Northern Wisconsin advertiser. [volume] (Wabeno, Wis.) 1898-1925, 1902-08-14
QUEER TERMS USED IN QUICK
LUNCH ROOMS.
STRANGE APPROXIMATIONS
"Noah on a Raft" a "LittIe on the
Cow" "Put up the Flag and RED,
White and Blue" are Some of the
VernacuIar of the Walters in the
Lunch Room.

When the great majority of the
quick-lunch-room proprietors of New
York agreed last week to raise the
price of beef an" also of ham an, !"
from 10 to Is cents, and their momen-
tous decision was duly, if somewhat
jocularly, recorded in the papers, the
surprising fact developed that there
are actually to be found men and
| women in this city who do not know
what beef an" is, says the New York
Tribune.
I Beef. and what?" asked downtown
i business man, as he read his paper go
: ing home on the l..
| well, you don't know beans, for
fact" his companion laughed.
| That's it, eh?'' said the first. But
how should know whether it is beans
or cabbage? I never go to that sort
of place to eat"
| And there are thousands more like
| this man, who never went to that
| sort of place" to eat, or have care
/ fully forgotten that they ever had to.
How "the other half" eats is unknown
to them. They enter a cafe where
the linen is liberal and snowy, give
their order confidentially to a silent
| waiter, and by and by their food
comes to them under cover. There
is something private, even intimate,
about the whole process, however
crowded the cafe. They do not know
the strange sensation-strange at
| first-of having ones order beloved
through the hail. of drinking coffee
out of handleless cups SO thick they
stretch the mouth to rim them; and,
greatest loss of all, they do not know
the curious system of abbreviation
| that prevails in such places-abbre-
viations that are often metaphors in
the rough, and of which '.ham an"
is only faint suggestion
| IF you are new to this style of
lunch-room. you enter, sit down at
bare and not too clean table and wait
| quietly to be served You are likely
to wait some time, but while you wait
! you hear a bare-armed waiter roar
| down passage, Sind up the goat
That's easy. You know he wants
| more butter. Then he cries, Beef
an, and you know that. "Plate o.
Bostons' isn't hard, either. But make
1t two, sunny side up" is staggerer.
However, the solution is simple-two
eggs fried on enc side only.
| Finally you get tired of waiting.
and by pounding glass with a spoon
and sundry gesticulations you get a
waiter to come to you. "Give me some
poached eggs on toast" you say, "and
a cup of coffee"
The waiter turns toward the kitchen
and shouts, Noah on raft.' Then
he wheels toward the steaming.
polished coffee tanks and cries, Draw
one!"
/, Say" you call, with an after
/ thought, II guess I'll make that
+, scrambled eggs on toast
! Wreck Noah," calls the waiter
solemnly.
The strange thing may well seem to
be that you get what you ordered.
There are many such phrases, some
of them common to all the "grub-on-
: the-run" places, some of them local.
| "a little on the COW" is milk.
Draw one-black" is coffee without
milk "One up" is not golf, but SYM
boil meaning that the waiter who calls
has another cup of coffee coming to
him. "Off the griddle" means butter
cakes--those deadly bullets, or,
rather, small cannon balls of dough
which are commonly known to the
hardy eaters thereof as "sinkers," but
which it is high treason to call by
J that name within the lunchroom.
! Put up the flag" means macaroni.
! Just why, no one seems able to ex-
plain, though there is vaguely felt to
be some subtle reference to Yankee
Doodle and the Stars and Stripes.
i Brown the wheats" means simply
an order of buckwheat pancakes,
while ''two in three" signifies that
somebody wants two eggs boiled three
minutes. Red. white and blue" is
a plate of mixed ice-cream.
The crown of the collection. however
is to be found on the Bowery. where
there is much poetry in the block, any
way. There if you should happen to
have the sort of taste that demands
mince pie with powdered sugar on top
4 you will hear shouted to the rear:
! Zone Indigestion in snowstorm,"