Hot-House Tomatoes

Holland House
New York City, 1897

Today the Café Au Bon Goût, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 30th Street, has an enormous International buffet that is open 24/7. If you step inside and look up, you will see a beautifully molded ceiling. Although you would never guess from its general appearance, the buffet is situated in the old dining room of the Holland House, one of New York’s grandest hotels when it opened in 1891.

Modeled after the celebrated Lords Holland’s mansion in London, the ten-story building was built of white Indiana limestone in the Italian Renaissance style. Now containing offices, it was then well positioned in the most stylish part of Fifth Avenue—the dozen-block stretch of elegant shops and restaurants that catered to the wealthy. It soon became known for its aristocratic tone.1

The Holland House was developed by two restaurateurs in Chicago who owned Kinsley’s, the best restaurant in the Windy City. One of the partners, Swiss-born Gustav Baumann, moved to New York to be the proprietor of the new establishment. Not surprisingly, there was careful attention to the design of the dining rooms and food service.

The main dining room, decorated in Louis Quinz, a French Rococo style also known as Louis XV, was as luxurious as the dining room of  New York’s Imperial Hotel. The New York Times reported, “The ceiling, in salmon tints and gold, is supported by a row of handsome columns. Electric lights are everywhere, borne by polished brass brackets. In spite of its size—125 by 50 feet—the dining hall seems delightfully cozy.”²

The café, near the reading room with its massive leather chairs, featured a distinctive row of columns with relief designs made of papier-mâché.

The Gilt Room, an exact reproduction of a famous room in the London mansion, was used for banquets and other social functions. The room was wainscoted with panels displaying the elaborate heraldic devices of the Earls of Holland.

Regarded as “one of the marvels of the establishment,” the wine vault touted cases of Chateau Lafite 1870, reportedly an exquisite vintage from the premier wine estate in the Médoc.³

The Holland House was not immune to the labor strife of the era. In the upstairs-downstairs world of the late nineteenth century, long hours and low pay were aggravated by fines routinely leveled by hotels on their employees. In April 1893, the newly-formed International Hotel and Employees’ Society of New York decided to strike its first blow at the Holland House. Forty waiters “flung down their napkins and deserted their posts” just before dinner on Saturday night. Three of the men who walked out, later discharged presumably for speaking out, said that their wages of 83 cents a day were eaten up by fines for trivial offenses. The penalty for being five minutes late was 25 cents, and 50 cents for talking together during a lull in the service.4

The Waldorf Hotel, which opened at 33rd Street only the month before, also had problems with the new union. A waiter there could be fined a quarter for leaving a horseradish dish on the table for more than five minutes. While it was true that waiters earned tips, the men explained that many of them devoted their time to “answering bells,” a service for which there was no gratuity.

Hotel employees also complained about the cost of buying their uniforms. The uniforms at the Holland House were generally dark blue and, although commended for their “extreme simplicity,” they cost the equivalent of about three weeks’ wages. The elevator operators and hall boys wore electric blue with red and white cord trimmings while the carriage men wore full English livery.

In the end, Gustav Baumann responded to the union by offering waiters two dollars a day, throwing in an added concession that there would be “no restrictions as to whiskers” (another issue).

The Holland House operated on the European plan, in which meals were not included in the cost of the room.5 The daily menus were printed in English on one side and French on the other, a common practice at luxury establishments at the time. This offered the benefit of being pretentious without the inconvenience, or  possible embarrassment, of struggling with the “kitchen French,” as it was then called. Despite the French,  the dishes on the menu reflect the English-oriented fare served at most upper-class hotels.

Prices on the a la carte supper menu below are about a third higher than those charged at somewhat lesser hotels. Dated July 1, 1897, the menu offered salads of Hot-house Tomatoes or Hot-house Cucumbers for fifty cents, twice as much as they would cost a few weeks later when local produce had ripened in the fields. Despite these luxuries, and a few others such as the Strasbourg Fat Goose Liver with Truffles and Reed Birds, each costing one dollar, the menu reflected the standard fare of the era. It was mainly the high prices that differentiated this menu from others.

 

Later in 1897, the 17-story Astoria Hotel opened at 34th Street, making it the third new hotel along the stylish half-mile stretch of Fifth Avenue. It was soon connected to the 13-story Waldorf Hotel next door, becoming the Waldorf-Astoria, the largest hotel in the world. The social elite of the city, a group whose numbers were beginning to expand, used its forty public rooms for various functions such as having afternoon tea, which came into vogue there. As shown on the menu below, tea was served in the crystalline Palm Garden, a large room ornamented with tropical foliage. While the Waldorf-Astoria eclipsed the Holland House in some respects, together they were for the moment the most fashionable hotels of fin de siècle New York.

Notes
1. King’s Handbook of New York City (1892)
2. It should be noted that the ceiling is now painted white. New York Times, 6 December 1891.
3. The wine estate, awarded First Growth status in the classification of 1855, is located near the village of Pauillac in the Médoc region, northwest of Bordeaux, France. It was purchased by Baron James Mayer Rothschild in 1868, three months before his death. It became the joint property of his three sons and was eventually renamed Château Lafite Rothschild.
4. The union claimed to have 800 members, out of an estimated 3,000 hotel waiters working in New York City at the time. New York Times, 17 April 1893.
5. The cost of a room was two dollars a day, and up, when the hotel opened in 1891. Holland House, promotional brochure (1892).