The Breakfast Autocrat, 1950s New York Kitchen Towel Birds At Frenchy’s Black Cat Cafe

At Frenchy’s Black Cat Cafe the local newspaper reported that the choice of starter on the fixed lunch menu was "cocktail or soup” which makes us laugh

This classic menu cover from 1923 is a perfect representation of the carefree life enjoyed by the very rich

As the legendary entertainers went through their repertoire

Fred Harvey immigrated to the US at the age of 17 and worked his way up from being a pot-scrubber in a restaurant in New York to starting the country’s first restaurant chain called Harvey Houses

is a great example of the modernist style or perhaps something between modernism and art deco

The Breakfast Autocrat, 1950s New York Kitchen Towel Birds At Frenchy’s Black Cat CafeThe Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is a collection of essays written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1857 and 1858. They take the form of a one sided dialogue between the author and other residents of a New England Boarding House. This lovely literary nod by the 2,500 room Hotel New Yorker for its breakfast menu shows that the management knew their clientele very well indeed. The 1940s and 1950s saw