The Café Martin

New York City
1901-1913

By the end of the nineteenth century, the area around Madison Square Park was losing some of its luster. After being the center of New York’s social scene for nearly twenty-five years, some of its leading hotels and restaurants were beginning to close. Most notably, Delmonico’s did what it always did when faced with this situation; it shuttered its doors and followed society uptown. It had moved there in 1876, after closing its renowned restaurant at Union Square, and now it moved again, this time to Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. Despite these departures, Madison Square was still a stylish part of town, prompting French-born brothers Jean and Louis Martin to take over the lease on Delmonico’s old location on 26th Street, well-situated between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. They refurbished the building, giving it the look of a Parisian restaurant, complete with the latest flourishes of Art Nouveau design, and named it the Café Martin.

Café Martin (1903)

Opening in February 1902, the Café Martin was a gathering spot for the beau monde, the fashionable elite that became known as “café society.” Today, it is regarded as one the most interesting restaurants of the era, as illustrated by this chronology of menus, expressing its spirit over the course of its ten-year history. Appearing in a variety of formats and styles, the menus show how the cuisine evolved, reflecting the changing tastes of the upper class and America’s rising influence in the world. However, when the era that spawned luxurious restaurants of this type eventually came to an end, it was driven by social forces that could not be forestalled, even by moving further uptown.

Banquet at the Café Martin (1904)

The Martins had operated the Restaurant Martin on University Place since 1883.1 Dated June 25, 1901, eight months before their move to Madison Square, the menu shown below lists the French specialties of the house on the front cover. Although their father ran a restaurant in Aix-les-Bains, there are only a few dishes on this menu like potatoes Savoyarde, originating from the Rhône-Alpes region of their native France.

The daily luncheon menu shown below appeared in May 1902, three months after the Café Martin opened. This bill of fare seems abbreviated compared to a similar menu from 1903 (illustrated in a previous posting.) At this juncture, the wine list was not yet printed on the back of the card.

This fixed price menu from 1902 expresses the Gallic spirit of its early years, as reflected by the cuisine, the illustration, and the address, shown here as “26me Rue et Broadway.”

Although the illustration on the large, after-theater supper menu from 1903 shown below reinforces the French theme, the catchphrase “ask for the keys to the cellar” now appears in English. There are sixty-nine Champagnes listed on the back. An important source of revenue and profit, Champagne was aggressively promoted an essential component of an elegant late-night supper and other celebrations. Reinforcing its importance, the amount of Champagne sold at the leading restaurants and hotels was routinely reported in the newspapers after major holidays. In fact, on some holidays like New Years Eve, restaurants often displayed “Champagne only” signs to insure its consumption. Everyone got a piece of the action, including the waiters who saved the corks, later receiving a kickback from the wine importers for each bottle that they popped.

Two small banquet menus, dated a week apart in January 1906, express the joyful exuberance of high society during “the aughts” of the twentieth century, a period marked by economic growth and prosperity. For luxury restaurants like the Café Martin, the times were particularly good, as the nation rebounded from the severe depression of the previous decade. In addition, New York was experiencing an infusion of wealth, as scores of newly-minted millionaires moved to the city from all over the country, eager to have fun after selling their factories to the recently-formed conglomerates which were then called trusts. The arrival of this new breed of nouveau riche set the tone at many of the new high-end restaurants, perhaps one of the factors that caused the cuisine at places like the Café Martin to become more anglicized over time.

No holiday went uncelebrated in Manhattan’s finest restaurants, as shown by these menus from Independence Day and Christmas in 1906. Continuing to use more English on its menus, the Café Martin gave the dishes on this July 4th bill of fare patriotic names like chicken gombo à la Dewey, aiguillette of cold salmon à la Washington, and sweetbreads en casse Roosevelt. Setting the price at $1.50, the restaurant always included spaghetti à la Italienne on its fixed price menus, a lost-cost dish listed as one of the two vegetable choices.

The fixed price menu below from 1906 features a comic postcard at the top, along with a notice stating: “Addressed postal cards handed to the Head Waiter, will be stamped and mailed without charge.” In fact, this card could only be addressed, for it was not until 1907 that the U.S. Postmaster General ruled that messages could be written on the back. As a result, printers added a vertical line, creating two separate areas, and almost immediately, daily menus with a detachable postcard came into vogue at hotels and restaurants across the country. Always at the leading edge of fashion, the Café Martin employed this format for one of its menu a year before the fad.

One of the dishes on the charmingly-illustrated menu below from 1906 is pêche Melba, a dessert first created by French chef Auguste Escoffier in honor of Nellie Melba, the Australian operatic soprano who was the most famous diva in the world. The inclusion of an expensive dessert named after a star performer was often a sign that she had recently been in the news. In this case, Melba announced a few days earlier that she was coming to New York to perform at impresario Oscar Hammerstein’s new Manhattan Opera House.2  However, it is the diversity of cuisines that makes this luncheon menu fascinating.

The daily bill of fare comprises the usual French, English, and American dishes, along with a few Germanic foods like herring, pig’s knuckle, and Westphalian ham, but it is the French, Russian, Oriental, and Spanish “specialties” shown on other side that puts this menu in a class by itself. At the time, the United States was emerging as an economic and cultural world power, and as a result, Americans were trying out an ever-widening variety of foreign foods when dining out. The new cosmopolitanism revealed a certain pride in the nation’s growing prestige, but there was also a sense of adventure about it, as members of the middle- and upper-classes ventured to the small ethnic eateries situated in other parts of town. This social trend was no more in evidence than in New York City with its unmatched range of cuisines. However, it is simply remarkable that the Café Martin, a large French restaurant employing 450 people, embraced this form of American cultural expression.

The three scans shown below provide a more detailed look at this “rosetta stone” of culinary cosmopolitanism; all that seems to be missing are the Chinese chop suey dishes that were then rising in popularity. This complex matrix of ethnic dishes shows all of the daily specials for the week; accordingly, the specials for that day also appeared on the front as part of the daily menu, sometimes accompanied by a brief description. It is interesting that French is included in this group of ethnic foods. Although there was a similar scheme of soups and daily luncheon specials on the cover of the menu from the Restaurant Martin in 1901, the context was now different—French is positioned here as only one of many cuisines.

Some of the Russian and Polish dishes reflect a culinary bond between France and Russia going back to the eighteenth century. However, there were other reasons why these dishes may have found their way onto a menu in New York in 1906. At the time, immigration was peaking at record levels, driven in part by the anti-Semitic violence of the Russian pogroms. During the first decade of the twentieth century, more than a million and half people came to the United States from the Russian Empire, many of whom were Jews fleeing religious and political persecution.

The accompaniments listed under Cuisine Russe include zakouski (marinated herring), selodka pa Rouski (raw fish preserved in salt water), and caviar d’Astrakhan, along with a good selection of alcoholic beverages imported by P. A. Smirnoff of Moscow. Below is a brief description of the luncheon and dinner dishes.

Luncheon

• Schaschlik Tatarski – marinated beef on skewers
• Zrazi Moujika – Polish-style beef roulade
• Kotletka Swiniowaïa po Kourlandski – minced pork cutlet, Courland-style, named after the duchy in the Baltic region that now comprises Estonia and Latvia
• Escalops Teliacia po Moskowski – escallops of veal, Moscow-style
• Gaviadina Stroganoff – sautéed pieces of beef served with sour cream. Also known as Beef Stroganoff, this dish was developed during the so-called Franco-Russian period in Russian cooking during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Iasike Voloviè Menschikoff – sliced beef tongue served with small onions and pickles
• Bitokpa Rouski – Russian-style meatballs

Dinner

• Kourytsa Demidoff – stuffed chicken named after Prince Anatole Demidoff, a flamboyant Russian emigre who lived in Paris during the mid-nineteenth century
• Tzesarska pa Rouski – possibly a Russian-style beef stew, perhaps related to Czarina, a Franco-Russian beef soup flavored with fennel, and garnished with diced vegetables.
• Tsplionock po Polski – young chicken, Polish-style
• Telatsche Groudinka – veal breast braised with vegetables
• Filets of Bass po Polski – fillets of bass, Polish-style
• Kotletka Pojerskaya – minced veal cutlet, named after Pojarski, a cook and innkeeper said to have been favored by tzar Nicholas I.
• Schaschlicks Tatarski – marinated beef on skewers

Listed under the “Orientale” heading, there are dishes with names related to Austria, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, and Iran; these are followed by a few Spanish dishes, seemingly added in the spirit of completeness. Although dishes like moussaka à la Persane and moussaka à la sultan were probably close to the same thing, it was beside the point, for this array of cuisines represented an ideal—only in America could you find the foods from so many nations on one menu.

The excellent wine list on the back of the lunch menu shown below from 1907 supports the notion that the culinary standards remained high. Nevertheless, the menu itself appears somewhat less dignified than similar ones from 1902 and 1903. Describing its location as being on Broadway (it was shown as Fifth Avenue on the previous menu), the restaurant marked the “ready dishes” with a conspicuous star, giving this menu the look of a quick lunch. Reinforcing that impression, notices run along both sides of the bill of fare, warning customers that the establishment was not responsible for losses or damage to clothing not checked. Such pronouncements were inspired by the lucrative coat checking concession, a service that the Café Martin farmed out for $2,000 a year, a large sum at the time, but significantly less than the fee charged by some of the big “lobster palaces” on Times Square; the fees for the concessions at Murray’s and Rector’s were $4,000 and $6,000, respectively.

Perhaps this 1907 menu was simply a reflection of the changing times. On December 30th of that year, the New York Times reported that Jean Martin, proprietor of the “eminently respectable” Café Martin, was giving the women of New York a holiday gift that would be a milestone in restaurant history. “On New Year’s Eve, ‘all ladies’ may smoke cigarettes in any of the rooms of the restaurant,” Martin was quoted as saying, “and the privilege may become permanent if all goes well.” Rector’s quickly followed suit. In fact, the waiters had been looking the other way for years, having found it increasingly difficult to keep rich socialites from doing what they wanted. The new social customs were related to the universal change in human character that writer Virginia Woolf described as having occurred “on or about December 1910,” the only difference being that such things often happened first at these avant-garde establishments, well ahead of everybody else.3

Madison Square at Night (1907)

In 1909, New York hosted an elaborate commemoration, simultaneously celebrating two historic events—the three hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River and the hundredth anniversary of Robert Fulton’s paddle steamer. The city’s hotels and restaurants were an integral part of the two-week celebration, as evidenced by Café Martin’s ten-page souvenir booklet, containing information about the maritime achievements of Hudson and Fulton, whose discoveries founded the city and shaped its fortunes. The booklet also included the following music program and fixed price menu (now up to $2.00) for September 30th, called Military Parade Day on the list of activities.

The most memorable event of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration occurred on the previous day, when inventor Wilbur Wright flew over New York Harbor in his Model A Flyer, much to the amazement of nearly a million people who came out to see their first airplane flight. During the five-minute demonstration, Wright flew straight over the ocean liner Lusitania toward the Statue of Liberty, where he rolled his plane so that he could circle the bronze icon before returning back to Governors Island. The sense of drama was heightened by the red canoe that Wright attached to the bottom of his biplane, just in case he landed in the water.

Even as it approached the end of its reign, the Café Martin advertised itself as “the leading French restaurant in America.” Among the various ducks on the menu below, there is one called a “celery-fed duckling,” representing an ill-fated attempt by farmers on Long Island to replicate the unique taste of the expensive Canvasbacks.4 However, it was not so much the quality and diversity of its French-American fare, as it was its chic style that made the restaurant so popular, always au courant with regard to the opera, theater, and other entertainments patronized by upper-class society. This large, elegant menu from Sunday, February 13, 1910 has a notice stating that the restaurant would be open all night on the coming Tuesday, accommodating the Metropolitan Ball at nearby Madison Square Garden.

One of the special desserts on this menu is an ice cream creation named after the interpretative dancer Maud Allan, three weeks after she made her first appearance in New York, performing before a standing-room-only audience in Carnegie Hall. Now the latest sensation, Allan had already achieved fame in Europe, primarily for a dance she called “A Vision of Salome.”5 Photographs of the dancer provide a hint of what the fuss was all about; years later, art critic Sir Herbert Read remarked, “Maud Allan was the Marilyn Monroe of my youth.”

Postscript
In 1910, Louis Martin left the Café Martin to manage the defunct Café de l’Opera, an ornate lobster palace on 42nd Street at Times Square that failed after only four months. Renaming it Louis Martin’s, he ran the enormous restaurant for three years before leaving to open another restaurant named after himself at Broadway and 60th Street, an entertainment district near Columbus Circle filled with vaudeville theaters and houses of prostitution. Dated November 22, 1913, the large menu shown below seems to hearken back to the bygone era of the Café Martin which had closed in May of the previous year, during a period of rapid change for the city’s high-end restaurants. One of the issues can be seen on this menu by the notice announcing “dancing every night,” something that was never done at the Café Martin. However, when dances like the Tango and the Apache (pronounced a-posh-shay) were introduced in New York, they quickly became the rage; high society was no longer interested in sitting still during dinner, listening to concert music. Although nobody realized it at the time, the new social scene was a prelude of the coming Jazz Age.

Louis Martin closed this little-known restaurant in the summer of 1914 and returned to France with his wife.6 He opened a restaurant outside Paris after the Great War but died soon after in 1921, just as Prohibition was taking hold in the United States, about to finish off the remainder of the great restaurants that once flourished in America.


Notes
1. The Restaurant Martin was situated in the Hotel Martin in the East Village. The Martin brothers sold the hotel to headwaiter Raymond Orteig who renamed it the Hotel Lafayette, becoming a renowned French restaurant in its own right.
2. Oscar Hammerstein built the Manhattan Opera House on West 34th Street in 1906 to compete with the established Metropolitan Opera. In 1910, the Metropolitan Opera paid Hammerstein $1.2 million to cease producing opera for ten years. He accepted the offer and sold the house to the Shubert brothers for vaudeville shows.
3. Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, (1924).
4. The flavor of duck meat is said to be particularly influenced by the bird’s diet. The most prized ducks in North American were the large migratory Canvasbacks hunted at the Susquehanna Flats, the twenty-five-thousand-acre water area near Havre de Grace, Maryland, that was once abundant with an aquatic plant commonly known by various names, including wild celery, water celery, eelgrass, and tapegrass. Attempting to replicate the unique taste of the wild Canvasbacks, some duck farmers on Long Island added celery seeds and chopped stalks and leaves to the feed a few weeks before sending the ducklings to market. Along the same lines, farmers in France then used ginger, wintergreen, and vanilla to affect the flavor of their ducks, following a practice that was never adopted in the United States. Poultry magazine, October 1904.
5. Maud Allan was deeply traumatized by the loss of her brother who was hanged at San Quentin in 1898 for the murder of two women. In 1900, she published an illustrated sex manual in Germany for women titled Illustriertes Konversations-Lexikon der Frau. Shortly thereafter, she began dancing professionally as a means of self-expression, utilizing her athleticism, musicality, and great imagination. By associating the execution of John the Baptist with that of her brother, Allan infused her dance of Salome with power and passion.
6. By 1915, the French-born restaurateur Andre Bustanoby owned a restaurant at Broadway and 60th Street, perhaps operating in the space previously occupied by Louis Martin. Andre Bustanoby began his career at the Restaurant Martin on University Place in 1895, before moving on to Delmonico’s, and eventually joining his brothers Louis and Jacques to open the Cafe des Beaux Arts on 40th Street, near Bryant Park. The Cafe des Beaux Arts closed during the first week of 1912.