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An advertisement for the newly opened People’s Restaurant in the 1863 Rocky Mountain News reads:

FORD’S PEOPLE’S RESTAURANT,

Blake Street, Denver.

B.L. Ford would respectfully invite his old patrons and the

public generally to call and see him at his new and commodious

Saloon, Restaurant and Barber Shop

On the site of his old stand. Gentlemen will find at

All HOURS his tables supplied with the

MOST CHOICE AND DELICATE LUXURIES OF

COLORADO AND THE EAST

Private Parties of Ladies and gents can be accomodated

with special meals, and Oyster suppers to order

In his upstairs saloon

His Bar Is stocked with

The Very Finest Liquors and Cigars

That gold or greenbacks can control of first hands in

The eastern markets. Denver and Mountain Lager

Received daily.

Game of all kinds, Trout, &c. constantly on hand

For regular and transient customers, and served up in

Style second to no other restaurant in the west.

Customers flocked to the premises. The establishment included a restaurant, a saloon, and, in a nod to his former trade, a barbershop. Ford served Denver’s elite and its newly rich, who were often rough-hewn miners. (This, after all, was the Denver of the “unsink-able” Molly Brown.) The menu that he proffered was far from the standard cornbread-based slave diet; it offered elaborate dishes prepared from the finest local, national, and international ingredients and designed to suit the taste of the city’s sophisticates, which followed the tastes of those of Europe and New York.

The East Coast had begun to grow a restaurant culture among the rich in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Delmonico’s restaurant opened in New York City in 1837 and became a must-visit stop in the city. The seven-page menu was printed in English and French and offered twenty veal dishes, fifteen seafood ones, eleven beef items, and a wide variety of appetizers, vegetables, pastries, and fruits. There was a range of alcoholic beverages, and the wine list even included Premiers crus Bordeaux. Delmonico’s raised the national standard, and Barney Ford’s clientele wanted equivalent fare. His trout, oysters, and game were served up in rich sauces prepared from the most expensive ingredients; they were paid for by Denver’s growing upper class, who settled their checks not only with U.S. currency but also with the gold that they had mined. Ford was wildly successful and later expanded People’s Restaurant into the Inter-Ocean Hotel. Known for serving “the squarest meal between two oceans,” Ford recognized the commercial importance of the railroad lines that had begun to traverse the country and moved in to exploit their growth. By 1867, he had a second restaurant in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which developed into a second hotel, where he catered to those who arrived on the new train routes that were beginning to crisscross the West.

The first U.S.-built locomotive ushered in the age of rail in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1830. By 1862, the United States Congress had passed a bill that called for two railroad companies to construct a rail line that would join the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and promote western migration. The Central Pacific and Union Pacific companies were charged with the task. On May 10, 1869, the two lines were joined at Promontory, Utah, with the driving of a golden spike. The nation was joined. By 1895 four more lines were built that continued the growth of the country’s rail routes. Finding a meal on train journeys was a haphazard affair. Travelers had to either provision themselves for the journey or dash from the train at stops to purchase food from local vendors like the black women waiter-carriers of Gordonsville, Virginia, who proffered fried chicken and coffee to travelers on the Chesapeake and Ohio line after the Civil War.

Then, in 1867, George Mortimore Pullman introduced his “hotel car,” which immediately became the traveling rage. The idea was to provide the well-to-do with all the comforts of a hotel on the rolling stock that rackety-clacked