Did you know
that America’s first major fast-food chain started right here in Philly? Way
back in 1902? Contrary to popular belief, McDonald’s didn’t invent fast food. Philly’s
very own original, Horn & Hardart, first stoked the American appetite for
quick restaurant meals.
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Picking a meal at the Horn & Hardart automat in 1936 |
Bringing
the assembly line to dining
Joseph Horn, a Philadelphian
with no restaurant experience, and Frank Hardart, a cook from New Orleans,
opened their first restaurant in Philadelphia on December 22, 1888. Their tiny
11 x 17 lunchroom at 39 South 13th St. wasn’t fancy—simply a counter
with 15 stools. But Horn & Hardart soon had a steady stream of customers
drawn by its novel New Orleans-style French-drip coffee.
A trip Hardart
took to Berlin in 1900 inspired a unique twist to H&H’s restaurant
business. While there, Hardart came across an automat—a restaurant without servers
where customers used tokens to purchase food housed in glass-doored
compartments. Hardart envisioned an assembly line of diners putting together
their own meals. And by June 1902, Horn & Hardart opened their first automat
at 818 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia.
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An H&H automat in 1904 |
Diners at H&H
first visited attendants in glass booths—nicknamed “nickel throwers”—to
exchange their coins and paper money for the five-cent pieces the automat
required. Tokens in hand, customers approached the automat,
peering at the already prepared foods showcased behind small glass windows.
Some compartments were cool; others were hot. Seeing food housed in sanitary
compartments probably meant a lot to early H&H customers, who had likely
been spooked by the food contamination scares so common at the time.
All was
self-serve—drop your tokens in a slot, raise the glass and take your plate. Then
shuffle to a shiny table in the hall to eat your meal. Behind the wall, staff
would quickly refill the empty slots with sandwiches, side dishes and desserts
so they’d be waiting for the next customer.
What was on the
menu? Favorites included mac and cheese, Boston baked beans, chicken pot pie, creamed
spinach and rice pudding. The entrees were tasty, and H&H had created a concoction that appealed to
American tastes, blending novelty, choice and quality. It was a recipe for
success, and by 1912, Horn & Hardart opened its first automat
in Manhattan.
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The view from Philly H&H in 1911: "a fine place." Image courtesy of Card Cow. |
As the company
evolved, some H&H locations began to offer sit-down waitress service;
others cafeterias. At its peak, Horn & Hardart had 44 restaurants and 55
takeout stores in Philadelphia. In its heyday, 800,000 customers a day were
served in 80 locations located throughout Philadelphia and New York.
McDonald’s
studied the H&H Playbook
As someone too
young to have dropped coins in an automat, I am struck by how much it seems
like McDonald’s—first engineered as a production-line-styled burger joint in
1948—borrowed from H&H’s early 1900s playbook:
Quality
control and consistency. Say what you will, but at McD’s, you always know
what you’re gonna get. H&H set the standard for this. Supplies were
centralized and a leather-bound rule book defined proper handling of nearly 400
menu items. H&H execs lunched at the Sample Table each day, sipping black
coffee between courses. Each day the coffee came from a different H&H
outlet so that execs could verify that their most popular offering was up to
snuff everywhere.
Fast
service, no tip required. One of the advantages of McD’s is that you can get
in and get out. H&H was the first to bypass waitress service, and even
provided stand-up counters for customers to eat “perpendicular meals.” H&H was
also ahead of its time in providing meal solutions to busy moms. Way back in
1924, H&H opened retail stores to sell automat favorites to take home,
promoting them with a “Less work for Mother” slogan.
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A helpful how-to postcard for H&H patrons |
Freshness. When I worked
at McDonald’s as a teenager, I was schooled that any burger that sat longer
than 10 minutes was to be discarded. In fact it was H&H that set the first standards for
freshness. No food could be left overnight in any of its restaurants. At
closing time, surplus food was shipped to its “day-old” shops. And each H&H
coffee batch had a time card. After 20 minutes, expired coffee was tossed and
replaced.
Economical. H&H helped
keep food costs low by creating the first food “assembly line.” Fast food
joints have been replicating and honing this formula ever since.
Starbucks
didn’t revolutionize coffee; H&H did
If you think
Starbucks, founded in the 1970s and expanded in the 1980s, launched America’s
first coffee craze, you’re wrong too. Horn & Hardart introduced fresh-drip
brewed coffee to the masses.
Brewed coffee
hardly seems revolutionary now, but before H&H, coffee was a harsh,
brackish drink made by boiling coffee at length, along with eggshells(!) to
clarify it. The H&H fresh-drip brew quickly gained a reputation as the best,
and many H&H java addicts became loyal customers for life. From 1912 to
1950, a cup cost a nickel, and in the 1950s H&H sold more than 90 million
cups of coffee each year.
After
the thrill was gone and burgers became king
Though for a
time it was hard to imagine that there ever wouldn’t be an H&H, by the mid
1960s, French fries were in and the
“number of burgers sold” sign steadily ticked up at the rival Golden Arches. The
automat’s chrome fixtures seemed dated rather than quaint. And the land rush to
the suburbs meant fewer customers were near H&H outlets.
During the 1960s,
the New York branch of H&H attempted to evolve, making some of its sites subjects
of the Burger King realm. In Philadelphia, the old guard at H&H discounted
the burger joint craze sweeping America. One H&H vice president reportedly wrote
off its key rival, claiming, “Adults will never eat in McDonald’s.” Yet by
1968, the flagship automat on Chestnut Street sank.
Though the Philly branch tried valiantly to hang on, by 1986, after two bankruptcies, H&H was down
to its last surviving outlet in Philadelphia in the Bala Cynwyd Shopping Center
on City Avenue. H&H tried to revitalize, opening two new outlets in the late 1980s in Bensalem and in Jenkintown. Though the new president hoped to draw both
loyalists as well as younger patrons with a hankering for classic food, H&H soon found it couldn’t dine out on nostalgia. In 1990, the last original H&H eatery in Bala Cynwyd, as well as the newer H&H outlets, closed.
In the early 1990s,
entrepreneurs tried to make a go of selling signature H&H food items likemac and cheese and tapioca pudding in supermarkets, but the venture didn’t make
it very far into the 21st century.
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The way it was: The H&H automat. Image courtesy of Card Cow. |
Alas, you can’t
put three coins in an automat any more, but you can feast your eyes upon a
35-foot section of Philadelphia’s first automat in the cafeteria at theSmithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. Wonder what
would be on the H&H menu today?
Hungry for more about Horn & Hardart? Check out "The Automat: The History, Recipes, and Allure of Horn & Hardart's Masterpiece," a book by Lorraine Diehl and Marianne Hardart, a founder's great-granddaughter.
Do
you remember when H&H was more popular than McDonald’s? What was your
favorite H&H food? Tell us more about your favorite meal there in our
comments.
I remember eating there as a kid with my Father at the Frankford ave location. I really loved the mac and cheese. Not to mention how cool it was to get your food from robots
ReplyDeleteMy mom and her twin sister worked as secretaries worked at H&H offices in downtown Philadelphia where they met and married two cooks; my dad and uncle. My older brother worked as a baker at night downtown during high school. Years later my little brother managed the H&H restaurant on Old York Rd. In Jenkintown, PA for three years, until they closed in 1991. My sister and I waitresses there and my third brother was a prep cook. I have four canvases of actors from a movie and other pics printed on those canvasses that hung in the host area and I have the Philadelphia Inquirer article about them closing that includes an interview and picture of my brother, the manager. RIP David 1966-2021
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