EATING AT RESTAURANTS IN THE 1930S

Eating at Restaurants in the 1930s

The title of this essay is a contradiction, because no one ate at restaurants in the 1930s - at least no one that I knew.   Hamburger stands, ice cream parlors and doughnut shops were different and we did go to them on special occasions.  McDonalds didn't exist in the 1930s.  I am quite certain that pizza was also sold in central California but in those days we were too provincial to try it.   We didn't cross ethnic boundaries.  It wasn't that we were intolerant of other cultures.  It didn't occur to us to find out what it was, how it tasted or how it was pronounced. For example, during my high school years I would walk past a shop advertising bulgar wheat, every day, without ever asking myself, "What is bulgar wheat?" I wasn't even curious.  It gets worse.  In 1956 an Air Force buddy and I saw the movie, Guys and Dolls, in San Francisco before shipping overseas to Okinawa.  Nathan Detroit was trying to get Sky Masterson to make a bet - which was: Do customers eat more cheesecake or strudel?  I had no idea what they were talking about.  I assumed that it was some kind of dessert.  I had never heard of strudel and my experience with cheese was limited to cheddar cheese which sounded very undessert-like.  For the record, I tried my first pizza when I was 25 years old 

After that paragraph of disclaimers, I may have eaten in a restaurant, once.  I must have been a young teenager when my father mentioned eating at Harts Restaurant and I remember feeling nervous about the experience.  The uneasiness may have stemmed from the etiquette lessons we received at school that were supposed to prepare us for that big moment when we stepped onto the world stage.  It had something to do with using the right fork and knowing how to eat fried chicken the grownup way.  But some of the anxiety may have come from the restaurant itself.  Harts had a green and silver facade but the thing that set it apart was the electric eye on the front door.  You could swipe your hand past the electric eye and the door would open by itself. That was high tech in the 1930s.   There was only one other store in Fresno that had that feature - Roos Brother, a fashionable clothing store.  Ultimately, the etiquette lessons didn't matter much.  I don’t have any recollection of actually going inside of Hart’s.  But I do have the impression that it was a  cafeteria style restaurant and the silverware came wrapped in a napkin.  Maybe I superimposed some other dining experiences onto my memory of Harts Restaurant, such as Horn and Hardarts in New York City which was so lacking in privacy that a total stranger could, without hesitation, sit at your table.   It wasn't a high end restaurant after all.  Maybe that's why my memory is so fuzzy.  It was too ordinary.