The Ten Restaurants That Changed America by The Splendid Table | Free Audiobook

**Lynne Rossetto Kasper** (0:06)
This is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media, the show for people who love to eat. I'm Lynne Rossetto Kasper. That old saying, tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are? Well, that's true, but how about historian Paul Freedman's take? Show me your restaurants, and I'll show you what's shaping your community. Take New York City in the 1830s, a new country, lots of new money. The era of more is more, as in the palatial restaurant Del Monaco's, where as the maître d'seats you, he tucks a silk pillow at your back. The pillow is embroidered with your initials. Then he hands you the menu. It's printed in gold leaf on satin. Well, this is how Paul Freedman, the Yale historian, opens his story of Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Paul, good to have you back.

**Paul Freedman** (1:10)
I'm delighted to be with you again.

**Lynne Rossetto Kasper** (1:12)
So, ten restaurants, which ones did you choose?

**Paul Freedman** (1:17)
So, in the order of the chapters that I devoted to them, and it's roughly chronological, Delmonico's is the first, a restaurant in New York that really defined elegant cuisine, French cuisine, but also with American specialties from its foundation in the 1830s until Prohibition closed it in the 1920s. Then Antoine's in New Orleans, a durable example of the most vibrant regional cuisine of the United States, the cuisine of Louisiana, of course. Then Schraft's, which was a middle class restaurant, a restaurant that served ice cream, sandwiches, salads, but which was particularly appealing to women, not only as a place that women who were shopping or who worked in offices or stores might like since the beginning of the 20th century, but also served food that it was thought that women liked, basically, light entrees and very rich desserts. Then Howard Johnson's, which was like Schraft's, a safe and in this case more family friendly place for families with children, roadside restaurant, coast to coast. At its height in the early 1960s, more meals were served by Howard Johnson's than by anything except the US Army.
And then Mamma Leone's, an Italian restaurant. So it's an example of one of the most popular so-called ethnic or international or foreign foods. The Mandarin, which is the example of Chinese food, the most popular foreign food of the United States. Sylvia's, an African American restaurant that exemplifies the important...