The Library Foundation of Los Angeles celebrates the rich – and untold – history of restaurants and food in the City of Angels with To Live and Dine in L.A., an exciting new project spotlighting the Los Angeles Public Library’s vast menu collection.
The second in a series of collaborations between the Library Foundation and the Library to explore the Library’s collections, To Live and Dine in L.A. launches on June 13, 2015.
"It’s no surprise that such a recent and sophisticated innovation took a long time to reach Los Angeles, which for most of the nineteenth century was a little cattle-ranching town in a remote part of the world."
Charles Perry / Food Historian and President, Culinary Historians of Southern California
The earliest menus date from the Renaissance, but they were not like the menus we know today. They weren’t something for the diner to read—they were lists of all the dishes served at a banquet. Basically, they were instructions to the kitchen staff, though hosts might hang onto them so they could boast how well they had done by their guests.
For a long time, public dining places had no need for menus at all. At inns, taverns, and coaching houses, the food was just whatever the cook was making that day—the table d’hôte, or host’s table—unless the diner had arranged ahead of time for something special. The restaurants that sprang up in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century offered guests a choice of dishes, but originally the alternatives were either announced by the waiter (“Bon soir, I’m Pierre and I’ll be your server,” in effect) or written on a chalkboard known as the carte, hence the expression “a la carte” for individual dishes, not part of a set meal. The first menus written on paper, in the early nineteenth century, were posters, like the menus that some restaurants put in their windows today.
It’s no surprise that such a recent and sophisticated innovation took a long time to reach Los Angeles, which for most of the nineteenth century was a little cattle-ranching town in a remote part of the world. In the days when nearly all buildings in the city were made of adobe, table d’hote service still ruled, both in the tamale shops northwest of the Plaza and the new American places that appeared after the Gold Rush. The earliest restaurant advertisement in the Los Angeles Star, in February of 1855, declared that the Lafayette Restaurant (“formerly the Old American”) offered “meals at all hours by bill of fare.” All that the ad had to say about its cuisine was: “Cakes of all kinds constantly on hand. Partridge, rabbit, and chicken pies.” This was certainly Old American cuisine, because Americans were great pie eaters in the nineteenth century. The cakes would have been unfrosted single-layer pastries, more like the modern-day fruitcake. The rest of the food offered would have depended on the vegetables, fish and other ingredients that were available on a particular day, prepared simply by boiling, roasting, or frying.
The most distinctive feature of Los Angeles dining in the mid-nineteenth century was the prominence of French restaurants. The 1860 census showed that six people with French surnames were running eateries with names such as Restaurant du Commerce and the French-American. At the time, there was a French colony of about six-hundred in Los Angeles, dating back to the early 1830s when two French immigrants began California’s table wine industry just east of where City Hall stands today. Mostly these places served French home cooking—onion soup, coq au vin, salads, omelets and so on—but some eventually aimed higher. In 1870, the restaurant in the Pico House Hotel on the Plaza, run by “French Charlie” Laugier, had a menu written in French, which shows grander aspirations.
It would have been written by hand, because printing was expensive. Until 1886, typesetting was done in a slow, laborious way that had not changed in more than four hundred years. The printer picked individual pieces of type from a case and arranged it in a gallery, inserting metal spacers by hand. Then Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the Linotype machine, which allowed a typographer to enter text by way of a keyboard and made printing much faster and cheaper. Now newspapers could afford to be longer than four or eight pages and, in principle, restaurants could print menus.
The problem was that restaurants offered different dishes from day to day, not to speak of varying ingredients from season to season—printing was still too expensive for menus to change as often as the food did. The best evidence we have of what restaurants were serving in the 1870s through 1890s comes from city directories (Campi’s Italian Restaurant, at 309 N. Main, advertised tagliarini, macaroni, spaghetti, ravioli and risotto alla Milanese; Mrs. Gregg’s Restaurant and Bakery in Boyle Heights boasted that it made ice cream every Sunday) or newspaper advertisements of special menus, such as the Stevenson House’s Christmas dinner.
From the mid-1870s on, about twenty restaurants around town were run by Croatians. Some, such as the earliest one—Marcovich & Toppan’s Italian Restaurant, on the Plaza—served their own Dalmatian cuisine. (Calling it Italian was honest enough, because coastal Croatia cooks much like Venice.) Others opened American-style chop houses and Giovanni Tomich ran a prominent oyster house. Many of these Croatian restaurateurs were very successful; Marcovich and Tomich were still in business in 1900. Jerry Illich, who arrived in 1877 as a penniless sailor, eventually owned the grandest restaurant in town, three stories high and boasting the finest fish and game, but he retained his roots, making a specialty of paste (pasta).
In the 1880s, Los Angeles had made a great leap into modernity. Victor Dol’s Commercial Restaurant, the first in town that didn’t have adobe-style rammed earth floors, opened in 1881. In the next decade, the city would boast twenty-four-hour restaurants and begin to set fashions. The emblematic figure of the time was Al Levy, who started by selling a novel dish, the oyster cocktail, from a pushcart in 1894. Cocktail sauce had been invented in San Francisco a few years earlier, but it was in Los Angeles that diners went crazy for oyster cocktails and spread the fashion around the country, even into Mexico.
By 1897, Levy had opened a “swell [fancy] fish and oyster restaurant” which morphed five years lataer into something even sweller, with marble wainscoting, an orchestra, a refrigerated pantry and a detailed menu which had expanded beyond seafood. It was a menu typical of the beginning of the twentieth century in listing large numbers of dishes by name, without descriptions, because Levy’s customers were familiar with the Victorian-era twelve-course meal. Prohibition would later extinguish this knowledge of old-fashioned haute cuisine, but Levy managed to remain one of the leading restaurateurs in town until his death in 1941.
The next restaurant craze in Los Angeles was the cafeteria, which fed tens of thousands of Angelenos every day in the 1920s. Cafeterias rarely bothered with printed menus, because their food sold itself on its looks as you slid your tray along the rails. However, another sort of restaurant popular in the 1920s typically explored the possibilities of the printed menu to the limit: the theme restaurant.
Theme restaurants, based on creating a fantasy environment, were a specialty in Los Angeles because there were always plenty of out-of-work set designers in Hollywood. But there had been adumbrations of the theme concept even before the film industry came to the City of Dreams. Outstanding was Casa Verdugo, the first upscale Mexican restaurant in town. In 1905, Los Angeles was besotted with the romance of the Days of the Dons, and for more than a decade, Casa Verdugo was the hottest ticket in town. After all, Piedad Yorba, a member of a leading Old California family, ran the place, which was located in a nineteenth-century Glendale adobe and featured rancho-period singing and dancing.
And its menu set the standard for theme restaurant menus that lasted through the Tiki Cuisine madness of the Sixties and beyond. It was shaped like a tamale. Here was a menu that was first cousin to the programmatic architecture that was later considered quintessentially L.A., the restaurants shaped like a hot dog or a derby hat. California crazy menus had been born.
Charles Perry is an acclaimed food historian, widely published author, and co-founder of the Culinary Historians of Southern California. From 1978 to 1990, he was a freelance food writer. From 1990 to 2008, he was a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times food section, where he wrote a series of ground-breaking articles examining Southern California food and restaurant history.
"Los Angeles has all the necessary ingredients to lead a food justice revolution – a willingness for cross-sector collaboration, public officials who are eager to advance progressive food policy, concerned residents ready to mobilize, as well as world class chefs, media, and celebrities."
Alexa Delwiche / Managing Director, Los Angeles Food Policy Council
Clifford Clinton, founder of Los Angeles’s iconic Clifton’s Cafeteria, ran his business by “Clifton’s Golden Rule.” Clinton opened his first cafeteria two years into the Great Depression, and was said to never have turned away a customer for lack of money. During hard times, the cafeterias operated on the honor system, asking customers to pay if they could, putting pot pie, roast beef or scalloped green beans on their trays, even if they couldn’t.
At Philippe the Original, twenty-three year’s Clifton’s senior, the carvers who pile beef, pork, lamb, turkey or ham on your french roll are represented by members of UNITE HERE Local 11. Philippe’s patrons share communal tables and an appreciation for an inspired culinary invention (that may or may not have occurred for the first time on site).
A few miles west, other Local 11 members turn out a second contestant for LA’s best sandwich—the #19 at Langer’s. Since 1947, Langer’s has served the world’s best pastrami where Downtown, Koreatown, Echo Park and Pico-Union meet in MacArthur Park.
These restaurants, with their accessible menus and their mutual respect for workers and customers represent inclusion, equity, and pride in community. They serve as models for the role that restaurants can and do play in advancing the local and national discussion of food justice.
Los Angeles activists and civic leaders have long been counted among the leading national voices demanding equity in the way food is produced and consumed. Radical concepts in their day, LA-born ideas have inspired national movements. Soda bans in schools, Farm to School, 2/3 voter rejection on a Wal-Mart proposal to build a super center in Inglewood, to the shift away from defining food issues with an anti-hunger lens towards a more holistic concept of community food security—these campaigns and initiatives were successful because they mobilized residents, parents, students, advocates, and policymakers around the principles of economic, social, and racial justice.
A willingness and urgency persists among LA’s food system change-makers to work together to solve big food system problems. A variety of initiatives active today reflect the City’s progressive values and historic leadership on food system issues:
These efforts on the part of activists and policy makers have laid a strong foundation for awareness of and solutions to food justice issues in LA. However, much more must be done to make food justice part of the greater public consciousness. LA’s chefs and restaurateurs can play a role.
The current vanguard of celebrity chefs, restaurateurs, farmers and food critics have given rise to a social phenomenon that rivals TMZ for the public’s attention. Roy Choi’s fusion of LA’s taco truck and Korean barbeque cultures created his own traffic patterns as hipsters, housewives and office mates followed the trucks’ twitter feeds across the basin. Jonathan Gold has shamed any self-respecting Angeleno from ever eating Chinese food west of the 710.
These food celebrities can also help raise awareness of serious issues that still plague our food system. Low-income residents and communities of color face disproportionately higher rates of diet-related health issues, due in part to poor access to healthy food options such as full-service grocery stores and farmers’ markets. The food system supply chain poses serious health issues to workers, who still die from heat exhaustion in California fields, meat processing accidents and chronic exposure to toxic pesticides.
Ironically, food workers can’t afford the food they harvest, serve and sell—the industry’s workers suffer food insecurity rates higher than the general workforce. And it’s no wonder. Seven of the 10 lowest paying jobs in the US are in the food system, with the restaurant sector accounting for almost half of American workers earning at or below the minimum wage.
Industrial agriculture remains the largest contributor to air and water pollution in the state. Year after year, agricultural towns in the Central Valley are ranked the poorest, most polluted, most unhealthy towns in the US.
These problems are immense, but they need not paralyze. Rather, our vision and goals need to be as big as the issues we face.
Los Angeles has all the necessary ingredients to lead a food justice revolution – a willingness for cross-sector collaboration, public officials who are eager to advance progressive food policy, concerned residents ready to mobilize, as well as world class chefs, media, and celebrities. Plus Los Angeles has scale. As the largest County, second largest City and second largest school district in the country, when we make change, we transform supply chains. Los Angeles has quietly paved the way for many years, but now it’s time to lead.
The moment has arrived for the food movement to leverage this unique position and popularity. It is time to champion an ambitious vision, strategy and policy platform for social change. But the movement will not succeed if it just keeps talking to the converted.
Food is the ultimate connector. It brings together diverse people and communities, often allowing an entry point for difficult conversations: issues of race, class, immigration, inequality, climate change, anti-trust and so on. Chefs intimately understand this connection.
Over the years, chefs here locally and across the country have been vocal advocates for food system change. Yet, with the rise of Los Angeles foodie culture and the quest for the best taco, burger or ramen, Angelenos have too often forgotten this tradition. The food movement can help to reinvigorate this role for chefs and likewise, chefs can serve as the food movement’s ambassadors, using their clout to mobilize the masses and demand food justice for all.
"Our society is currently at a critical point for making progress on health literacy—and libraries as trusted community institutions are at the forefront of finding solutions."
Alison K. Cohen / University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health
At some point in your life, a doctor has probably used a word—or several—that you did not understand. Maybe as a result of this, you didn’t fully understand your diagnosis, or how to take the recommended medication. This is just one of the many ways literacy can affect your health. And this is even more of a challenge in places like Los Angeles, which has one of the lowest levels of literacy in the nation—with 57% of working age adults in the city lacking basic literacy skills.
We understand that poverty has a direct correlation to literacy—40% of adults in Los Angeles at the lowest level of literacy are below the federal poverty line. As higher education leads to a more successful life path, we have only been able to assume that includes better health as well. Now we finally have the data to back those perceptions up.[1] It turns out that education, as a component of individuals’ socioeconomic position, has affected a variety of health outcomes over decades—even as the specific diseases and risk factors change. This consistency suggests that education is a “fundamental cause,” or key determinant, of health.[2]
So how exactly does education affect health? It may not be immediately obvious that there is a biological link. As I recently described in the American Journal of Public Health,[3] education can affect health through a variety of different pathways—from having access to more information about health issues to being qualified for better jobs. Across these various mechanisms, the more education people have on average, the healthier they are.
What the Research Tells Us
Researchers have become very interested in understanding the exact connection between literacy and health. While most studies have measured education using the number of years of school one has completed, some studies have been able to compare this measure of education to measures of literacy[4] and have found that improved literacy is even more strongly associated with better health.[5a] [5b]
We now know that health literacy is a big issue: at least 1 in 4 American adults have low health literacy, and this is even higher among racial/ethnic and linguistic minorities and other populations.[6a][6b] But how do we define health literacy? Researchers have studied how reading both words and numbers affect health outcomes. Health literacy is often defined as the ability to read health-related materials, for example, a brochure to educate a patient about their health condition. Health numeracy is the ability to make sense of health-related numbers, such as the need to follow the correct dosage of a medication. Health literacy can also be defined more broadly to include being able to critically evaluate health and science information in order to take civic action and/or improve their own health.[7]
Increase in Literacy Can Improve Health
Research has shown that higher literacy can vastly impact a wide array of health outcomes.[8a][8b] A review of studies published between 1980 and 2003 found that higher reading ability is associated with higher knowledge of health and health care, and that adults with lower reading ability were less likely to have preventive health care services (like vaccines or screenings) or appropriately manage their chronic illnesses.[9] For example, they were less likely to visit the doctor and more likely to visit the emergency room for reasons that could have been avoided.[10]
A literacy-health gradient exists even among underserved groups, which has been observed in studies of socioeconomic position and health.[11] Among adults participating in programs to increase their literacy, those with lower literacy had poorer health.[12] And among adults qualified for Medicaid, those with higher literacy had fewer health care costs.[13] This proves that an increase in literacy can improve health.
Researchers have found that health literacy affects health status as well as a variety of more specific chronic conditions. In a study that included people from Los Angeles, adults with lower health literacy and health numeracy (the ability to act upon and make decision about health information) reported poorer health in both English and Spanish-speaking populations.[14] It turns out that their measure of self-reported health is one of the strongest predictors of sickness and death in the next year,[15] and the association was independent from their access to and use of health care. Another study of older adults enrolled in Medicare found that those with inadequate health literacy had poorer mental and physical health than those with an adequate level of health literacy.[16]
Managing Health Through Literacy
Health literacy also affects management of chronic disease. Those with higher health literacy are more likely to take medications as directed.[17] We also know that among adults with asthma, those with lower health literacy have worse health and manage their asthma less comprehensively.[18] And higher oral health literacy is associated with higher oral health status.[19]
Health literacy is also associated with preventive measures like healthy eating and drinking. Those with higher health literacy read food labels more,[20] and are better able to understand the information those labels convey.[21] This can translate into better diets. For example, one recent study found that those with higher literacy reported a healthier diet and less soda consumption.[22]
Collaborations Between Libraries and Health Professionals
There are many ways to improve both literacy and health literacy. And the solutions can be related, since we know that health literacy is strongly correlated with literacy more generally.[23]
First, based on new research, it is important to note that the literacy programming that libraries already do likely has health benefits. And these health benefits can impact anyone at any point in their life span. In addition to supporting reading programs for kids, the Los Angeles Public Library has one of the largest adult literacy programs nationwide.[24]
Libraries are poised to play an important role in creating more user-friendly health education materials. Clinicians have acknowledged the importance of literacy for over a decade, including a 2005 editorial to primary care providers,[25] and a call for nurses to measure health literacy as one of the core vital signs.[26] Many clinical journals have pages dedicated to patient education materials for clinicians to share with their patients. However, one study found that the majority of these materials are written at a more advanced reading level than appropriate for the general population.[27] Libraries working together with clinicians can help follow through with this call to action to develop more accessible health education materials.
Libraries can also play a crucial role in navigating the difficult process of enrolling in healthcare. Enrolling in health insurance can be a major challenge for those with low literacy. A recent study found that the application individuals must complete to renew their enrollment in Medicaid are written at a reading level more advanced than recommended.[28] Given the growing importance of health care coverage in the era of the Affordable Care Act, this can be an exciting opportunity for cross-collaboration. For example, the Los Angeles Public Library has played a leadership role in helping enroll local residents in Covered California, the state’s health insurance marketplace.[29]
With libraries helping the public enroll in healthcare, it will also cut the costs of care for both patients and insurers. One systematic review estimates that low health literacy increases health care costs by 3-5%, which can be from a few hundred to several thousand dollars for any individual patient.[30] It is therefore also in health insurance providers’ best interest to improve health literacy as a way of improving their population’s health and reducing their total health care spending.
Our society is currently at a critical point for making progress on health literacy—and libraries as trusted community institutions are at the forefront of finding solutions. As health professionals focus on the social determinants of health and recent federal legislation provides mechanisms and requirements to improve health literacy, libraries are well-positioned to expand their programming and play a crucial role.[31]
Many factors affect literacy.[32] This figure highlights some of the main determinants of literacy and health literacy, and depicts the links to health. It is important to note that there are many other steps in the pathways that could have also been depicted, such as how health literacy affects health.[33]
We asked three contemporary chefs working in different parts of the city to reflect on their own relationships with food, and with all the stories that food helps them tell. In the spirit of the "To Live and Dine in L.A." project, they were also asked to comment on food inequalities in the city and to react to select vintage menus from the Library's collection.
It is with great pleasure that the Library Foundation of Los Angeles recognizes the generosity of the supporters who helped make the To Live and Dine in L.A. project possible.
Principal Funders:
Dwight and Julie Anderson
Annenberg Foundation
Judith Krantz
Benefactors:
Donna Schweers and Tom Geiser
Judith Selbst Kamins and
Kenneth Kamins
Patrons:
Sharon and Michael Kelley/Sidley
Austin LLP
Gwen T. Miller
Special Thanks to
Michael K. Lindsey
