More and more of our meals are eaten out of the home, many at a
sit-down restaurant. We tend to take the amenities of modern
restaurants for granted. City and state ordinances protect us from
unscrupulous entrepreneurs and unsanitary kitchens, and we can
usually expect a similar experience - if not similar foods
- at almost every eatery. But our expectations differ from
those of restaurant patrons in the past, says NPR. You can find out
how US restaurants have changed in the past century by taking their
quiz on what restaurants were like 100 years
ago.
The quiz is based in large part on the book
Repast by Michael Lesy and Lisa
Stoffer. Stoffer comes from a family of chefs and Lesy (her
husband) is a professor at Hampshire College. The couple
was inspired to write Repast after discovering an
archive of old menus held by the New York Public Library.
Most of the differences involve changing cultural norms. For
instance, while men and women can now walk into any restaurant
together, in times past some restaurants separate entrances for
women or were closed to unaccompanied female diners after a certain
time. Other changes have to do with culinary changes driven by
diner preferences, like the decline in popularity of German foods,
which were all the rage in the early 1900s. Who knew that
frankfurters and potato salad were once considered exotic foods in
the US?
While many of the practices have changed over the years, some
things remain the same, like low wages for waitstaff. Restaurateurs
of yore used several mechanisms in order to drive down labor costs,
replacing men with women and people of color who were paid
much less.