Category:
Restaurants
Restaurants
The Mechanized Restaurant
British inventor Thomas Maldwyn Lewis and his partners apparently had some expertise in conveyor-belt technology. So they cast about for novel ways to apply this knowledge. What they came up with was the "mechanized restaurant". Their idea was to put diners on a conveyor belt and move them past serving stations. From their 1948 patent:In accordance with our invention, the customers are provided with seats and if desired footrests moving in a continuous manner along with a table or like surface, the different courses being placed upon the table at definite positions in the travel of the table so that when the traverse of any particular seat is completed, the occupant has completed his meal and may move to a seat in a lounge or the like to rest and/or to finish his meal with a coffee or the like which may be supplied just before the said traverse is completed.
The inventors argued that this mechanization of the dining experience would "expedite the delivery of meals and enable more meals to be served with the use of a given floor area than is at present possible."
That may be true, but I doubt many restaurant owners would want to invest the money to build one of these, just for the sake of potentially serving a few more meals.
Not to mention the problem of slow eaters. I'm imagining a crowd of diners standing at the end of the conveyor belt, plates in hand, trying to finish their meals.
Posted By: Alex - Sun Feb 21, 2021 -
Comments (2)
Category: Restaurants, Technology, Patents, 1940s
Parking Garage Dining
A sign of the times: Searching for ways to allow more distance between diners, the Glendale Galleria mall in SoCal decided to open an eating area in the parking garage.It definitely has a certain ambiance.
More info: NBC LA, twitter
Posted By: Alex - Sat Aug 01, 2020 -
Comments (3)
Category: Restaurants
Edmund Love and His Restaurant Quest
In 1964, THE SATURDAY EVENING POST profiled Edmund G. Love, who intended to eat his way through approximately 5000 NYC restaurants.
By 1973, when THE NEW YORK TIMES took notice, his quest had ballooned to 6000.
His 1990 obituary in the NYT says he managed to hit 1750 of them.
Posted By: Paul - Thu Nov 07, 2019 -
Comments (4)
Category: Addictions, Bums, Hobos, Tramps, Beggars, Panhandlers and Other Streetpeople, Eccentrics, Food, Restaurants, World Records, Twentieth Century
Open Concept Bar
The Open Concept bar, recently opened in St. Louis, Missouri, doesn’t sell drinks. Instead, it sells time. Buy an hour’s worth of time at the bar, and you can drink as much as you want in that hour. The price is $10/hour for basic drinks, $20/hour for premium ones.Sounds like a bargain! But how does the bar plan to make money? Well, it turns out there actually are some limits to how much alcohol they'll serve you. From St. Louis magazine:
Anyone who’s ever attended a wedding might be wondering how you keep an open-bar concept from getting out of control. Butler says he’s put a few safety measures in place. When patrons book their time at Open Concept, they create a profile and are assigned a confirmation code, which is used to place drink orders at the bar. Bartenders will only serve one drink per person at a time, and a proprietary point-of-sale system will track consumption. Butler says the system will scan driver’s licenses and use a patron’s height and weight to assign a number of drinks per hour to keep the bar in compliance with legal limits.
In other words, you can't actually have all you can drink in an hour. But what's the limit? It seems like they're being coy about that. I'm guessing it's about two drinks per hour. So, in essence, you're pre-paying for two drinks.
Posted By: Alex - Wed Oct 09, 2019 -
Comments (5)
Category: Inebriation and Intoxicants, Restaurants, Alcohol
Old Cawlija
Info at source: "Old Cawlija, a five pound black bass, eats from hand and drinks Falstaff Beer from the can. The tank is placed in front of the Didda-Wa Restaurant."
Posted By: Paul - Sun Apr 08, 2018 -
Comments (1)
Category: Regionalism, Restaurants, Fish, 1950s, Alcohol
The McRazor
Disposable razors were first introduced in 1974, by Bic. In 1976, Gillette came out with its own competing product, the Good News twin blade disposable. And in 1978 McDonald's decided to run a promotion in which they gave away free Gillette Good News razors with orders of breakfast meals.They must have thought the promotion was fairly successful, because it seems that they repeated the offer a couple of times throughout the 1980s. I can't imagine them giving away free razors today.
Honolulu Star Bulletin - Apr 17, 1978
Posted By: Alex - Tue Feb 27, 2018 -
Comments (3)
Category: Restaurants, 1970s
Crazy Cafe
Posted By: Paul - Tue Oct 10, 2017 -
Comments (1)
Category: Entertainment, Restaurants, 1950s
Dolph Traymon, 97-year-old at the Keyboard
I cannot find anything to contradict this review from 2015 which had Dolph Traymon still tinkling the ivories at his Fife and Drum restaurant.
Source of 1948 ad.
Posted By: Paul - Sun Jun 19, 2016 -
Comments (1)
Category: Music, Restaurants, 1910s, Longevity
Mystery Illustration 21
What famous restaurant is depicted here?
The answer at this link.
Posted By: Paul - Tue Jun 07, 2016 -
Comments (11)
Category: Restaurants, 1950s
Wendys, the Musical
A few months back I posted about McDonalds, the Musical. In a similar vein, here's Wendy's, the musical employee training video.
Posted By: Alex - Sun Oct 12, 2014 -
Comments (3)
Category: Restaurants, Video
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Contact Us |