Two Anachronistic Eateries

Lunch at Horn & Hardart Automat
Image: Getty

Two astonishingly old-fashioned restaurants still existed when I moved to New York in 1986. My memories of them are in black-and-white. They were time capsules from the 1940s and 1950s, when businessmen were men, wore hats and grey suits, and ate things like Salisbury steak with buttery mashed potatoes and apple pie for dessert. 

You had a foot in old New York when frequenting these retrograde establishments. Your day might have also included buying the paper at a newsstand or getting a shoe shine at Grand Central. 

There is no throughline from these sui generis citadels of square meals to today’s hellacious haute cuisine, with its “grilled reindeer heart on a bed of fresh pine, and saffron ice cream in a beeswax bowl.” 

The first of the eateries was the legendary, space-age Horn & Hardart Automat on 42^nd Street. H&H was a sizable, futuristic corral with walls of glistening, coin-operated vending machines containing sandwiches (American cheese; sliced egg, tomato, and lettuce; tongue), mains (roast leg of spring lamb with brown gravy; ham salad), vegetables (buttered spinach; mashed squash; green peas) and dessert (applesauce cake with whipped cream; coffee ice cream). 

There was an odd juxtaposition between the haimish ’50s American fare on offer and the sleek, modernistic stainless steel and glass furnishings. I ate there twice, once with my parents while on vacation, and once by myself when I first moved to the city. 

As a kid, it was all about getting to use the vending machines. I knew full well that there were workers behind the glass walls replenishing the empty cubby holes with new slices of pie and plates of peas. But it was still like magic, and I could not fathom why every restaurant would not want to have coin-operated machines and no apparent waitstaff. 

The other frozen-in-time place I frequented in ‘80s New York was called Marie Elizabeth’s on Madison in the 30s. I am unsure of the spelling and cannot find any online record of this archaic cafeteria as I remember it. (I doubt this is it; certain details do not line up.) 

I was staying at my friend Claudia’s family's Upper West Side apartment. Her mother, Mrs. B, a singularly kind and generous New Yorker who became a sort of metropolitan mentor to me, told me I simply had to go to Marie Elizabeth’s when she learned I was working in a nearby Murray Hill neighborhood. What began as an obligation quickly turned into a habit.

Marie Elizabeth’s was a lunchroom for businessmen. They were not open at dinner time, and most of the customers -- even in the ’80s -- were men. For some odd reason, the place was dimly lit, which always made me want to take a nap instead of returning to work after eating.

Along a serving line, female attendants wearing pink-and-white belted uniforms offered a $10 prix fixe menu of meatloaf or beef stroganoff, some god-awful kind of boiled vegetable (succotash seems about right), and for dessert, strawberry cake with pink icing. 

I became such a regular of Marie Elizabeth’s that the accommodating women who worked there would regularly slip me extra slices of cake on the house. As I took my tray to my seat and pondered New York's infinite possibilities, this back-to-the-future immersion in midcentury mid-day dining had not figured into my calculations. 

I feel an implicit sense of patriarchal culpability just for having, momentarily, lived in a world where women served men beef-based entrées and wore uniforms. But stepping back in time for a serving of nostalgia is a delicious memory I still hold dear. 

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Note: The New York Public Library archives helped me reconstruct the menu at Horn & Hardart. 

Also, I just learned that Mrs. B is frail and in a state of compromised health -- sending love to her and the entire family, who selflessly took me in and helped launch me in New York all those years ago.