tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post2456690515455568022..comments2024-02-13T17:04:02.351-05:00Comments on The American Menu: The Café MartinHenry Voigthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00318053634783305091noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-14784482768920896262023-08-25T15:49:29.906-04:002023-08-25T15:49:29.906-04:00I have a set of four luncheon dishes and four soup...I have a set of four luncheon dishes and four soup bowls from the original Café Martin from 1901 they are ironstone. They are decorated with green clover and in script café Martin. It says “Barth and sons New York” on the back. They were retailers in NYC of restaurant China. I was researching the history of café Martin, such great information here. Thank you!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-67182808001277995932022-12-09T13:46:22.879-05:002022-12-09T13:46:22.879-05:00Hello,
I am currently doing a research on the Fre...Hello,<br /><br />I am currently doing a research on the French association "les Allobroges de New York" that was created n 1901. The Nartin brothers were solid supporters of this association of people comimg from the french Alps and living in the US. After the martin brothers went back to France. I have no more information about this association. I am looking for a few pictures or menus of the Martin Cafe. If you could help. Thanks to contact me rigaud73@gmail.com Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01148269474668050911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-49487996043115422462022-04-10T09:36:41.763-04:002022-04-10T09:36:41.763-04:00Fantastic post. In 1910 Martin brought Maurice Mou...Fantastic post. In 1910 Martin brought Maurice Mouvet from France to dance at the Restaurant on 41st street, that's the beginning of Tangomania in New York City, which lasted until the onset of the Great War.José Manuel Araquehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09739886088226056615noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-85223668598480160122020-05-25T19:02:22.901-04:002020-05-25T19:02:22.901-04:00Next to me, as I write here in London, is a pepper...Next to me, as I write here in London, is a peppermill which I have owned for some 50 years. It's a beautiful thing, still used every day. Inscribed upon it are the words 'Café Martin N.Y'. It was once owned by the British Poet Laureate John Masefield. He visited the US several times and possibly worked, in his youth, at the Café Martin. or could have dined there at some point and either stole, or was presented with, the peppermill. When he died in England in 1967 his housekeeper inherited his belongings and the housekeeper's daughter was given the peppermill which she gave to me as I loved it so. I wish i could post a photo of it here but that is not possible. I look at it now and am amazed at its long and venerable history and that it is over 100 years old and still going strong. After reading this article I shall treasure it even more. foodieafloatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-2678183408345902042020-04-28T04:37:50.033-04:002020-04-28T04:37:50.033-04:00merci pour cet article. En 1910, un cousin est par...merci pour cet article. En 1910, un cousin est parti de France pour y travailler. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10459874108596867385noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-60209156092709734422017-04-01T16:11:41.535-04:002017-04-01T16:11:41.535-04:00Wonderful story! You may be interested in reading ...Wonderful story! You may be interested in reading about what was happening next door to Cafe Martin during these times -- like the cat colony that occupied the Town Topics office at 208 Fifth Avenue. http://hatchingcatnyc.com/2017/04/01/town-topics-office-cats/P. Gavanhttp://hatchingcatnyc.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-52980428296785588322015-08-15T15:27:08.739-04:002015-08-15T15:27:08.739-04:00The Telharmonium, an enormous electric music machi...The Telharmonium, an enormous electric music machine, was installed at Telharmonic Hall at Broadway and 39th St. Its first outside connection, on the line that ran down Broadway to Madison Sq., then north on Fifth Ave., was to the Cafe Martin. The directors of the New York Electric Music Co. held a banquet and demonstration at the Cafe Martin on Nov. 9, 1906. By mid-December music was supplied to diners from 12:30 to 2:00 and between 6:00 and 8:00, in one of the private rooms. The inauguration of public service of the Telharmonium was celebrated with a recital and reception at the central station on Friday, Jan. 11, 1907. The music was played to an audience at Telharmonic Hall and heard simultaneously through receivers at the Cafe Martin and several other locations. --"Magic Music from the Telharmonium", Scarecrow Press, 1995, now public domain and available from Google Books.Reynold Weidenaarhttp://magneticmusic.wsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-4494487176037825362013-04-30T01:04:41.046-04:002013-04-30T01:04:41.046-04:00Here's a bit more from MacLane:
during my la...Here's a bit more from MacLane: <br /><br />during my last two years in New York, life seethed with women. They were one’s companions in the apartment houses where one lived, at matinees, in tea rooms, at the Cafe Martin, in the shops, on Fifth avenue at the ends of the afternoons, on Broadway always, at the apartments of friends - in all the highways and byways. If you’re an unattached young woman living alone in New York, and markedly a free-lance, you’ll meet up with a million other unattached women. They color up your life and mean adventure - in the day-light and the dark. <br /><br />The Absinthe Drinker: him, too, I knew in New York. He was good-looking in a pallid sort of way, a slender, tallish young man, a dilettante in letters, and a follower - if that can be called following which bothers not even to note the direction of its leader - of an extremely indifferent, light-hearted, indolently-reckless cult. I was fond of him for two reasons - that the light-hearted and reckless always make an appeal to me, and that I felt my conscience in a perpetual state of assuagement (like the citizens of Butte at their Sunday morning breakfasts) by being myself in a state of but half-approval of his tenets. Every time I held back and took exception to his modes of thought, I reflected, “What a good sort I must be, to disapprove of this.” It’s a pleasant feeling. In the Cafe Martin, Twenty-sixth street and Fifth avenue, at four o’clock, we spent a hundred afternoons, listening to the music, watching the people, desultorily talking, and looking upon the absinthe in its cold, sinister, death-colored seduction. The Drinker drank eight absinthe frappes in the hour, while I ambled through one. “To think,” said I in half-sad protest, “that it’s slowly killing you, that you’ve been slowly dying for two years and are slowly dying now!” And said he quickly, “But, my child, what a sweet, sweet death to die! We are all dying, you know, from one cause or another - we are all, in this orchid-decked room, slowly moving toward our graves. So how much better to go with this exquisite poison in our veins, with the taste of it on our lips, and the flavor of it in our hearts! It brings us the flower of life and the music of the spheres - it would bring them to you if you’d give way to it and take it as I do, with ardor and delight. We would then slowly die together - a primrose death. It softens all the heart-breaks of life. My soul and body are dedicated to it and it, like a Green God of Misericorde, giveth me sundry good gifts in high reward. So drink, my child, drink to the primrose death.” I drank with him that spring too often, to the primrose death, but always under a protest - a protest not strong enough to let me refuse my one thin glass, and so much the less strong to make his number smaller. Presently an invisible grave began to yawn too near his careless feet. He was a charming thing, the Absinthe Drinker, but my friendship with him blew away in the autumn winds like the scattering of dead leaves.Michael R. Brownhttp://www.marymaclane.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-56495895414151430352013-04-30T01:02:49.558-04:002013-04-30T01:02:49.558-04:00The epicurean American feminist Mary MacLane (1881...The epicurean American feminist Mary MacLane (1881-1929) wrote a great deal about the Cafe Martin - it is probably the most vivid account of it in print. Here are some excerpts, for interested readers, from articles MacLane wrote when she had returned home to Butte, Montana in 1910: <br /><br />On the corner of Fifth avenue and Twenty-sixth street, close to where the bronze Diana stands, poised against the blue, is the Cafe Martin, where the Dry Martini is more palely golden than anywhere else on the Isle, where the people are more attractive and all the delights more bewitchingly treacherous. It has been the scene of more new and well nigh insane adventures for me - and a million other feminine youths - than probably any cafe could be outside London. It is swagger, extremely French (for America), and cordial in its welcome to unescorted women before the bell tolls six in the evening. The place is so pallidly, prettily decorated, the music is so thin and sensuous, the women such high wrought things. It is consequently crowded with them from lunch-time until then. There are also men to be sure - at about four in the afternoon, when one type of the masculine absinthe-drinker of New York assembles to steep its sodden soul in anise. But the restaurant which looks on the Avenue is mostly filled with women, such a picturesque crowd, with a freedom of mood upon them which is remarkable even in New York. They are nearly all young women - (but New York women are still in the throes of youth at five-and-forty) - there are artists, writers, chorus-girls, vaudeville people, habitues of Bohemia, dilettantes of all sorts - all the loose young feminine fish in New York. It is the one cafe on the Isle wherein the crowd is not specialized - where that most fascinating, most complex, most unexplainable of human beings, the New York young woman, may be seen in the mixed aggregate. In that the Martin is unlike the Knickerbocker, up at Forty-second street, the center of the Rialto and the haunt of the moneyed but unaristocratic theatrical people, or the Cafe des Beaux Arts, frequented chiefly by the high-browed followers of the arts, or Rector’s, beloved of the refined demimondaines, or Churchill’s, loved of the unrefined ones, or Sherry’s, the feeding-place of the swagger, or the Waldorf, where the ungrammatical and heavily upholstered inhabitants of Pittsburgh feel at home, or Maria’s, the resort of the not-too-successful litterateurs, or Jack’s, where the hippodrome ballet nightly grazes. Any or all of those types are to be seen at Martin’s, whereas they would be unlikely to find themselves at any two of the others.<br /><br />What a picture of youth it is at the Martin, at four in the afternoon! - a picture of tired, tired youth, women like crushed lilies or half-wilted jonquils. They are all in the clutch of the vampire. The mark of the vampire is upon their delicately-rouged and faintly-drooping lips, in the glint of their all-knowing eyes, upon their insolent brows and in the movements of their slender hands. Their hearts and bodies are weary from the ceaseless glitter of the world and from their endless pursuit of Pleasure - a Pleasure like an ignis fatuus that is always a little way beyond, that never, never waits. I have seen it myself around corners, behind doors, at the top of flights of stairs - always beyond, never in my hands or by my side. I have sat, times, in the Martin, with some delectable companion, twirling the stem of my absinthe glass with my thumb and finger and with my chin on my hand, and looked about at the gay-hearted company and wondered if they knew they had never caught up with the ignis fatuus Pleasure, and never would - and if they did that the flavor of the Grape would become wormwood on their lips, and the daylight shadowed, and the music stilled.Michael R. Brownhttp://www.marymaclane.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-31201496092467323632012-03-04T08:48:46.301-05:002012-03-04T08:48:46.301-05:00truly a multi-media tour de force this time, henry...truly a multi-media tour de force this time, henry! speechless!Jeanne Schintohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05348608424277134414noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-68913570847738143372012-03-01T16:53:58.193-05:002012-03-01T16:53:58.193-05:00Amazing work, Henry...thank-you!Amazing work, Henry...thank-you!Sumo Sommelierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06125978604266706506noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-36911637711777067962012-03-01T08:57:58.347-05:002012-03-01T08:57:58.347-05:00Oh Henry, you have outdone yourself. I was just r...Oh Henry, you have outdone yourself. I was just reading about the Martin establishments in Henri Charpentier's delightful autobiography. He remembered it fondly and they were most generous to the aspiring restauranteur. This is just a brilliant article. Makes me want to try everything and really puts me in the mind of the times. BRAVO!!!Deana Sidneyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14908407077861396161noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5475164893058336118.post-74893657303988935762012-02-29T18:50:06.436-05:002012-02-29T18:50:06.436-05:00Henry, you have an excellent Cafe Martin menu coll...Henry, you have an excellent Cafe Martin menu collection. Fascinating as always!ephemeralisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07779202584604113348noreply@blogger.com