Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 - Hardcover

Haley, Andrew P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807834742 ISBN 13: 9780807834749

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011

Synopsis

In the nineteenth century, restaurants served French food to upper-class Americans with aristocratic pretensions, but by the twentieth century, even the best restaurants dished up ethnic and American foods to middle-class urbanites spending a night on the town. In Turning the Tables, Andrew Haley examines the transformation of American public dining at the start of the twentieth century and argues that the birth of the modern American restaurant helped establish the middle class as the arbiter of American culture. Early twentieth-century battles over French-language menus, scientific eating, ethnic restaurants, unescorted women, tipping, and servantless restaurants pitted the middle class against the elite. United by their shared preferences for simpler meals and English-language menus, middle-class diners defied established conventions and successfully pressured restaurateurs to embrace cosmopolitan ideas of dining that reflected the preferences and desires of middle-cl

About this title

About the Author

Andrew P. Haley is an associate professor of American cultural history at the University of Southern Mississippi.

From the Inside Flap

Haley examines the transformation of American public dining at the start of the twentieth century and argues that the birth of the modern American restaurant helped establish the middle class as the arbiter of American culture.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807834742
• ISBN 13: 9780807834749
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 376