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Bogle set the groundwork, but the catering fame of Philadelphia also resulted from the expertise of the French West Indian immigrants who arrived in the City of Brotherly Love following the Haitian Revolution and were trained in the French culinary arts and service. One of them was Peter Augustin (sometimes given as Peter Augustine). His additions to Bogle’s basics put Philadelphia caterers on the map of high-society families throughout the country. Augustin established a restaurant on Walnut Street after he arrived in the city from Haiti. He and his family not only provided dining facilities but also warehoused materials—chairs, linens, and other service items—that could be used for various catering events. They also trained waiters, as had Bogle, to work at various venues. The Augus-tins were joined by the Baptistes, another Haitian family with catering and restaurant businesses. The families intermarried and soon established an enterprise of such renown that they purchased a railroad car with a kitchen that dispatched waiters and goods up and down the East Coast. Tastemakers for the upper classes, the Augustin family and its staff were noted for their sophisticated cuisine and served dishes like creamed terrapin and oyster fritters to prominent families as far away as New York and Boston. The Augustin family enterprises continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century; by the late 1870s one of the restaurants was reputed to be the “Del-monico’s of Philadelphia.” The Augustins continued to intermarry with others from Haitian catering families, like the Dutrieuilles, and their catering business continued until 1967 as the oldest continuously managed black family business in that city.

Bogle and the Augustin family were the first generation of what would become a tidal wave of African American caterers, who had a lock on Philadelphia’s entertaining in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their inheritors banded together in enterprise to share resources and facilities and to consolidate their buying power, purchasing ingredients in bulk and sharing the cost of equipment. They not only catered private affairs in the homes of wealthy clients, providing food, waiters, crystal, silver, napery, and more; they also opened dining rooms that functioned as restaurants and catering halls. The caterers, adept at business and with finely honed social skills, became the black elite of the city. While many of the catering families were of Haitian origin, the most renowned Philadelphia caterer of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly Thomas Dorsey, a former slave.

Dorsey was born on a plantation in Mary land in the early decades of the nineteenth century and escaped to Philadelphia in adulthood. He was captured and returned to his owner, but during his brief sojourn in Philadelphia he had made friends among the free blacks and abolitionists who were able to raise the sum necessary to purchase his freedom, and he was able to return to the city a free man in the late 1830s. Like many of the newly arrived blacks from the South, he apprenticed at a trade and is listed as a shoemaker in the Register of Trades of the Colored People in the City of Philadelphia and Districts, a pamphlet published by the Philadelphia Abolition Society in 1838. The privately published Philadelphia City Directory, which appeared annually between 1793 and 1940, lists him for the first time as a waiter in 1844 and it seems that he rotated among several different eating establishments in the city until i860. He made his first appearance in the listing as a caterer in 1862. And by the middle half of the nineteenth century, Dorsey was well established as one of the pillars of the catering network that provided the food, servants, and accoutrements for the upper-class soirees and dinner parties in Philadelphia. Dorsey served only the upper crust and had a reputation for excellent fare. At one meal, served on December 27, 1860, the menu included such delicacies as oysters on the half shell, filet de boeuf piqu