The Laurel

New York City, 
1903-04

The Laurel was one of only a few vegetarian restaurants in New York at the turn of the last century. Technically, it was a lacto-ovo vegetarian restaurant in that it served dairy products and egg dishes. A menu from 1903 offers a wide selection of dishes, along with health tips, nutritional advice, and quotes from the Bible and the poet Oliver Goldsmith. This à la carte menu, and a banquet menu from the following year, mark the reemergence of vegetarianism in the United States after a hiatus of fifty years.

The Laurel was patronized by Seventh-day Adventists, many of whom were vegetarians.1 The proprietor, E. W. Coates, was a church member who closed his restaurant at 3 PM on Friday and reopened on Sunday morning in accordance with their religious practice to keep the Sabbath from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday.2

While vegetarianism has roots going back to antiquity, it attracted a small following in western countries in the mid-nineteenth century. The American Vegetarian Society was founded in 1850, only a few years after the word vegetarian was coined. When the Society established a chapter in New York in 1852, it planned to hold a “festival dinner” at the Chinese Assembly Rooms at 539 Broadway, as shown by this admission ticket.3

After the tickets were distributed, the dinner in 1852 was cancelled and replaced by a meeting of speeches that the organizers promised would be a “feast of reason.”4 Such pronouncements invited ridicule by the newspapermen who relished the opportunity to mock the vegetarians. The New York Times reported that the philosophical repast “was not as inviting as the pumpkin pies, melons, peaches, pears, grapes and apples that were first offered, if we may judge by the scant attendance." Indeed, only fifty people attended. When editor Horace Greeley hosted the dinner the following year, it attracted about 300 antebellum reformers, such as the socialists, abolitionists, free lovers, and temperance advocates. Two-thirds of the attendees were women, including the suffragettes Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Amelia Bloomer.

The dinner in 1853 featured tomato and rice soup, Graham bread, fruited bread, mixed-fruit cake, wheat cakes, corn blanc mange, apple biscuits, molded rice, molded farina, and wheat grits. There were only two vegetables—baked sweet potatoes and stewed squash with cream. The desserts included pumpkin pie, baked apples, coconut custard, and ice cream. Although the banquet appears to have been successful, it marked the end of the so-called “first wave” of vegetarianism in the United States. The movement went into hibernation and would not reawaken until the end of the nineteenth century.5

By the time the Vegetarian Society held its dinner at the Laurel in 1904, such events were no longer considered newsworthy; the novelty had worn off. None of the dishes on the banquet menu below appear on the à la carte menu of the previous year. Still, many of the dishes were similar in that they were based on protose and nuttolene, the canned meat substitutes produced by Kellogg’s Sanitas Nut Food Company in Battle Creek, Michigan. Protose comprised peanuts and wheat gluten; nuttolene, which appears on this banquet menu in the form of cutlets, was a baked peanut pâté that was sliced for cooking. Nut chowder, the first course at this banquet, could be made with either of these “vegetable meats.” The other ingredients included chopped hard-boiled eggs, strained tomatoes, sautéed onions, thyme, sage, and bay leaves.6

In 1904, people adopted a plant-based diet based on their religious beliefs, health issues, or opposition to the killing of animals, a sentiment reflected by Goldsmith’s poem. Today, the reasons for vegetarianism have expanded to include ethical concerns related to the mass consumption of meat, such as the treatment of animals in factory farms, environmental damage, and the exacerbation of world hunger.


Notes
1. Christian author Ellen G. White (1827-1915) summarized the pro-grain, anti-meat beliefs of the church, writing that “grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our Creator.” She also believed that “a religious life can be more successfully gained and maintained if meat is discarded, for this diet stimulates into intense activity lustful propensities, and enfeebles the moral and spiritual nature.”

2. E. W. Coates operated a small heath food store before opening the Laurel on August 27, 1902. The Seventh-day Adventists regarded it as their second vegetarian restaurant in New York City. (The first was Health Restaurant at 391 Sixth Avenue.) “Another Vegetarian Restaurant,” The Bible Training School (Vol.01-04) 63.

3. In 1859, the old Chinese Assembly Rooms, situated on lower Broadway near Spring Street, were converted into a concert saloon named the Melodeon. Featuring “pretty waiter girls,” watered-down drinks, and dancing, the Melodeon is often cited as one of the first nightclubs.

4. New York Times, 16 September 1852.
5. Karen Iacobbo, Vegetarian America: A History, 2004.
6. Edward Fulton, Substitutes for Flesh Foods: Vegetarian Cook Book, 1904.