Guest post by Ben Katchor, author of The Dairy Restaurant and a Cullman Center Fellow in 2006-07.

My research into the history of the dairy restaurant was a side project. I was awarded a Cullman Center Fellowship in 2006-07 for a graphic novel project about the history and workings of the NYPL at 42nd Street. That work ended up being a libretto and set designs for an opera with music by composer Mark Mulcahy entitled Up From the Stacks. It premiered at the Library in 2011.

Having a small, private work space in the Cullman Center was a library habitué’s dream. I could request any book in the building to be brought to my desk and also search online collections that were, at the time, otherwise inaccessible. As I usually got a late start, I would continue working in my office long after the Library closed to the public. Being nearly alone in that building with its 4 million items was an intoxicating experience for someone engaged in open-ended research. To maximize my use of these facilities, I dedicated my time to reading and searching for source material—I did very little writing or drawing. In my spare hours I also did some research on a side project—a history of dairy restaurants. I had signed a contract to produce a history of this subject in 2003.

I was at the Library in that moment when the Google Books project was in full swing and searchable online. I was able to word search that vast online resource to discover mentions of dairy restaurants and public eating in books that I would never have thought to consult. The Annals of the Scottish Episcopal Church offered a picture of missionary work in Jewish taverns in the Pale of Settlement. I read through hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles dealing with the phenomenon of the American dairy lunchroom—but very few touched upon the existence of the dairy lunchroom run by Jews in accordance with Jewish dietary law. I tried to expand my understanding of interwar Jewish cultural life in Warsaw, Odessa, Czernowitz and other cities.

Very little had been written about Jewish dairy restaurants.This subject fell into the category of undocumented details of Jewish working class life in New York in the late 19th and 20th centuries.The biographies of waiters, countermen, cooks, and small restaurateurs were deemed unworthy of journalists and historians. I was forced to approach the subject indirectly by studying everything around dairy restaurants—a general history of public eating, surveys of Jewish immigrant behavior, the vegetarian movement (a subject very well documented by its devotees), and the microfilmed pages of Yiddish newspapers and journals. Along the way, I had to fill in vast areas of ignorance concerning history, religion, philosophy, and science in order to understand the details of my elusive subject. Fifteen years earlier, on an impulse, I had interviewed a few surviving dairy restaurateurs. 

Although the NYPL menu collection includes several American-style dairy restaurants, such as Geyers and the Columbia Dairy Kitchen, Miss Frank E. Buttolph, the woman who began collecting menus for the New York Public Library,  seems to have overlooked the many popular working-class Jewish restaurants in New York City. Her collection was mainly of use in understanding the larger and more affluent end of restaurant culture in New York City in the early 20th century. As I discovered, some early dairy restaurants did not use printed menus, but instead relied on signboards and the waiter’s ability to recite the specials of the day. Also, the regulars knew what they wanted to eat.

I thought I was making things easier, by outputting and xeroxing the countless bits of information that I uncovered, but at the end of my time at the Library I was confronted by an overwhelming pile of prints that I had to revisit over the following years. As a short-form cartoonist, I was not prepared to deal with such a long story.  

Restaurants and eating places driven by the pastoral impulse and offering a menu centered around dairy products was a worldwide phenomenon. The social history connected to these places was an impossibly complex skein of politics, religion, philosophy, and the drives of human appetite. In between drawing and writing weekly and monthly comic strips, teaching and doing illustration jobs, the casual research on this book continued over 17 years. In the end, the book is a bare outline of the history I set out to document. Hopefully, future historians of the dairy restaurant will be able to expand upon and correct the facts and chronologies set out in my book. 

Visit The Dairy Restaurant to learn more about Ben Katchor's book and for personal memories of the dairy restaurants in New York and Philadelphia. His book is available in our catalog.