Book Description

Excerpt from Sandwich Shops, Drive-Ins, and Diners: How to Start and Operate Them Successfully In these modern days, when food is sold in hundreds of thousands of eating places throughout our country, it is difficult to imagine a time when lunch-boxes were a part of every worker's equipment; when factory men, laborers, and office help all stopped work and opened little packages to munch the edibles provided by mother or wife. Yet, in 1888, when Max Garfunkel came to America, an immigrant boy of thirteen, restaurants were mainly places for social gatherings, except to the few of wealth who considered it demeaning to carry food and could afford the dollar or two squandered on served luncheons. The only other places in which food could be had, aside from boarding houses, were the saloons which provided magnificent free-lunch counters to entice the drinking public. Max, my father, was born into the farm-hardware business in the old country, and he became hardy from handling the heavy pieces, and shrewd from contact with farmers who bargained with every trade. Precocious enough to help in the business before he was ten years old, stories of the wealth of this Golden Land fired him early with an ambition to come here. So, as he reached his thirteenth birthday, he announced his intention to a startled family, and sailed away with only enough money to permit him to enter. The boy who was to become one of the greatest factors in changing the eating habits of all Americans by introducing a meal at a price which eliminated the need for carrying a lunch-box to work, spent his first night in this country sleeping in an empty open wagon on the New York waterfront not far from where he had been put ashore from Ellis Island. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.