What a Midtown lunch counter’s Thanksgiving menu says about dining in 1917
Looking through vintage Thanksgiving menus from New York restaurants gives us a lot of insight into how city residents used to dine and live.
Case in point: menus from fancy Gilded Age hotel eateries. The titans of industry who spent Turkey Day at the Plaza Hotel in 1899 enjoyed several-course meals of the finest dishes—starting with appetizer courses of little neck clams and turtle soap through entrees like canvasback duck, turkey stuffed with chestnuts, and broiled hothouse chicken. (What is that, exactly?)
More interesting are the Thanksgiving menus from working-class counters and luncheonettes. The New Mills Hotel Restaurant and Lunch Counter, once located smack in the Garment District on Seventh Avenue and 36th Street, is one of these restaurants (menu above).
First, a little backstory about Mills Hotels. Three were built in Manhattan from the 1890s through the early 1900s. They were the brainchild of banker Darius Ogden Mills, who was a millionaire several times over but remained concerned about the plight of men of lesser means who couldn’t always find an affordable and safe place to live in the city at that time.
Mills built his first Mills Hotel on Bleecker Street in 1897, offering clean, comfortable single rooms to men for 20 cents a night, according to a 2011 New York Times article by Christopher Gray. A second Mills Hotel went up Chrystie and Rivington Streets, and the third in 1907 at Seventh Avenue and 36th Street (photo above).
Mills deemed this one for “those injured in life’s battle,” states Gray. The single rooms here, dubbed the New Mills Hotel, cost a little more per night: 30-40 cents, depending on the size of the room.
When the Lunch Counter launched isn’t clear, but this Thanksgiving menu dates to 1917. Open to the public (note the “tables for ladies” line), the offerings are decidedly less illustrious than those of the Plaza Hotel.
But for fifty cents, a diner could fill his or her belly with a Thanksgiving feast of roast stuffed turkey and cranberry sauce, plus English plum pudding with “hard rum” sauce. Sides include sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, and vegetables. The baked apple pie would be my on my plate for dessert.
The non-Thanksgiving menu items seem designed for the type of men who lived in the hotel or in similar situations. Roast suckling pig with applesauce cost 30 cents. Cream of celery soup with bread and butter was ten cents. A cup of hot coffee: a nickel.
The back page of the menu offers insight into dining during wartime. The United States had entered the Great War by now, and the New Mills Hotel Restaurant and Lunch Counter urged customers to observe the call for “meatless Tuesdays and wheatless Wednesdays” to conserve food for soldiers overseas.
“Eat wisely and plenty but without waste: food may win the war” the menu states. It’s hard not to wonder how a similar request would go over with today’s diners.
[Menu: NYPL Buttolph Collection of Menus; second image: MCNY, 1907, X2010.28.578]
