Nostalgia for the Lunch Counter

The lunch counter has a distinct place in the history of American restaurants for the 20^th century. Evolving from inns, pubs, taverns of the 19^th century, lunch counters developed in many working class town’s main blue lane highway strips and downtown centers of commerce for the white collar crowd on a budget. Marshall Field’s on State Street even famously held a lunch counter until the early 1970’s.

Look around at those spots in 2012 and you would be hard pressed to find the lunch counter style restaurant. I can think of only two off the top of my head with Manny’s Delicatessen in Chicago and Primanti’s in Pittsburgh, the home of the stuffed sandwich. Why have these staples of the American work week gone into near extinction? Fast food and the adamant desire for convenience in the modern world has subjugated many sit-down style restaurants and diners to bankruptcy as hungry customers refused to sacrifice a decent meal, albeit sometimes a greasy one, for cheap and gluttonous with the same flavors repeated for stockholder satisfaction. 

Historians do know of the affect Jim Crow segregation had in the United States with signs that read across the front glass “White’s Only” or “Colored Café.” That disgraceful sliver of America reaffirms the salad bowl ideology of separation between ethnicities in America, instead of the melting pot which America is taught to be but only found in utopia. The four black students of A & T college in Greensboro, North Carolina, shattered this long standing rule on February 1^st, 1960 with the first of what would be many sit-ins, defying the Jim Crow laws that had denied them a spot at the counter and a mere cup of coffee. We also know from history that many of these locations in the city centers fell prey to white flight, a term associated with white citizens flocking to the suburbs from 1945-1975. By 1970 alone, 95% of the American suburbs were populated with whites only, on occasion some cities handing out separate housing applications based upon race. Guess which ones they accepted?

When the American city saw jobs outsourced and undermined, as well as a general hallowing out of identity and citizenry, the majority of the population that remained were poor whites, Latinos and almost all of the black population of America in areas like the south side of Chicago, known by another name as the black urban capital of the United States. Businesses went under when this shift occurred. Poverty saturated inner-city America in the absence of this prosperity and balanced housing values with names like Chicago, Detroit, New York, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. The lunch counters shut down, hanging signs on their front doors that read “Closed. Thank you for all of your business throughout the years.” 

In 1986, the lunch counter model went corporate when the original Johnny Rocket’s in Los Angeles melded the drive-in and lunch counter idea to classic American images of 1940-1960. Decades later over three hundred locations propped up around the United States in shopping malls and airports, reminding you that the 1950’s hadn’t passed on, they were just on hiatus whilst it was being prepared in the kitchen. I remember even the Eddie Rocket’s location that friends and I frequented for a decent burger in downtown Limerick, Ireland when I lived there in 06-07 for my Master’s degree at the University. There, like the Johnny Rocket’s location I visited this past Sunday at Old Orchard mall in Skokie, had the Pax Americana lunch counter look down. 

A fair LivingSocial deal propped up a few weeks before for Johnny Rocket’s, allowing you to get twenty dollars worth of food for only ten bucks. A fair compromise, even though I knew that each time I step into one of those corporate lunch counter chain’s I feel as if I am back on the set of Mel’s Diner in one of my favorite films, American Graffiti, the father later ripped off by Happy Days. Classic Rock-n-roll buzzes through the restaurant. Noticing all of the red seated booths, covered in clear plastic were taken up, Ally and I sat at the lunch counter. Had I dove for the chair, I might have not even written this article with the reflection of why the lunch counter went the way of the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly. Stainless steel was everywhere, as was a whole side industry of Coke’ Cola signs of the Normal Rockwell-esque American families, blonde women in Army uniforms, and what Ally thought was a young version of Ms Norma Jean, aka Marilyn Monroe. 

None of the classic faces were of any color, save white. That wasn’t true of the counter we sat at with multiple races, from black to Indian. I felt a satisfaction to realize those student’s at A & T College achieved their dream of racial unity, though I am not sure that Johnny Rocket’s was the result. 

The food was passable, with a watery Cookies and Cream milkshake and plastic fries. I admit the Mushroom Swiss burger I ate was tasty and was as greasy as I remember all those nights I had imbibed far too many pints in a Limerick pub years back. I looked behind the counter to the open kitchen to see every waiter, bus boy and cook was Latino. The reality that majority of kitchen work in America, even there at the pre-packaged Johnny Rocket’s, is done by Latin American immigrants, searching for their piece of the American dream, taking jobs not a single white face in those Coke ads would consider taking. As the American lunch evolves, or devolves for that matter, I wonder if race relations and the conditions we allow our fellow citizens to be subjected to will again place a role in shaping that change.