Ten Restaurants That Changed America
About this audiobook
From Delmonico’s to Sylvia’s to Chez Panisse, a daring and original history of dining out in America as told through ten legendary restaurants
Combining a historian’s rigor with a foodie’s palate, Ten Restaurants That Changed America reveals how the history of our restaurants reflects nothing less than the history of America itself.
Whether charting the rise of our love affair with Chinese food through San Francisco’s fabled the Mandarin, evoking the richness of Italian food through Mamma Leone’s, or chronicling the rise and fall of French haute cuisine through Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon, food historian Paul Freedman uses each restaurant to tell a wider story of race and class, immigration and assimilation. Freedman also treats us to a scintillating history of the then-revolutionary Schrafft’s, a chain of convivial lunch spots that catered to women, and that bygone favorite, Howard Johnson’s, which pioneered on-the-road dining, only to be swept aside by McDonald’s.
Ten Restaurants That Changed America is a significant and highly entertaining social history.
About the author
Paul Freedman is a history professor at Yale University. The editor of the ICP Award–winning Food: The History of Taste and the author of Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, he lives in Pelham, New York.
Danny Meyer is the CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group. His restaurants and their chefs have earned an unprecedented twenty-one James Beard Awards and perennially rank among New York City’s favorite restaurants in the Zagat survey. He lives in New York City.
Keith Szarabajka has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit. Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Shorts for National Public Radio. He won the 2001 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and has won several Earphones Awards.
