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By Root 2713 0

in town closed at 8 p.m. he had no competition and his business thrived. Soon wagons began appearing all over. By the time Scott retired forty-five years later he had fifty competitors in Providence alone. They were called lunch wagons, which was odd: because they didn’t come out until dusk, lunch was the one thing they didn’t serve. When residents complained about having food served outside their houses, cities everywhere enacted ordinances banning the wagons. So the lunch wagon proprietors hit on the idea of moving their wagons to vacant lots, taking off the wheels and calling them restaurants, since restaurants were immune from the restrictions. By the 1920s several companies were mass-producing shiny, purpose-built restaurants known everywhere as diners. From a business point of view diners were an appealing proposition. They were cheap to buy and maintain. You could set them up in hours on any level piece of ground, and if trade didn’t materialize you loaded them on to a flat-bed truck and moved them elsewhere. A single diner in a good location could make a profit of $12,000 a year – a lot of money in the 1920s. One of the more enduring myths of American eating is that diners were built out of old railway dining-cars. Hardly any were. They were just made to look that way.

The first place known to be called a cafeteria – though the proprietor spelled it cafetiria – was opened in Chicago in the early 1890s. The word came from Cuban Spanish and as late as 1925 was still often pronounced in the Spanish style, with the accent on the penultimate syllable. Cafeterias proved so popular that they spawned a huge, if mercifully shortlived, vogue for words of similar form: washeteria, groceteria, caketeria, drugeteria, bobateria (a place where hair was bobbed), beauteria, chocolateria, shaveteria, smoketeria, hardware-ateria, garmenteria, furnitureteria – even casketeria for a funeral home and the somewhat redundant restauranteria.

The automat – a cafeteria where food was collected from behind little windows after depositing the requisite change in a slot – was not an American invention but a Swedish one. In fact, they had been common in Sweden for half a century before two entrepreneurs named Horn and Hardardt opened one in Philadelphia in 1902 and started a small, lucrative empire.

Luncheonette (sometimes modified to lunchette) entered American English in about 1920 and in its turn helped to popularize a fashion for words with -ette endings: kitchenette, dinette, usherette, roomette, bachelorette, drum majorette, even parkette for a meter maid and realtyette for a female estate agent.14

The waitresses and hash slingers (an Americanism dating from 1868) who worked in these establishments evolved a vast, arcane and cloyingly jocular lingo for the food they served and the clients who ate it. By the 1920s if you wanted to work behind a lunch counter you needed to know that ‘Noah’s boy’ was a slice of ham (since Ham was one of Noah’s sons) and that ‘burn one’ or ‘grease spot’ designated a hamburger. ‘He’ll take a chance’ or ‘clean the kitchen’ meant an order of hash, ‘Adam and Eve on a raft’ was two poached eggs on toast, ‘cats’ eyes’ was tapioca pudding, ‘bird seed’ was cereal, ‘whistleberries’ were baked beans and ‘dough well done with cow to cover’ was the somewhat laboured way of calling for an order of toast and butter. Food that had been waiting too long was said to be ‘growing a beard’. Many of these shorthand terms have since entered the mainstream, notably ‘BLT’ for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, ‘over easy’ and ‘sunny side up’ in respect of eggs, and ‘hold’ as in ‘hold the mayo’.

Eating out – usually quickly, cheaply and greasily – became a habit for urban workers and a big business for the providers. Between 1910 and 1925 the number of restaurants in America rose by 40 per cent. A hungry New Yorker in 1925 could choose from among 17,000 restaurants, double the number that had existed a decade before.15 Even drugstores got in on the act. By the early 1920s, the average drugstore, it was estimated, did 60 per