Re-Ordering the Scene: The Hollywood Restaurant and American Culinary Culture, 1947–1963

Abstract

This article explores the social and culinary landscape of Hollywood restaurants during the 1950s. Throughout Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, many Los Angeles-area eating establishments garnered national attention for their celebrity clientele and elaborate dáecor. In the 1950s, however, due to industrial and cultural factors, these same restaurants watched their patronage drop. Hollywood's elite, who once dined out “to see and be seen” at such famed sites as the Brown Derby, Chasen's, and Romanoffs, began abandoning their old watering holes, preferring instead to spend leisure time at home. In the postwar era, as the film industry underwent vast structural changes, and television began to offer a new view of mass entertainment, Hollywood restaurants no longer showcased the glamorous lifestyles of the rich and famous. The absence of glitter extended into the kitchen. Despite a relative flowering of ethnic cuisine, most Hollywood restaurants in the 1950s served food that suited the mainstream palate. (Beef, wheat and canned products, all mildly spiced, were menu staples.) Ultimately, the 1950s proved a pivotal time in the history of Hollywood dining. The postwar ideals driving middle class suburbanization, domesticity and homogeneity strongly influenced popular food, fashion and entertainment, and the Hollywood restaurant reflected the new order. This article demonstrates how in the 1950s, Hollywood's most celebrated restaurants, serving as barometers of many American tastes and trends, turned from exclusive havens where stars courted publicity to quieted rooms where the patrons and food were equally inconspicuous.