Restaurant

A Tiki Bookshelf

August/September 2006

The tiki civilization has a surprisingly broad literature.

A Top 10 Tiki Tour

James Teitelbaum | August/September 2006

A passionate connoisseur’s choice of the greatest survivors

Make The King Of Tiki Drinks At Home.

August/September 2006

The Cult of Tiki

Wayne Curtis | August/September 2006

How sex, rum, World War II, and the brand-new state of Hawaii ignited a fad that has never quite ended.

The Taste of Time

J. M. Fenster | April 1997

All across America, there are restaurants that serve up the spirit and conviviality of eras long past.

Mr. Henry Erkins had a flash of inspiration in 1908. He could see every detail of it in his mind.

Agents of Change

Phil Patton | December 1994

You’ve probably never heard of them, but these ten people changed your life. Each of them is a big reason why your world today is so different from anyone’s world in 1954.

For want of nails, kingdoms are won and lost. We all know that. The shoe slips, the horse stumbles, the army dissolves in retreat. But who designed the nails? Who hammered the nails? Who invented the nail-making machinery?

Everybody Likes Italian Food

John F. Mariani | December 1989

A restaurant critic who’s a food historian and the fortunate recipient of an Italian grandmother’s cooking follows the course of America’s favorite ethnic fare in its rise from spaghetti and a red-checked tablecloth to carpaccio and fine bone china.

Should the Smithsonian Institution ever wish to display an example of a prototypical Italian-American restaurant, it could do no better than to move Mario’s, lock, stock, and baròlo, from the Bronx to Washington, D.C.

Fast Food

Joseph Monninger | April 1988

It began with a few people trying to get hamburgers from grill to customer quicker and cheaper. Now. it’s changed the way Americans live. And ,whether you like it or hate it, once you get on the road, you’ll eat it.

When I was ten, my brother was accepted into a college in Kansas. My parents decided to drive him out from New Jersey, using the opportunity to show both of us the countryside as we went. The year was 1963.

Lets Eat Chinese Tonight

Bryan R. Johnson | December 1987

Americans have been doing just that since the days of the California gold rush—and we’re still not full

A photograph taken in New York’s Chinatown in 1933 seems to sum up the special place of Chinese restaurants in American culture.

Delmonico’s

Peter Andrews | August/September 1980

The restaurant that changed the way we dine—

When Charles Dickens first came to the United States in 1842, he did not like our clothes, our speech, or our manners. But he reserved perhaps his deepest scorn for our dining habits.

“slice Of Pie And A Cup Of Coffee—that’ll Be Fifteen Cents, Honey”

April 1977

A last look at an American institution

DINERS used to be everywhere. Since the turn of the century the long, low, oddly cheery buildings have been the restaurants of the working class.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.