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The First Great American Hospitality Empire | Stephen Fried · The Restaurant Guys

• 1:30
  Speaker 3: Good morning, mark.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: Hey Francis,
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: how are you this morning?
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Bye to Mike.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: How you doing?
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: I'm doing great.
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: I'm very excited for our guest, Stephen Free.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: He's joining us later to talk about his book about the Harvey organization was the first real restaurant chain in America, and it's a.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: Wonderful.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: Look at America.
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: I can't, can't wait to talk to him.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: I think, I think he's the first person to really go in depth and tell this story.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: A lot of people knew that the Harvey's had important restaurants in, in the, in the country, but not to the, this degree.
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: Unbelievable.
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: Well, well, I wanna start with a more serious topic.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: I want to talk about high fructose corn syrup.
• 1:59
  Speaker 3: Now, those of you who've listened to us for a long time know that we've discussed high fructose corn syrup in the past.
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: And if you don't know it, you can listen to some our sometimes humorous anecdotes about high fructose corn syrup, uh, in our archive.
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: but there's a study that's come out.
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: Uh, Princeton researchers have found that high fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain that than sugar.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: think Francis and I looked at each other when we saw this study and kind of said, why did it take so long to do this study?
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: Well, you can find the study at, at, uh, www.princeton.edu.
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: the, the, the debate about high fructose corn syrup is indicative of a, of a larger issue in how we deal with food in America overall in the United States as opposed to many other countries.
• 2:40
  Speaker 3: We have a process by where we put new foods, new types of foods, new ingredients on the market, and we allow them to go into the marketplace.
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: They're often classified as GRAS or generally recognized as safe, and therefore don't require any testing.
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: And we put new stuff out there in the marketplace for us to eat, and then it's someone else has the burden of proof to prove that something may not be safe or may not be desirable.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: And once you set things up like that, first of all, you set the American people up to be the Guinea pig.
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: Uh, instead of testing in advance as they do in Europe, the second thing you do is you allow a large investment of corporate capital in products that have a vested interest in keeping these things once in the market and keeping them in the market so they don't have to retool to get them out of the market.
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: And the third sort of diabolical leg on this stool is you have, um, food disparagement laws, which in many places don't allow people to talk.
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: I mean, the famous Oprah getting sued because she said she was gonna think twice about eating beef.
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: Now she was Oprah and she won after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in her own defense.
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: But, um, she stopped saying bad things about beef.
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: It, it's a crazy, crazy world of food approval that we live in.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: But we, we look at this logically, and Francis and I have talked about this a bunch of different times, but you look at this logically.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: America changed.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: America changed almost to the day when America switched to high fructose corn syrup from beet sugar or cane sugar as its primary sweetener in, in a lot of its foods, almost to the day you see a fattening of America.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: I just think that you have to be blind to not make some kind of correlation, to not see that there's some type of connection
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: or, or intentionally leave blinders on.
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: Now, here's an, uh, from this article from Princeton, in the 40 years since the introduction of high fructose corn syrup as a cost-effective sweetener in the American diet, rates of obesity in the US have skyrocketed according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1970.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: Check these statistics.
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: You're right.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: Uh, in 1970, around 15% of the US population met the definition for obesity today.
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: One third of the American adults are considered obese,
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: so we've more than doubled the, the amount of obese people
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: in this, that that's according to the CDC.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: That's why the people talk about an obesity epidemic.
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: high fructose corn syrup, by the way, is found in foods, almost so many beverages, including fruit juice, soda, cereal, bread, yogurt, ketchup, mayonnaise.
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: Um, here's a statistic from Princeton.
• 5:15
  Speaker 3: Americans consume roughly 60 pounds of high fructose corn syrup.
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: Per person per year.
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: I
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: mean, it's truly in almost everything that's processed in this country at this time,
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: 60 pounds is more than a pound a week.
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: Think about a pound cereal,
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: ice cream.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: I mean, you look almost anywhere it fried foods that where, where you would think fried chicken and syrup study where you think even sweet, you just waffles
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: now
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: let's, you name it, it's in there.
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: Now let's make a different distinction between high fructose corn syrup and corn syrup.
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: Corn syrup is something different than high fructose corn syrup.
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: Now people have asked and listeners have written in.
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: And so what, what makes high fructose corn syrup different?
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: And here is the most cogent and concise definition of of the difference.
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: Are you ready?
• 6:02
  Speaker 3: Sucrose, table sugar sucrose is composed of equal amounts of the two simple sugars.
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: Fructose and glucose.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: Okay, that's sugar.
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: It's 50% fructose, 50% glucose, high fructose corn syrup.
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: The one used in this study anyway, and it's typical of so many, uh, features, a slightly imbalanced ratio containing 55% fructose and 42% glucose.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: larger sugar molecules called, higher saccharides make up the remaining 3% of the sweetener.
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: Now, that's not the only difference, and here is what may be an important difference.
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: And we don't understand.
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: The Princeton study doesn't point to exactly the mechanism behind how high fructose corn syrup makes you fat or makes mice fat.
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: but here's something that's a big difference, another big difference between fructose and sucroses.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: And I'm really sick of industry telling me, oh, it's the same.
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: It's it's natural.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: It's from fruit.
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: So they take this corn and it goes through, uh, lot of processing.
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: big difference here is that the fructose molecules in high fructose corn syrup are free and unbound and ready for absorption and utilization into your body, as opposed to in sucrose where every single fructose molecule, it comes from cane sugar or beet sugar, it's bound to a corresponding glucose mo molecule.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: They're bound up together and that means they have to go through another metabolic step before they can be utilized.
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: So I can't say that that's causal, but here's what this study shows.
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: It shows that, uh, rats with access to high fructose corn syrup significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: So here's, let, let's go back again.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: Rats had the same amount of calories of sugar and food as rats that had corn syrup and food.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: And the rats that had corn syrup and food were fatter.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high fructose corn syrup.
• 7:57
  Speaker 3: Also led to this is long-term abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen.
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: Huh?
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: Does that look like America or what?
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: And the rise in circulating fats, call triglycerides.
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: Guess what?
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: That's what we're also seeing in, in the population.
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: here's another quote.
• 8:13
  Speaker 3: When rats are drinking high fructose corn syrup at all, at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese.
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: Every single one.
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: Across the board.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: That's a quote by the way, from the article.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: Every single one across the board.
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: And the quote continues Even when rats are fed a high fat diet, you don't see this, they don't all gain extra weight.
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: Um, those results were published online in the February, on February 26th of this year.
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: But the Journal of Pharmacology, biochemistry and Behavior, um, from Princeton, the Neuroscience Institute.
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: Anyway, well, we're gonna come and talk about a happier topic in just a moment if you'd like.
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: If you choose to, to drink high fructose corn syrup, uh, that is your choice to make.
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: But I think, that there are other choices possible as well.
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: We'll be back in a moment talking with Steven Freed about his book, about Fred Harvey called Appetite for America.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: Can't Wait.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: Stick with us.
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: You're listening to the Restaurant guys
• 9:01
  Hello, everybody, and welcome back.
• 9:02
  Today, we're talking with Steven Fried.
• 9:03
  He's an award-winning investigative journalist
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: essayist and adjunct professor at Columbia University, and he's written a wonderful book called Appetite for America, how Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey built a railroad hospitality empire that civilized the Wild West.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: Steve, welcome to the show.
• 9:19
  Speaker: Thanks for having me, and thanks for getting the whole subtitle, and I know it's really long.
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, I had to make sure that people knew that it was relevant to the Ra restaurant Guy Radio show, but
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: we're gonna have to break for commercial any second now.
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: So, uh, you write this book and, a fascinating book and it's, it's about maybe the first national retail outlet business, uh, in America.
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: But I love that I read the subtitle because I love it.
• 9:43
  Speaker 3: He used a hospitality empire, AKA restaurants and hotels that civilized the Wild West.
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: Can you talk to us about how he did that?
• 9:52
  Speaker: Yeah, well, basically, you know, America after the Civil War, uh, sort of stopped at the Missouri River, you know, and everything west of that was being taken over slowly by the trains.
• 10:01
  Speaker: Uh, the towns out there had no good food at all.
• 10:05
  Speaker: Uh, very few restaurants.
• 10:07
  Speaker: The restaurants were, you know, they used canned, mostly canned food.
• 10:10
  Speaker: And what Fred Harvey did, and he did this actually later in his life, I mean, he was a 40-year-old guy who had made a living, uh, as a freight agent for the railroads that had eaten horrible food all over the country, was that he started a chain of Trackside restaurants along the Santa Fe railroad, which at that time was a tiny railroad, but became the biggest railroad in America and ended up running between Chicago and Los Angeles.
• 10:32
  Speaker: And he built slowly but surely a chain of restaurants that were incredibly high quality restaurants, food as good as you would find in New York or Chicago or Philadelphia during that time, at a time when there were very few restaurants in the country and very few people ate out.
• 10:47
  Speaker: But obviously when they were on the trains, they were forced to eat out and he used the fact that the trains had refrigerator cars and could bring ingredients from everywhere in the country to create this amazing, not partly American cuisine, but also Americanized international cuisine.
• 11:03
  Speaker: To these many cases, little restaurants, many of them in the middle of nowhere.
• 11:07
  Speaker: And the chain grew from these small Trackside restaurants into larger restaurants and later resort hotels all along the Santa Fe.
• 11:15
  Speaker: Um, and also later, uh, stores because the company in its later years took over the union stations in Chicago, St.
• 11:22
  Speaker: Louis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and.
• 11:25
  Speaker: Ran all the restaurants, all the shops.
• 11:28
  Speaker: So they were in the retail business as well.
• 11:29
  Speaker: But what they started out doing was taking care of hungry passengers who were used to being ripped off at railroad restaurants, which were the scourge of culinary America.
• 11:38
  Speaker: I mean, culinary America was bad anyway.
• 11:41
  Speaker: America was considered a country that had all the food in the world, and no one knew how to cook it.
• 11:46
  Speaker: And, um, and Fred Harvey was considered to be someone who really taught an incredible number of Americans.
• 11:51
  Speaker: Not just rich people, but everybody who rode the train.
• 11:54
  Speaker: The value of fresh food, the value of quality food, and excellent ingredients.
• 11:58
  Speaker: And also the food could be prepared quickly because these trains had to eat the, the meal stops were 30 minutes.
• 12:05
  Speaker: That means 30 minutes to get off the train, sit down, have a full course meal.
• 12:09
  Speaker: Where the salad dressing was prepared, tableside steaks cooked to order, and then back on the train in 30 minutes.
• 12:15
  Speaker: So the idea of fast food, which we associate with hamburgers, you know, you guys know as restaurant owners, you can make anything fast if you have to.
• 12:23
  Speaker: The decision about how high the quality is is up to you.
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: Now, was this the first restaurant chain in America?
• 12:29
  Speaker: Yes, absolutely.
• 12:30
  Speaker: There was no, there were no reason for other restaurants to be chains back in the 1870s.
• 12:35
  Speaker: There were certainly in, in a couple of cities, there might have been multiple locations of a family restaurant, but this is the first national chain where somebody was running restaurants in multiple cities that were far away from each other, that had to be run with the same kind of standards.
• 12:50
  Speaker: That kind of systemization and standardization that we think of is automatic today, but of course was incredibly difficult.
• 12:57
  Speaker: We're talking about a time before telephones, um, and they had the train staff who they dispatched to these different places.
• 13:03
  Speaker: Their wait, their famous waitresses.
• 13:04
  Speaker: The Harvey girls were actually trained in the Med Midwest, hired in the Midwest, and then sent to the different Harvey restaurants where they lived in barracks above the restaurants so they could be available to serve patrons 24 hours a day.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: Very Denny Mayes to make sure get your staff from the Midwest to make sure they're just the right kind of people and transplant them to someplace else.
• 13:26
  Speaker: Exactly.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: Y you know, he, the focus, some of these restaurants were, were some of the best restaurants in the country to, to, you know, I think, I think when we talk about, you know, you're saying fast food, I think people aren't, aren't, aren't really understanding, you know, what you convey in the book that, you know, there's oysters and truffles and coconuts and cheeses from Europe and all kinds of ingredient.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: He's, he's running this ingredient driven menu in the late 18 hundreds.
• 13:49
  Speaker: Yeah, I mean it's really interesting because back then the idea that there was regional American cuisine and you would want to sample it in different parts of the country was kind of unknown except for the game that people would shoot locally.
• 14:00
  Speaker: And what part of what Fred Harvey realized once they got the chain in place, and you know, it began extending across from Kansas, across Kansas into Colorado, across into New Mexico, and then slowly to California.
• 14:12
  Speaker: And once they had the whole thing in place, what they decided was, look at this amazing thing that we can do.
• 14:16
  Speaker: We have.
• 14:17
  Speaker: High quality chefs in all these towns.
• 14:19
  Speaker: We have access to ingredients from everywhere.
• 14:21
  Speaker: Let's really show off.
• 14:23
  Speaker: So when you get on a train in California, we're not gonna serve you, uh, dishes from California.
• 14:28
  Speaker: That's too easy.
• 14:29
  Speaker: We're gonna serve you Great lakes, fish or fish from the Gulf of Mexico, from Texas, we're gonna serve you.
• 14:35
  Speaker: Things that we can move around the country.
• 14:37
  Speaker: Because the other thing is when you took a Fred Harvey trip on the Santa Fe, you ate different things at the different restaurants.
• 14:44
  Speaker: They assumed that you were gonna make the whole trip.
• 14:46
  Speaker: They didn't wanna bore you.
• 14:47
  Speaker: So the, the cuisine was amazingly high level and they were bringing oysters from New York.
• 14:53
  Speaker: They were bringing, you know, wherever they had to get their ingredients from.
• 14:56
  Speaker: And the chefs.
• 14:57
  Speaker: Were given some leeway.
• 14:58
  Speaker: I mean, they were sent recipes, uh, you know, telegraph the recipes or sent in.
• 15:02
  Speaker: Shes of paper, but they also were allowed to free associate locally.
• 15:05
  Speaker: So if a chef, uh, you know, in Colorado found out that there was some great harvest of something, he was told to buy all of it, send it on the refrigerator cars to his fellow chefs along the line with suggestions on how to prepare it.
• 15:18
  Speaker: So, because the company wanted to be both systematized and accurate, but also entrepreneurial so that the chefs and even the waitresses and the busboy felt that they had a vested interest in the food and the presentation being really perfect.
• 15:32
  Speaker: And so one of the things that was great was we were able to get recipes going really far back.
• 15:36
  Speaker: Most of them never before published in the form that the chefs actually used back then.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: I think one of the really interesting and innovative things about the way that Harvey organized.
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: The, the chain of restaurants was just that very thing that you talk about that really struck me.
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: They would have these recipe books in each restaurant and there would be the corporate core recipes, what we, we call the corporate core recipes today.
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: And yet he, unlike many chains today, allowed the local chefs to augment those recipes with their stuff.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: And if it became good and if it propagated up through the ranks, what a rich way of, doing ground up cuisine was amazing.
• 16:15
  Speaker: Well, you know, Fred was a great delegator, partly because he had to be in 90 places at once, and so he understood the business, he understood what he was good at.
• 16:23
  Speaker: He was not a.
• 16:24
  Speaker: He was an owner and he was great at hiring people, giving them freedom to do their work.
• 16:30
  Speaker: And he would pick, you know, his, the initial chef that he brought in was this guy William Phillips, who had been a, a chef here in Philadelphia during the centennial in 1876, and who he stole from the Palmer House in Chicago, which one of the biggest restaurants in the country, hotels in the country at that time.
• 16:44
  Speaker: And he said, I will give you this little tiny restaurant hotel in Florence, Kansas, and you can turn it into the greatest destination restaurant in America.
• 16:53
  Speaker: And he did that.
• 16:55
  Speaker: And people came from all over the country to eat in this restaurant.
• 16:57
  Speaker: And this guy, William Phelps, who was the food guy under Fred Harvey for many years, really, uh, generated this culture where you would have chefs who would, he would even come from Europe, who wanted to work for Fred Harvey because the system was amazing training.
• 17:11
  Speaker: And, uh, it was an incredible place where you could move up because they only promoted from within.
• 17:16
  Speaker: Once you were within the Fred Harvey Company, you were expected you could make your whole career there and you'd come back anytime you want because they valued more than anything, people that they had trained in their own ways because they believed that the way that they served, the way they cooked, the way they ran their company was just, was higher level than everybody else.
• 17:33
  Speaker: And while many companies feel that way, the truth is, if you look back over history, everybody else in the business felt that way too.
• 17:39
  Speaker: I mean, the Fred Harvey standard, there weren't a lot of standards in the food service business back then.
• 17:44
  Speaker: In many ways, people thought of the Fred Harvey standard as the standard.
• 17:48
  Speaker: And then later, you know, it's interesting, the Americanized versions of New Mexican and Mexican dishes.
• 17:53
  Speaker: Some of which aren't the way you would want them today,'cause we want them more authentic.
• 17:56
  Speaker: But it's fascinating to watch the process of the chefs, you know, taking in the local cuisine and then sending it around.
• 18:02
  Speaker: And what you get when you look at what they have is these big piles of papers that have been accumulated by the chefs over years and years.
• 18:09
  Speaker: The people in the dining car chefs had them, the people in the restaurants had them.
• 18:12
  Speaker: And we were lucky enough to get a handful of them and also for one of the big hotels, an entire year's worth of menus with the recipes also.
• 18:20
  Speaker: So it really was a bonanza just to see the cooking as well.
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: Well now Harvey Empire lasted through multiple generations.
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: And started to fall apart, was it after World War I or after World War II
• 18:31
  Speaker: it was.
• 18:32
  Speaker: It was after World War ii.
• 18:33
  Speaker: Part of what was great for me is, you know, people know the story of Fred Harvey, if they know it a little bit, what they know is about a British guy who came to America in the 1850s and had a restaurant, had a chain of restaurants in the late 18 hundreds along the Santa Fe.
• 18:45
  Speaker: What they don't really understand is Fred Harvey himself, died in 1901 and was ill for many years before his death.
• 18:51
  Speaker: His son Ford, who was actually quite as brilliant as Fred and ran the company for much longer, took over the company in the 1890s.
• 18:58
  Speaker: There was a depression in the 1890s, worse than any of the depressions we've had in the 20th century.
• 19:03
  Speaker: And after that depression, um, they rebuilt the railroad and the company, and that's when they, you know, started the Grand Canyon.
• 19:09
  Speaker: That's when they started doing bigger hotels.
• 19:11
  Speaker: And so this company was dominant in America up through the 1930s and 1940s.
• 19:17
  Speaker: And what happened was the third and fourth generation of the family.
• 19:20
  Speaker: We're simply not as innovative as the first three were.
• 19:23
  Speaker: And, you know, they were steering the company through the depression.
• 19:26
  Speaker: They had already put the company into serving people at automobiles because the, the Route 66 ran along the Santa Fe railroad.
• 19:33
  Speaker: And Fred Harvey's grandson, Freddie Harvey, was one of the original partners in TWA and had already gotten the company involved in the aviation business on the ground floor.
• 19:42
  Speaker: The first airborne meals in America in transcontinental flights, flights were Fred Harvey meals.
• 19:47
  Speaker: Um, but you know, the train business certainly changed after the second World War, and a lot of people started copying what Fred Harvey had done.
• 19:55
  Speaker: You know, they saw that running chains in different places was a thing that you could do.
• 19:59
  Speaker: So that, that had started in the 1920s, but it got much bigger after the second World War and Fred Harvey, I mean, continue to exist.
• 20:05
  Speaker: If you go to the Grand Canyon today, those hotels there are still run by the company that bought out Fred Harvey.
• 20:12
  Speaker: and you can, and you can still get the feel of Fred Harvey at the Grand Canyon, and there are several of the Fred Harvey properties that are still open and, and operating in, in a very reddish ways.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: Let's talk about the Grand Canyon, because he was instrumental then in making, uh, I think what started as initially just convenience along your way to somewhere else.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: He then helps to create.
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: Destinations and dining destinations.
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: And he, from your book, you say that he was instrumental in, promoting the Grand Canyon as, as a destination for tourism.
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: Is that, is that accurate?
• 20:42
  Speaker: Well, sure.
• 20:43
  Speaker: What people don't understand is that the Grand Canyon, which we see as a national park, when people first started going to the Grand Canyon in the early 19 hundreds, they went there on a train that the Santa Fe Railroad, a private company, well, a publicly traded company, but a company built to the lip of the Grand Canyon, and then they built a hotel for Fred Harvey to run called Elto Var, which is still there, right on the South rim of the Grand Canyon, which is an audacious thing to do.
• 21:08
  Speaker: But at the same time, is representative of, I mean, all of us want to go to a really far away place and stay in a four star hotel.
• 21:15
  Speaker: I mean, what else could you want that, you know, to go camping in a four star hotel?
• 21:18
  Speaker: Um, and that's sort of what the Grand Canyon is and what the Grand Canyon represented was part of the process in the early 19 hundreds of taking the Southwest, which most people saw as the flyover states for the train.
• 21:30
  Speaker: Just deserts that you had to go through to get to California and make people re uh, attach to them as the, as you know, as sort of in a way the birthplace of America.
• 21:41
  Speaker: You know, so the fact that we go to Santa Fe now and the people are in touch with Native American culture, that they go to the Grand Canyon.
• 21:47
  Speaker: People didn't do this stuff before the Santa Fe railroad put the tracks in place and the Fred Harvey Company created the tourism business there for people to do that.
• 21:57
  Speaker: So we take that for granted now.
• 21:58
  Speaker: But that was all invented, not by Fred, himself.
• 22:01
  Speaker: Fred was gone, Fred's son Ford ran all of that, and the other people in the family business.
• 22:05
  Speaker: But that is really a process that people refer to as, as the company, uh, introducing America to Americans.
• 22:12
  Speaker: And in fact, you know, the Fred Harvey Company was in business with the Native Americans.
• 22:16
  Speaker: Most of the Native American art in this country that you see in museums was originally owned by the Fred Harvey Company.
• 22:22
  Speaker: So they were very involved there.
• 22:24
  Speaker: Restaurants, hotels, and the Native American art business all through Northern New Mexico and Northern Arizona, which were places that were otherwise fairly desolate up to that point.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: The Harveys really did a lot to raise awareness for the Native Americans didn.
• 22:37
  Speaker: Absolutely.
• 22:38
  Speaker: They, they, they were in business with them.
• 22:39
  Speaker: I mean, again, what was, what was good about this was that it was about business.
• 22:43
  Speaker: And what they saw was, you know, there was a time before the Fred Harvey company worked with the Native Americans, where the Native Americans coming to the trains when they pulled into the depots and these stations were almost viewed as homeless people, as beggars trying to sell their goods.
• 22:56
  Speaker: It was not a pretty site.
• 22:58
  Speaker: And what the Fred Harvey Company did was make that business into a business.
• 23:01
  Speaker: They created stores that sold Native American goods and had demonstrations of Native American goods all along the railroad, even into the Midwestern cities.
• 23:10
  Speaker: I mean, you would go in Kansas City Union Station, there would be a place where you could buy authentic Navajo blankets.
• 23:16
  Speaker: William Randolph Hurst bought his entire collection of Navajo stuff, which sat in Zanadu forever, uh, from the Fred Harvey company.
• 23:23
  Speaker: There's documentation of all his bills, which he didn't want to pay.
• 23:26
  Speaker: Um, you know, which we were able to write about in the book.
• 23:29
  Speaker: But it was an amma.
• 23:30
  Speaker: The partnership between the Fred Harvey Company and the Native Americans, I mean, certainly is one that people talk about and criticize because they see it as the marketing of Native American life.
• 23:39
  Speaker: And it certainly was.
• 23:40
  Speaker: But at that time, um, that was the business Native Americans could be in.
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: Well,
• 23:44
  Speaker: and it was an amazing partnership that unfolded over many decades.
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: What, where do you come down on the criticism that that was exploitative of Native American culture?
• 23:53
  Speaker: Well, you know, look, I'm a journalist.
• 23:55
  Speaker: I'm not a social historian.
• 23:56
  Speaker: There has, there have been, uh, there has been so social history writing about this.
• 24:00
  Speaker: You know, one of the things about the whole Fred Harvey story is that it has been written about by academics in a lot of different ways.
• 24:07
  Speaker: No one ever took it seriously, just as a great story.
• 24:10
  Speaker: Um, so I was able to, to work with certainly different academic, uh, writing that raised these questions.
• 24:16
  Speaker: And of course it's, it's a double edged sword.
• 24:18
  Speaker: Um, but I think most people agreed that the state, the Amer Native American culture was in, when the Fred Harvey Company went into business with them was not caused by the railroad.
• 24:27
  Speaker: You know, it was caused by the, the actions of the US government earlier, the Long Walk, all these terrible things that we now look back on.
• 24:33
  Speaker: So it wasn't the railroad's fault that the Native American culture had been really ruined by the US government.
• 24:39
  Speaker: It was about trying to make sure they could, uh, have an economy.
• 24:43
  Speaker: And you really look at, it's really interesting.
• 24:45
  Speaker: I mean, we're talking about Fred's children, were really the people who said, you know what?
• 24:49
  Speaker: We should have a business with these guys.
• 24:51
  Speaker: They do incredible things.
• 24:52
  Speaker: People don't appreciate them.
• 24:53
  Speaker: And while they did market, uh, what they did, and they, you know, they invented that kind of Santa Fe jewelry that people like that light turquoise jewelry.
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
• 25:02
  Speaker: That isn't really what made of Americans made, I mean, they made heavier turquoise jewelry.
• 25:07
  Speaker: That kind of jewelry is actually invented by the Fred Harvey Company, uh, to make lighter jewelry that will tourists would like better.
• 25:13
  Speaker: But at the same time, they save Native American blanket making and Native American craft.
• 25:18
  Speaker: And people from that time period wrote about that.
• 25:20
  Speaker: So it's not just me observing this.
• 25:21
  Speaker: I mean, this is what is in the history.
• 25:23
  Speaker: So, but it's a, it's a complex relationship.
• 25:25
  Speaker: Look, people have a love-hate relationship with tourism generally, and nobody, everybody wants to visit places.
• 26:57
  Speaker: No one wants to feel like a tourist.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: Right,
• 26:59
  Speaker: but we're all tourists when we go to some places, right?
• 27:01
  Speaker: So when you, when you run the concession at the Grand Canyon, or you run a restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, you are living in the world of the love-hate relationship of tourism.
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: Well, the, the story is, is amazing and we'll come back in another moment.
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: You can find the book on our website, restaurant guys radio.com.
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: It's called Appetite for America.
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: That's a book about Fred Harvey's restaurant empire and how it civilized the west.
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: The, we're talking with the author Stephen Fried, and we'll be back in just a moment.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: Steven, one of the things I really enjoyed about your book as a restaurateur, obviously I get to see both sides of the coin.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: I get to see the front of house, the show, what happens, the results of, all the things I put into it.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: But I think frequently the customers don't know exactly what goes into it and the trials and tribulations that, that go into owning a restaurant.
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: One of the things I enjoyed about, and certainly this, that this family went through over multiple generations in order, to produce these types of restaurants, they went through some pretty difficult economic times and some, pretty rough behind the scenes kinds of things that, that I think maybe America didn't realize was happening while the Fred Harvey restaurants were, were thriving.
• 28:06
  Speaker: Well, I, I, I think in many ways what they went through is not that different than what restaurateurs go through today.
• 28:11
  Speaker: I mean, you don't want to share the challenges and the difficulties of what's going on in the back of the house.
• 28:16
  Speaker: With the people who out there are out there wanting to have a pleasant dining experience and what you get to see in Fred Harvey.
• 28:21
  Speaker: And I was really happy that this could be a business book too, where you really got to see what happened, uh, you know, behind the scenes there.
• 28:29
  Speaker: But yeah, their goal was that they wanted to make sure that people had a perfect dining experience, no matter how hard it was for them to make that happen.
• 28:37
  Speaker: And the company, because they had so many employees in different places, they, they created manuals and all kinds of rules because they really wanted their employees to understand, I mean, this doesn't just happen.
• 28:47
  Speaker: You know, you have to have rules, you have to keep to them.
• 28:49
  Speaker: And it's hard.
• 28:50
  Speaker: I mean, it is, I, I, I have a new appreciation writing this book.
• 28:53
  Speaker: Just how hard the hospitality business is and always has been because the nature of it, you know, there's many industries that are totally different than they were in the 18 hundreds.
• 29:02
  Speaker: Uh, if you wrote about them, I think the hospitality business is basically the same.
• 29:07
  Speaker: Because the challenges are the same in terms of the quality of ingredients, the ability to keep good employees, make sure the employees respect you and the, people in the restaurant.
• 29:15
  Speaker: So I was really happy that this could be a real business book that somebody in your business or a hotel business would be able to read and go, you know, this guy was struggling with the same stuff that I struggled with.
• 29:24
  Speaker: And I hope that people who read it, uh, see that the difficulty behind the scenes of how hard it is to make something be, feel like an easy, perfect dining experience.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: Well, it's tough to own a restaurant now, I mean, with these economic times.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: But I can't imagine having, trying to own a restaurant chain during the panic of 1893.
• 29:40
  Speaker: Oh my God.
• 29:41
  Speaker: I mean, the thing, you know, part of what was cool about the book is you get sort of every major historical event from that time.
• 29:47
  Speaker: Somebody in a it, somebody in the Fred Harvey system saw it.
• 29:50
  Speaker: So the Oklahoma Land Rush left from the Fred Harvey restaurant in Arkansas City, Kansas.
• 29:55
  Speaker: And you know, there are scenes in the book during the great Pullman strike in the early 1890s where, where Fred Harvey customers are, are trapped in their, in their restaurants around the country, and the strikers won't let them out of the restaurants.
• 30:07
  Speaker: And the the chefs are forced to break into the train cars and prepare anything they can find in the cars.
• 30:12
  Speaker: And, um, you know, it's, it's very, there's very challenging stuff that, one of the things that was fascinating that piece together was when the Fred Harvey company was really down on its luck during the depression.
• 30:22
  Speaker: It took a job trying to get the catering gig at the 1893 World's Fair.
• 30:27
  Speaker: And we were able to recreate this amazing lunch they had to put on for, for like 15,000 people in order to impress the judges to try to get the catering contract, which he didn't get ultimately.
• 30:37
  Speaker: But, um, you know, these people had an army of employees capable of serving vast numbers of people and sometimes the economy just wasn't that great.
• 30:45
  Speaker: And they always wanted to keep them on because they knew that keeping the staff in place, and you guys know this today, keeping a good staff in place is really important.
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: You know, I think one of the interesting things that people may not realize is you cover in the book how these, these, these Harvey restaurants, opened up when uh, people think, oh, well, weren't there dining cars?
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: And you talk about how when Pullman was, had had these fine coaches, uh, they really couldn't manage dining in the coaches.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: They really didn't work, as a dining car on the train, which is what I think a lot of people think of why.
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: Why these restaurants rather than dining cars on the trains?
• 31:20
  Speaker: Well, first of all, you gotta realize that for part of the time, they hadn't yet invented the vestibules between the train cars.
• 31:25
  Speaker: So even the trains that had dining cars, you couldn't get to them unless the train was stopped, which is bad.
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: And then you couldn't get off unless the train was stopped.
• 31:34
  Speaker: Exactly.
• 31:34
  Speaker: Exactly.
• 31:34
  Speaker: So the other thing was that west of Chicago, and especially west of Kansas City, none of the TRA companies use dining cars.
• 31:41
  Speaker: They were considered to be too heavy and, and too much of a loss so that all the, all the train companies west of Kansas City basically had dining stops where people got off and ate in the depot restaurants.
• 31:53
  Speaker: And they did not take dining cars on the trains really until the early 19 hundreds.
• 31:58
  Speaker: But for many years, the dining cars were a product of the shorter Eastern rides and not part of the culture.
• 32:04
  Speaker: The Fred Harvey company later got into dining cars in a way they sort of competed against themselves.
• 32:09
  Speaker: Some people wanted to eat the dining cars, some people wanted to eat in the restaurants.
• 32:13
  Speaker: Part of the reason they expanded into the hotel business was because of the dining cars.
• 32:16
  Speaker: But over the years, the Fred Harvey company had an operation that ran sit down restaurants in the Depots, all the dining cars, and then these big hotels too.
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, I, I, I can't help but be struck by a conversation you, by what we're talking about earlier in our conversation about, um, the parallels between restaurants today and restaurants long ago.
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: And what strikes me as a current restaurant operator who's been in business for about 20 years is.
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: Uh, and I think Mark made a salient point when he compared Fred Harvey to Danny Meyer, who's sort of the leader of a, of a certain school of hospitality and, is representative of a certain school of hospitality that has to do with fresh ingredients, that has to do with the focus on, on being present and hospitable as opposed to just giving service that it looks like was really central to the Fred Harvey way of doing things.
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: But then it's not only that it's, it's still relevant, it's that it, it wasn't relevant for a while.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: It wasn't how people looked at restaurants for a while when things were, were, were mostly focused on being fast and convenient and flashy.
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: But from your book, you, you talk in, in a list of business fundamentals by Fred Harvey.
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: You say one of his fundamentals is to have a, his employees should all have a sincere interest in people, which sounds a heck of a lot to me.
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: Like being mindfully present at the table, which is what, the chef from, uh, the Little Washington talks about being mindfully present.
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: And Denny Meyer talks about, um, hospitality over services, about having a sincere interest in people.
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: there's a quote from Fred Harvey.
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: He says, and I say this all the, all the time.
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: He says, it's in our, it's our business to please cranks anyone can please a gentleman.
• 33:49
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: You know, that's, that's perfect.
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: it's true.
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: What I what I say to the waiters sometimes is I say, and we have a wonderful bunch of nice people who come to our restaurants, who are our regular customers, but I say, you know, the reason they call it as a job is we, we don't just have to keep the happy people happy.
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: You know, we have to make everyone happy.
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: And, and that's, that seems that, I just found that really striking to read in a, an employee manual from the 1890s.
• 34:14
  Speaker: Well, you know, the thing about Fred and his son Ford and, and their, their high level employees, they were very direct about these things in that these are things that sometimes the owners know, but they have a hard time communicating to their employees.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 34:26
  Speaker: And because of the nature of their staff, which were so spread out over so many parts of the country, they used the kind of communication that you usually think of for railroads and armies, which is, you know, memos kind of explaining the way we do things.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 34:40
  Speaker: To get people inspired, to make it clear to them, this is how we do things and we have a process for everything.
• 34:46
  Speaker: And if you don't know how to do something, ask,'cause we have thought of this.
• 34:49
  Speaker: You're not out there on your own.
• 34:51
  Speaker: it's also a form of brand marketing, which Fred is considered to be sort of the inventor of the idea that every person who works in your place is part of your brand and either makes people want to be part of the Fred Harvey experience or whatever other dining experience or turns them off.
• 35:06
  Speaker: Um, I think what you're describing in terms of, in terms of the community aspect, you know, the Fred Harvey restaurants in many of these places, when they started, they not only were the best restaurant in town and they served all meals, but they would also have the dances on Friday night in the Fred Harvey restaurant to try to create, you know, more of a community spirit in cities.
• 35:23
  Speaker: That, up to that point were mostly, you know, sort of ranchers and railroad men.
• 35:26
  Speaker: So there are descriptions, certainly in the early years of the book of the Fred Harvey restaurant, you know, at night after they stopped serving, being the center of, of the community as well.
• 35:35
  Speaker: And I think what you're describing is that restaurants were that for a certain period of time.
• 35:39
  Speaker: Then other places took that over.
• 35:41
  Speaker: And I do think that restaurants are reestablishing that idea that they're not only there to serve good food, that hospitality is also about creating an ongoing community, that can be centered at your restaurant.
• 35:51
  Speaker: And that's also part of the people working for you, knowing their, customers, which the Fred Harvey people did really well because they, you know, they lived in the town.
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, let's talk about that because I, I do think that's central to how Mark and I have run our, uh, own restaurants here in, in New Jersey.
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: But let's talk about being a center of the community.
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: Let's talk about the, the dances in the evening.
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: Let's talk about.
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about sex.
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: The Harvey girls were, were an instrumental part of the brand.
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: And, and, uh, talk to us about the Harvey Girls and, and who they were and, and what roles they played in the communities they went to.
• 36:24
  Speaker: Well, in many ways, the Harvey Girls were sort of America's first sweethearts.
• 36:28
  Speaker: Um, in the early years of the company, uh, basically in the early years of the company, uh, African American men were generally the waiters in more, uh, western places.
• 36:36
  Speaker: It was considered too dangerous a place for single women.
• 36:39
  Speaker: But the Harvey Company decided in 1883 after a series of racial incidents in Northern New Mexico that they would bring.
• 36:46
  Speaker: Single Caucasian women from the Midwest and that they would be the waitresses in all the Harvey restaurants.
• 36:51
  Speaker: Now these women were dressed almost like nuns.
• 36:54
  Speaker: You know, they were wearing very long wool black, you know, dresses with white aprons.
• 36:59
  Speaker: Um, but they were in most of these towns, the only single women.
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: I was gonna say, when you're the only game in town, you can dress like a nun, as long as you're really not a nun, you know, you're still the hottest girl in town.
• 37:07
  Speaker: And so honestly, you know, you know what?
• 37:09
  Speaker: Life is anywhere in a workplace when there's a new single woman.
• 37:12
  Speaker: You know, it sort of changes the whole dynamic of everything.
• 37:15
  Speaker: So think of it as part of your business is bringing in new, the only new single women in town, in cities all over the Midwest, Southwest and West.
• 37:22
  Speaker: Literally for decades, it's believed that up to a hundred thousand Harvey girls were trained by the Fred Harvey companies sent to these different cities, and then married and settled down on these towns, which is why people say that Fred Harvey civilized the West.
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, the other thing is, I mean, you're talking about a time where in the West there were mail order brides.
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: You know,
• 37:39
  Speaker: yeah.
• 37:39
  Speaker 3: You could save yourself a lot of money on a mail order bride if you just hooked up with the Harvey girl and the rest,
• 37:44
  Speaker: couple bucks
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: for a meal.
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: Lot
• 37:45
  Speaker: of girls, you know, married locally, and, but it was part of, you know, the first, the Harvey girls were the first all female workforce in this country, and what they represented for single women in America was the opportunity to travel, to have adventure on their own.
• 37:58
  Speaker: If you worked for Fred Harvey, you if, and you stayed for six months, you got a free train ticket to anywhere the Santa Fe went.
• 38:04
  Speaker: Huh.
• 38:05
  Speaker: And these women were incredibly adventurous, incredibly brave.
• 38:09
  Speaker: I'm sure some of their parents just thought they were outta their minds.
• 38:11
  Speaker: they created a sort of, you know, an ethos for the Harvey Girls.
• 38:15
  Speaker: And again, you know, you know how hard it is in a restaurant business to keep something going for five or 10 years that everybody talks about in the town.
• 38:22
  Speaker: You know, we're talking about a company that created a certain ethos for its restaurant that continued through several generations of Americans.
• 38:28
  Speaker: I mean, they were, they were mothers whose daughters, and then granddaughters went to have the Harvey Girl experience during a certain time in their lives.
• 38:36
  Speaker: So this is before women really worked a lot.
• 38:39
  Speaker: And in fact, in the 1920s when women really started working more, that, that was like the second generation of Harvey girls, they had already, they had already been Harvey girls for 40 or 50 years by that time, and they became the more modern Harvey girls of the twenties, thirties and forties.
• 38:54
  Speaker: So it's actually quite a fascinating phenomenon in and of itself.
• 38:57
  Speaker: But the thing you gotta remember is these Harvey girls were the most amazing weight people in the world.
• 39:03
  Speaker: they were like a SWAT team.
• 39:04
  Speaker: They could serve incredibly quickly, incredibly accurately, and still make people feel they were being taken care of by somebody who really cared about them.
• 39:12
  Speaker: You know, it was the nth degree of, of quality service.
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: You know, I know the Harvey's did this for multiple generations, but I hope never to do that to my children.
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: When we come back, I want to talk with you about some of the innovation and innovations in service.
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: I was amazed to read in this book because they're things we use today in our fine dining restaurant.
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: and we'll also talk about what, what happened to the Harvey Empire and how it sort of fell off the radar and out of existence.
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: We're talking with Stephen Freed.
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: His book is Appetite for America.
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: It's about Fred Harvey's, railroad hospitality empire that civilized the wild west.
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: You're listening to the Restaurant guys We were talking before the break, Stephen, about, service the how quick and how accurate and how wonderful the service was in these restaurants.
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: And in reading the employee manuals and reading what's expected of these women, the service is tremendous and there are tricks that they use that I didn't learn until I, you know, we opened our own restaurant here, 17 years ago in New Brunswick.
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: Things like, where the cup is placed would signal to the server.
• 40:11
  Speaker 3: one server would place the cup a certain way and they would know what the drink order was based on where it was.
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: We call those things in the current restaurant business, we call them, tells there are tells at the table.
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: So you may not realize this when you go out to find dining, but you know, if the special card is on the table, you have been SpecialEd if the water glass has been removed, it's a different kind of water And this is all designed to be largely invisible to the fine dining guest.
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: And it's kind of fun actually to wait on a table and have them think, how did they know that I keep getting sparkling water and my husband wants still.
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: Um, but here I am thinking, you know, this is an innovation of the, of the 20th century.
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: And, the Harvey girls were doing this in 1890.
• 40:47
  Speaker: Oh yeah, they were doing it earlier than that.
• 40:49
  Speaker: I mean, you know, what happened was, again, you're talking about a chain of restaurants that are so far from each other that you can't really be looking at.
• 40:55
  Speaker: I mean, even though Fred would go take the trains and really lurk, he would hop off the trains before people got off them and sort of go in the restaurant.
• 41:02
  Speaker: And if he found something broke, you know, chipped or imperfect, he would like throw the table up in the air, make them do the whole thing over so that everything would be perfect.
• 41:09
  Speaker: So they did a little bit of, sort of terrorizing the staff because they couldn't always be there.
• 41:13
  Speaker: But the codes came into place very quickly.
• 41:15
  Speaker: Again, influenced, I think, by the army and by the railroads because that's the way that they manage their employees, to give them systems for everything that save time.
• 41:25
  Speaker: And, you know, the, the Harvey girls were the only waitresses and the only servers in America who had to do fine dining service in a hurry.
• 41:32
  Speaker: So the idea was how could you get extra seconds out of this?
• 41:35
  Speaker: So the Cup Code is the best known of these because, you know, people would talk about it over the years and they could see it.
• 41:41
  Speaker: And, you know, they had cup codes not only for whether you wanted coffee, tea, there were different positions of the cup handle in terms of different kinds of tea you want, whether you wanted milk and, uh, because they, they had to serve, you know, three, four courses really fast.
• 41:55
  Speaker: And, you know, this was stuff where you couldn't even, and they couldn't do things in advance.
• 41:59
  Speaker: I mean, if you, if the, if a chef was found with pres squeezed orange juice in his refrigerator, he was fired because every glass of orange juice had to, beque had to be squeezed, right?
• 42:09
  Speaker: Then.
• 42:09
  Speaker: That's the idea was I have no
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: problem with that whatsoever.
• 42:11
  Speaker: Freshness.
• 42:12
  Speaker: And, uh, so it was, they were very demanding and the customers knew they were very demanding.
• 42:18
  Speaker: And you know, I think also it's easier for the staff if they know there's a system for everything.
• 42:23
  Speaker: And that somebody else has thought about this too.
• 42:25
  Speaker: So the fact that they were given this training, if they understood that it worked and that it had been working for years, uh, helped.
• 42:31
  Speaker: But it was very demanding that when the women were done, believe me, they were very tired.
• 42:35
  Speaker: although they even had rules for what they had to do when there was nobody in the restaurant, because of course all the silver had to be polished all the time.
• 42:41
  Speaker: The coffee urns had to be polished, the coffee had to be changed, and they changed coffee more than anybody did in the west and the West.
• 42:48
  Speaker: If you drank coffee that was made that day, you were really lucky at the Harvey places they dumped out coffee the way you would expect to see at Starbucks today.
• 42:55
  Speaker: Uh, and in fact, you know, if you look at Starbucks baristas, the way they work, when things are really busy at a really good Starbucks,
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: right,
• 43:01
  Speaker: it's a fairly good indication of what it was like.
• 43:03
  Speaker: For Harvey Girls, because I must say when I go to Starbucks and I look at their systems for the baristas, a lot of the things remind me of the things that Fred had the Harvey girls do and what he had his managers doing.
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: Well when he had you talk about how he had limitations on coffee and how long coffee could be in the pot before they had to throw it out and start again.
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: And it's interesting how they make coffee'cause they sort of did a drip version of coffee in their coffee errands, but they would run it through twice, which is somewhere between percolating and dripping.
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: That's kind of interesting to me, uh, and I'm sure to very few other people in the world, so I apologize to all of you listening.
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: Um, but, but, there, there was a time where they would throw it out and, you know, at seven 11 for 20 years, they would just leave it on there until it actually solidified under the bottom of the pot.
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: And only in the last 10 do they have a, do they have a time limit?
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: And McDonald's introduced a time limit on coffee yet Fred Harvey was doing this in 1890.
• 43:51
  Speaker: No, they were very clear on that.
• 43:52
  Speaker: And part of the reason for the coffee was, I mean, coffee was so important in the West, and I must say one of the first things that people commented on when Fred Harvey restaurants came into town was how much better the coffee was.
• 44:01
  Speaker: Also, you know, Fred was personally friendly with Chase and Sandborn.
• 44:05
  Speaker: partners in Boston who had one of the first big coffee companies and who made special coffee only for the Fred Harvey chain.
• 44:12
  Speaker: I've actually found correspondence in the, uh, between the, the Chases and the Harvey's.
• 44:16
  Speaker: Uh, in several of several generations.
• 44:19
  Speaker: So he understood that especially in the West, having the best coffee was gonna be his entree, and in fact, having the best breakfasts because that was really what a huge part of, you know, sort of western and cowboy life was about.
• 44:31
  Speaker: So even though they served, you know, excellent meals at all meals, their coffees and their breakfast, I think honestly were the first thing that people noticed, just like vastly changed everything that they had thought of in terms of what food could be.
• 44:43
  Speaker: Um, because most of'em had never seen steak that wasn't cooked all the way through, so you wouldn't be killed.
• 44:49
  Speaker: the comment that was made when they first started serving raw steaks at Fred Harvey restaurants, you know, a cowboy might be apal, but it's a good line.
• 44:55
  Speaker: He said, you know, you know, I've seen critters, get up and walk away, who that were less dead than that.
• 45:01
  Speaker: Um, so that, you know, they really brought this to the west.
• 45:03
  Speaker: But yeah, the coffee was a huge thing and they were incredibly, sticklers about it.
• 45:07
  Speaker: And also the urns, which were huge and very much part of the image of the restaurant.
• 45:11
  Speaker: So the waitresses, you know, buffed those things to perfection and just, and threw out a lot of coffee.
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: So Steven, we've made some parallels with Danny Meyer and, and Danny Meyer's, a very soft spoken gentleman who has systems in place and who does amazing things.
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: And I think a lot of the re the, the model of a good manager, a good restaurant owner, way to make restaurants happen today is a fairly soft spoken person.
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: The day of the temper tantrum is, except for Gordon Ramsey has sort of left to the contemporary kitchen.
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: Uh, yet you, you relate in your book that, that, uh, when Fred Harvey would show up if some things were wrong, he was known to throw people out the door and the equipment after them.
• 45:48
  Speaker: Yes,
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: he has a hot tempered sort of a fell.
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: He
• 45:50
  Speaker: could be hot tempered.
• 45:51
  Speaker: And I will say that, you know, keep in mind the Fred Harvey company existed for a long time and it went through several eras.
• 45:58
  Speaker: Certainly the early era in the west, especially in New Mexico, which was really was cowboy country.
• 46:03
  Speaker: Fred threw a lot of stuff out the door.
• 46:06
  Speaker 3: any people,
• 46:06
  Speaker: you're also dealing with a time where it was not uncommon for people to come into the restaurant and put a gun to the head of the manager and tell him to make him breakfast.
• 46:14
  Speaker: So it was a little different time.
• 46:16
  Speaker: You know, you're talking about a restaurant, a place.
• 46:17
  Speaker: They had a restaurant in Dodge City.
• 46:19
  Speaker: So some of these places are a little bit more inhospitable.
• 46:22
  Speaker: And Fred wasn't the only person involved in a little bit of over the top behavior.
• 46:26
  Speaker: in the later years and, and we're talking about after the first 10 or 15 years, they didn't have to manage that way.
• 46:33
  Speaker: And a lot of those stories I think probably were retold so they didn't have to do that anymore.
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: Right, exactly.
• 46:38
  Speaker: You know,'cause retelling the story among waitresses is actually easier than knocking over all those tables and paying for all that broken glassware.
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: Perception is reality.
• 46:46
  Speaker: Exactly.
• 46:47
  Speaker: But in the early years of Fred, they would tell those stories.
• 46:50
  Speaker: And in fact we found the original newspaper stories where a lot of those things would happen.
• 46:55
  Speaker: And most of it, you know, when Fred was just in Kansas, it was a little more tame when the country connected to, to New Mexico.
• 47:01
  Speaker: New Mexico was a very rough place.
• 47:03
  Speaker: That's where they invented the Harvey girls.
• 47:05
  Speaker: And that's where Fred did probably some of the most extreme behavior.
• 47:09
  Speaker: And it was covered in the newspapers, honestly, because the local restaurants that were having a hard time competing with Fred because he could bring in fresh ingredients for free on the railroads, hated him.
• 47:19
  Speaker: And so they would plant stories in the paper about how outta control he was, because they felt that Fred Harvey was an outsider coming into their towns offering better food than them, and they didn't like that.
• 47:31
  Speaker: So it was very competitive.
• 47:33
  Speaker: And once they had their chain in place, it ran without so many, you know, random acts of, culinary violence.
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: It, it takes a very special kind of person.
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: to be very, very hospitable to your customer, Yet on the other side, you know, you wanna be hospitable to your staff as well, but draconian in your standards.
• 47:50
  Speaker: Mm-hmm.
• 47:50
  Speaker: Fred was beloved by his staff.
• 47:52
  Speaker: I mean, they, when, when he came in and did this, it's because someone had done something really wrong.
• 47:56
  Speaker: At the same time.
• 47:57
  Speaker: You're talking about a company that took amazing care of its employees.
• 48:01
  Speaker: the employees of Fred Harvey Company knew they did a good job.
• 48:03
  Speaker: They could work there as long as they wanted.
• 48:05
  Speaker: If they needed to move to another place, Fred Harvey would get them a job.
• 48:08
  Speaker: This was a big system that took care of its employees.
• 48:11
  Speaker: So people loved working for the Harvey's, even though it was hard work and Fred was not seen mostly as an insane boss.
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: I think that's exactly the point Francis was making earlier in that, you know, you have all these standards and you can be very hard on your staff.
• 48:26
  Speaker 2: But still make it a great place to work and make it a, a great place to be and, have the staff be happy to work in, in that type of atmosphere.
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: As long as, as long as their standards are as high as yours.
• 48:37
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 48:37
  Speaker: And, you know, look, there, there are plenty of living Harvey girls from the later years of the Fred Harvey Company.
• 48:41
  Speaker: they talk about this like it was the most amazing time of their lives.
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: Well now to talk about the end of the Fred Harvey Empire.
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: Many generations down the road, you talked about how they were sort of in on the ground floor of the changing in transportation.
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: they were in the airlines.
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: They were in the, in the beginning of air travel.
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: They were in on the highways as many of the highways tracked, the railroads and the foundations were laid to make the jump into modern transportation.
• 49:06
  Speaker 3: Yet the Fred Harvey Company never did quite make that.
• 49:09
  Speaker 3: And, and they were displaced, uh, along the highways, at least by Howard Johnson.
• 49:13
  Speaker 3: And what happened?
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: Was it just that the later generation didn't pick up the mantle where those foundations were laid and, moved the company into the 20th century?
• 49:21
  Speaker: Well, the story is mostly told about Fred Harvey, that the changes all came because of the depression and because of the changes in the railroads.
• 49:28
  Speaker: And those certainly were issues.
• 49:29
  Speaker: But as I looked more deeply into this, and this really is partly a family drama as all family owned businesses are.
• 49:35
  Speaker: Um, and you know, to me what finally happened is something much more dramatic, which is that Fred Harvey's grandson, Freddy.
• 49:42
  Speaker: Who was taking over the business and was gonna be the next great leader of the business was also a very much a daredevil World War I pilot.
• 49:49
  Speaker: As he became more and more of an executive, his, uh, employees and other executives begged him to stop flying.
• 49:55
  Speaker: Uh, but he loved flying.
• 49:56
  Speaker: He loved aviation.
• 49:57
  Speaker: He thought that was the future.
• 49:59
  Speaker: And he was, as you said, a partner in the original TWA with Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford and all these sort of big players.
• 50:05
  Speaker: And unfortunately, Freddy crashed his plane.
• 50:08
  Speaker: he and his wife died in a plane crash, very similar to the one that took JFK Jr.
• 50:13
  Speaker: And the Truth.
• 50:14
  Speaker: The company as a family business never recovered from that plane crash.
• 50:17
  Speaker 3: There was no error apparent.
• 50:19
  Speaker: Well, the only other person who was in line to get the family was Freddy's Sister Kitty.
• 50:24
  Speaker: and she was told that she could not own the company because she was a woman.
• 50:28
  Speaker: ironic since this was a company that had, that offered great advantage, not only to waitresses, it had some of the first female executives, very famous female architect, Mary Coulter, uh, who designed many of the southwestern buildings at the Grand Canyon and other places.
• 50:40
  Speaker: but when Kitty Harvey inherited the whole business, she was told because she was a woman, she couldn't be in charge.
• 50:46
  Speaker 3: Was that a matter of law or a matter of will, or it
• 50:48
  Speaker: was a matter of family arm twisting and a lot of things that happened after Kitty lost her brother.
• 50:54
  Speaker: Uh, there was actually a legal challenge to their state by the brother's wife whose family claimed that he had died in the crash a minute earlier than her.
• 51:03
  Speaker: And during the crash, his estate had gone to, his wife and his wife's family wanted the money.
• 51:08
  Speaker: So it was a very difficult time After Freddie died, uh, all of which was pieced together for the first time in the book, most people in the Harvey family didn't know about it.
• 51:16
  Speaker: And after that, the company was sold to one of the younger brothers of Ford.
• 51:22
  Speaker: Uh, who moved it to Chicago and it became a much more regular, less exceptional company after that.
• 51:27
  Speaker: And it had it's, hey, another quick heyday in the World War ii because they were, they reopened a lot of the Harvey restaurants to serve the troops during World War ii.
• 51:36
  Speaker: And then of course, I mean, have you ever seen the Harvey Girls movie with Judy Garland?
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 51:40
  Speaker: So that movie was made in 1946.
• 51:42
  Speaker: That was one of the biggest movies in the American movie history at that time.
• 51:46
  Speaker: And that was, uh, sort of the, the farewell to the Fred Harvey Company as a huge company that made a big impact in lots of cities.
• 51:54
  Speaker: After that movie came out and the war was over, what the Fred Harvey Company was, for most people was the place they ate at in their big union stations and that, and who took care of them at the Grand Canyon in Santa Fe.
• 52:05
  Speaker: And all the many restaurants along the way were gone.
• 52:07
  Speaker: There were still dining cars, but even dining cars became less important, and the company simply did not jump into the business that Howard Johnson and Marriott and Hilton all got.
• 52:18
  Speaker: A business that Fred Harvey had invented.
• 52:20
  Speaker: but in fact they did not then borrow the money franchise and do all the things that were required in the next stage of the food business, in order to become a, a chain in, the post World War II era.
• 52:32
  Speaker 3: Well, Steven, it's an amazing book.
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: The story is a Story of America as much as it is a story of restaurants and a business and a family.
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: And it's, uh, rivetingly written and thanks for coming on our show to talk about it with us.
• 52:42
  Speaker: Thanks so much for having me on.
• 52:43
  Speaker: It was great talking to you guys.
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: Thanks Steven.
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: Well done.
• 52:46
  Speaker 3: The book is Appetite for America.
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey built a railroad hospitality empire that civilized the Wild West.
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: Its author Stephen Free talked to us today from his home in Philadelphia.
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: We'll be back in just a moment.
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: You're listening to the Restaurant guys
• 52:59
  What a book.
• 53:00
  That's a great book.
• 53:01
  What a guy.
• 53:01
  Steven, Steven was talking earlier in the, in the show about the Cup Code
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: that Harvey Girls had in order to decide what was gonna go in your cup and, yeah.
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: And exactly which beverage and mm-hmm.
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: Uh, how you liked it.
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: There are lots of things that have come from that.
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: we all do that in the restaurant business.
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: We all mark the table.
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: You know, Francis talked about the table tells, but one of my favorite ones ever was a guy who was on the show, Patrick O'Connell, how he marked, you know, we all marked the table.
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: But Patrick actually marked his customers.
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah,
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: yeah.
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: That's great.
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: Which I thought was really, really interesting.
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: When you, when you would go to dinner, he would give you a bouton inne.
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: And based on the color and the type of flower on the rinne that would tell the dining room how many nights you had stayed, thereby telling you what you had eaten before to make sure that there was nothing repeated to you.
• 53:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 53:50
  Speaker 3: And there were all sorts of things that he did to mark the customers and, the, key to all of this is it's not just efficiency, it's that it's the beginning of restaurant and magic.
• 53:58
  Speaker 3: And I think that maybe in the, in the Fred Harvey, era, the tells were fairly obvious is they would like turn the cup upside down for tea and put it on its side for decaf and turn it on the left side for orange juice.
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: And so that was,
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: take
• 54:09
  a
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: little chip out if you wanted apple juice,
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: but.
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: part of what we do now is to do that sort of, to enhance the experience.
• 54:16
  Speaker 3: It's that I don't wanna bug you with having to right to worry about how we are gonna figure out what's going on
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: or have six people ask you the same question.
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: Oh God, I hate that.
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: You know when you go to a restaurant and you walk in the door and somebody comes and says, hi, how are you?
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: And you a reservation?
• 54:28
  Speaker 3: And you say, yeah, it's the Francis party.
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: Oh, Francis party.
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: Nice to see you.
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: And then somebody else walks up and says, hi, how are you?
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: Do you have a reservation?
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: I say, yes, it's the Francis Party.
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: one of the things that good restaurants do is they, the greet someone, say hello, but don't ask them a question unless you have a way to communicate the answer to everyone else.
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: Everyone else,
• 54:43
  Speaker 2: right.
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: So that we don't ask the same question again and again,
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: unless you got a bout Inne in your hand.
• 54:47
  Speaker 3: Well, what he does is he has a er to tell when you've been there.
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: And also the great thing that Patrick O'Connell does is
• 54:52
  Speaker 2: he owns a place, by the way, called the Unit, little Washington
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: Fabulous
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: restaurant just outside of dc,
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: one of the best restaurants in America, and also an inn where you can stay.
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: each employee with all of their interactions with a guest, whether it's the receptionist, whether it's the porter, whether it's the, in the dining room, they rate the customer on a, on a happiness scale of one to 10.
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: And, and so when
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: you arrive and when you leave
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: and each interaction in between when the.
• 55:15
  Speaker 3: Hostess or the, um, receptionist greets you at the door.
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: By the time you get to the waiter, the waiter knows that you are a four,
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: right?
• 55:23
  Speaker 3: And, and their goal is to get you up to a five or six, and they'll track you through the course of the evening, all invisible to you.
• 55:29
  Speaker 3: And I think that's just fabulous.
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: But look, we have the roots here in, in an American restaur.
• 55:33
  Speaker 3: And the other thing that I found was really striking about this book and about this story is when we think of the great restaurants and what was contributed to restaurants in the world, we think about European restaurants that were then copied in America.
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: This is America's contribution to restaurants and it's significant.
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: And these, these.
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: Um, methods are copied throughout the world
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: and it changed the world and for the better.
• 55:55
  Speaker 8: You know, a lot of thing...
• 55:56
  Speaker 8: a lot of times people talk about American restaurants changing the world for the worse, and, and Francis and I are two of those people who sometimes talk about that.
• 56:02
  Speaker 8: But this, this certainly a, family that changed American restaurants for the better.
• 56:05
  Speaker 7: Unbelievable.
• 56:06
  Speaker 7: Well, uh, you can find the book on our website, restaurantguysradio.com.
• 56:09
  Speaker 7: I hope you've enjoyed this hour half as much as we have.
• 56:12
  Speaker 7: I'm Francis Schacht.
• 56:13
  Speaker 8: And I'm Mark Falco.
• 56:14
  Speaker 7: We are the Restaurant Guys on WCTCAM and restaurantguysradio.com.