normandy they had what they have done here english pheasant scottish grouse english plugger royal squash let's see what else they have next page but you could get things like what they all the stuff but this is just the menu of the day now the thing is besides that and this is where it really gets out of hand they have a fifteen page aisle a carte menu in either of all these things are on the menu every day but they have twenty seven o beans so it's really quite amazing thing and what it points out in this is the way restaurants were back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century that the idea of a good restaurant was to be encyclopedic they have everything available didn't even have to be seasonal by this time a lot of food was maybe king and so you could kind of pull out some canned asparagus or something like that in the middle of winter so the idea was to have everything that was good dining where you could get anything you wanted in the time and now today which will see in a few moments it's more to our focus is what seasonal does with their service make it tonight and that's your choice so i just kind of another thing is for me to have tried that restaurant i mean how many times they have to go to figure out what was going on you have to go at least a dozen times they just get a sample of what they were having right through her chat about the cafe marley went back to the eight hundred eighty really eight hundred seventy s and it was run by a man who was french was originally more french but let's see what the next thing is in the one nine hundred thirty s i don't have that menu here in the one nine hundred thirty s it becomes italian and what that menu for show you that menu is around the early twentieth century ethnic restaurants become more food from the early to mid twentieth century but you begin to have ethnic food first of all eaten by people from that after group but also you have a venturesome native american people  going there over time and i'm so give this one here this is from the cover of my book the hotel epicure because a lot of people think that boston food was beans rate the land of the bean the c cold roast boston but as i'm showing you these menu as you say boy they have pretty elaborate food a pretty nice food in boston and i want to show you this because they told you in the nineteenth century women in that we're losing the old yankee history that the colonial revival comes with architecture of stork all societies and all kinds of things like that and it comes in with restaurants in this is when you get the restaurants that maybe we remember the food changes if in the nineteenth century if you look at the menu it's called big beans on the menu in the twentieth century they start to call it boston beans its claim chowder in one thousand nine hundred becomes boston or new england clam chowder in the twentieth century in the ninety's it is called boiled dinner it becomes new england boiled it right or pot roast becomes yankee pot roast right so because  all these french this is partly driven away by prohibition it all really starts to go away and people say we want to eat in dine like the puritans the pilgrims in the minutemen and we're just chatting a little earlier right now they're going to have the university of bells election in concord and if you go out the wayside in go out the same afternoon go out next weekend and you'll see the costume reenacted as they're kind of like getting ready to march out the concord it's a kind of a great we go to the toll house oh wow that's great anybody have any way before my time any recollections of it the thought house cookie yes memories but but i've got a copy of their cookbook ruth wakefield who was the owner of it and you look through there in the recipes that she had you name it every kind of cake and pyatt fantastic desserts again but they had a nice you know they had a lot of lobster dishes and turkey i know is a wildly popular things given and this was kind of a classic new england restaurant if you kind of look at the highways and byways of new england you've got these  over the place which didn't exist like this in the nineteenth century you have these old houses that are turned into inns and wood people certainly driving cars in one nine hundred twenty s they go out to the sun they drive in this where they go these are the top restaurants in  next so tea rooms and tea rooms are kind of connected to that i want to bring in the women's role women really start going out on the role in the late nineteenth century in downtown boston when they go down shopping with their friends they like to go out for a t they go to confectioner's shop afterwards maybe get a sunday was used to be called the college isis on it like that and by the one nine hundred twenty s women were going out in the role in the it cars in country towns  suburban communities around boston they would have this is one copley square but they would kind of dress it up with the in teat and arts and crafts and things like that the food very plain simple sandwiches but they all had good desserts that's what really made let's keep going you remember shaft shaft really starts is a key any place in boston starts is a restaurant that your then comes back to boston this is one that was on boylston century and howard johnson's really popularize is taking the family out the not just here but throughout america so take a look at the menu in the given it's the sort of thing where you could get the cme which you could get the chicken salad sandwich or the bacon and egg sandwich in the peanut butter sandwich but then after that then you'd have the coffee fudge peeking in sunday or you know whatever it is the banana royale or the whatever it was all these there is in the thing probably it's kind of like stuff that maybe give kids a day at the beach it's not really that good he says if i could put more butter fat content than it in more different flavors so he comes up to the idea of twenty eight flavors and he really had more than twenty eight flavor and he was the guy who says you can really do creative things with ice cream and he takes that nationally and that starts right here in quincy and here we are shops oh everybody likes bailey's who went to bailey's so here we are we've got downtown boston harvard square nearby and there was one the belmont ok ok well wasn't there when this picture was taken so that belmont center and everybody remembers what the sunday was like it had the the little saucer in the sauce would be all over the saucer in the nuts in the rear pms a tremendous mess and everybody loved it and i know if you realize that the guy who  steve's ice cream somerville did you ever go there that was kind of again these are national international ice cream pioneers a lot of people said that ice cream really gets going to boston a popular way in the early nineteenth century because this was the ins worried mix in the the nuts and the candies and all that stuff and again that influence ben and jerry's and it's gone from there so now we'll go to the next one now again i had to get in the worst house people remember harvard square and this is a real it's a c menu this is from one nine hundred fifty it is really we we recall it is a german place but it doesn't really have you can't read it here it's in my book but you know it's basically a western sandwich or only get miller bug you go here and get beers from new zealand or singapore and it was really impressive so here we are in one nine hundred fifty s things are things that change in the twentieth century people are looking for more spectacle right so this is places and they're drinking polynesian drinks out of pineapples so you have more of that i like this one here the rib room anybody ever go there at the somerset hotel again they but it reopened this i remember either they had a fire or they were redoing that last last year i think it's owned by the same people long a bit luis's it ok so here we are you get the redcoats grill and kind of by the the ninety twenty's and thirty's you had the beginning of specialty seafood places in one thousand century they served everything they served meat fish whatever but they started to specialize like beanies goes back to the one nine hundred twenty s but if these peer for those there you could you could get that experience yeah the one of the cape was temporarily closed but will say but this is the beginning of you know they have all the different lobster dishes in all these different seafood dishes you had a  couple meat dishes and you know if there was a restaurant that was famous for its sense of spectacle you know they had the spectacle was waiting in line they didn't take reservations you might recall and my parents would never wait in line so i remember they real revolution the way we dine and i'm sure you recall that for your own experience people have traveled to europe and say why can't we get food in boston of the united states the way they serve in italy or france the rise of not just the italian american spirit meatballs it's maybe been around for decades but the way they eat in italy in all kinds of you know japanese food indian food all kinds of greek food in the rise of casual eclectic die and you've got the baby boomers are going to college they're coming out and they just what they're interested in eating but it's kind of cheap in people dressing up so here we are food trends and they  good from boston i keep going to come back the very important influence of boston has had died in america these are from post in stands never in a restaurant but we know that she really promoted real interest in french food in again they all others t v shows about romilly stable anybody go in there it's funny i talk about that and people don't quite the same way but they had a cookbook they had a restaurant pretty good one in a basement in quincy market which nobody seems to have gone to but also another t v show on p b s to channel two and what they did romeo he was from rome and his whole thing was i'm going to show you food the way it's really made in italy with pesto sauce of real salt to baka dishes like that so this is influencing what people are interested in here and across the country so now i'm going to kind of really show you a couple menus the revolution that takes place this is the parker house in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight right so if you go to the park hundred seventy nine if you go back before nine hundred seventy nobody ever knew who was in the kitchen if you would to a restaurant you knew the host you knew the maid duty right they would greet you but you know from the who is the kitchen in the seventies it then becomes about the chefs in that way today the celebrity chefs it that's who drives the interest in the place right so that's what's happening here at the parker house who chose you have things revolutionized in this isn't just at the park house is that all the washington street that's where he gets started america and then other people like as we mentioned jasper white lead you're sorry they seem to work everywhere over a period of dozen years gordon hammersley or whatever so let's go on through what's next now the harvest this is really kind of interesting open in one thousand nine hundred five in this they said up until this point people are not really thinking about seasonality but i think they've been to europe they realize that food should be seasonal it should be fresh  ben thompson his wife jane ben the great architect to lead the redevelopment of quincy market other places he starts this restaurant in cambridge harvard square in these are the chefs that  are some of the trends celebrity chef the client afraid so cuisine which had been big in the seventy's and eighty's now it's more casual food more innovative american type food not slave usually following french recipes small plates farm to table this restaurant farmstead table new fresh food in their frequent dining out because back let's say before the last twenty thirty or forty years especially before the one nine hundred seventy s dining out was more of a special thing do they could be traditional spanish is the one burner thorough in brookline and then i called gastro pubs in the old days pub food was really plain not very good but now you can have good casual food that i had well i had i had to bring in delma because this is an interesting thing you know i think people realise it certainly back until the last generation or two if you wanted good restaurants you had to go into the i suppose harvard square and i said you did have these colonial in but in the last couple decades you know suburban towns now really do have good dining in  fact friend of mine is back tonight he lives at arlington and last night we went to a place to tango and argentinian steak place and it's like wow an energy to take place the middle of arlington and it's you know write about twenty years but you would have had it forty years ago right we provide not only incredible food or drink but also comfort entertainment education and above all the lovely escape from reality i've always believed you could walk into a restaurant and immediately know whether or not it has a so if i give you food for thought yes what i call ethnic restaurants which are more like the food that might be in those other countries you know not so much that to create a very busy but you know the turkish restaurants the afghan restaurant