Two of the restaurants participating in New York’s 2012 Winter Restaurant Week (which actually spans three weeks from January 16 through February 10), have stood the test of time and are celebrating numerous decades of serving food to hungry New Yorkers, namely, Delmonico’s and the “21″ Club. An obsession with dining in our fair city, however, is a tradition that dates much farther back in our history, to the early days of Dutch settlement, before New York was a city at all or was even called such. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 21 Club, Astor House, Delmonico's, dining in New York, New York Bibliography, New York City history, New York restaurants
Contoits Garden, opened in 1858, was one of the popular “pleasure gardens” of New York City that served refreshments of all kinds, including, of course, alcoholic beverages.
The release of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s new documentary Prohibition that recently aired on PBS has served as a reminder to Americans how deeply rooted the consumption of alcoholic beverages has always been in our social and political history. The culture of drinking in pre-Volstead Act New York is well documented in writings that go as far back as the first European settlers in our great city. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 21 Club, Al Hirshfeld, Burns Coffee House, Byard Still, Contoits Garden, Daniel Okrent, Gordon Kahn, Izzy Einstein, Michael and Ariane Batterberry, Michael Lerner, New York City history, Nicasius de Sille, Prohibition, Reverend John Miller, Volstead Act, W. Harrison Bayles