Mapping John Canaday’s 1976
New York Times Guide to Dining Out in New York

April 2014

Jump to Visualization

Recently, I have been exploring ways of mapping New York City’s evolving landscape of restaurants, bars, and cafes. Recognizing these businesses as cultural place-making sites where social rituals, personal tastes, community identity, and collective nostalgia are expressed, I aim to create resources that allow researchers and other food enthusiasts to explore establishments that have come and gone over time. (See How New York City Eats for a map of the current restaurant landscape).

In a continuation of this research, I set out to map restaurants featured in John Canaday’s 1976 New York Times Guide to Dining Out in New York. The book provides a rare chance to learn about restaurants that existed in a time before online directories. After scanning and performing text recognition on the book, I compiled a dataset of 248 restaurants. From there, I geolocated their locations based on their provided addresses, and developed an interactive Tableau map.

A Brief History of New York Times Restaurant Criticism

John Canaday’s 1976 New York Times Guide to Dining out in New York is a product of the earliest years of professional restaurant criticism. His predecessor at The Times, Craig Claiborne, is often regarded as the father of the modern restaurant review. As the newspaper’s food editor, Claiborne began writing weekly reviews in 1962. At first, these reviews were brief, directory listings with just under 100 words. Eventually, Claiborne started including more in depth commentary. In 1970, he published his first “Directory to Dining,”  which subsequently sparked the country’s fascination with restaurant criticism. (Pete Wells for the NY Times) 

After Claiborne, Raymond Sokolov and John Hess had brief stints contributing restaurant reviews between 1971 and 1974. John Canaday, who had been working as the Times’ art critic, contributed reviews in his spare time between 1974 and 1976. He promoted Mimi Sheraton as the first full-time restaurant critic in August 1976. (Eater.com)

Dining Out in 1976

So what does this guide tell us about the state of dining in 1976 New York City? Who was its audience? As Robert Sietsema, a restaurant critic at The Village Voice, wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2010, many of these 1970s restaurants were considered “the exclusive province of businessmen with expense accounts and the idle rich” (Robert Sietsema for Columbia Journalism Review). Canaday’s reviews certainly seem to cater to an upper middle class who spends their free time attending performances in the Theater District and Lincoln Center. The geography of the restaurants, predominantly centered in Midtown, support Sietsema’s statement that businessmen were likely some of the primary patrons of these establishments. 

These restaurants also illuminate broader trends that characterized American dining throughout the mid to late 20th century. In 1976, French cuisine clearly dominated the fine dining scene. Just under a third of all restaurants included in Canaday’s guide are classified as French. Colloquially, this is known as the era of the Le’s and La’s in fine dining– La Grenouille, Le Cygne, La Caravelle, et cetera. Italian food was also just beginning to enter the upper echelons of fine dining. Canaday made headlines when he gave Italian restaurant Parioli Romanissimo four stars in 1975 (Eater.com). 

Highlights from the Guide

Notable food and cultural history is threaded throughout the stories of these establishments. The “21” club was a former prohibition-era speakeasy that closed in 2020. Spanish restaurant Meson Botin was an offshoot from Spain’s pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. Yunnan Yuan is where owner Peng Chang-kuei invented General Tso’s chicken. 

(Above) Menus for Manny Wolf’s Chophouse, Les Mareyeurs, Gian Marino, Le Chateau Richelieu, and The Box Tree. From the New York Public Library. The “What’s on the Menu?” project features menus for many of the restaurants such as these that were featured in Canaday’s guidebook.

At all of these restaurants, it is clear that food and socialization were tightly linked. La Cote Basque was a 1960s hot spot for socialites and celebrities the likes of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Frank Sinatra. Les Pleiades was an art world hangout, attracting directors of the city’s prestigious museums and prominent gallerists. 

Other restaurants catered to specific communities. Bernstein-On-Essex and Moshe Peking, were some of the first Kosher Chinese restaurants in the city. Their operation contributed to a distinctly New York Jewish identity. Uptown, Czechoslovakia Praha, Ruc, and Vasata, were a part of what was once referred to as Little Czechoslovakia, an Upper East Side enclave of Czech and Slovak immigrants.

Whether it was to see and be seen, to celebrate one’s identity, or to just feel at home, patronizing these restaurants provided customers with a community. While compiling supplemental data for this map, most of my resources included personal blogs written by hobbyist historians and food lovers. Their writing is marked by a pointed nostalgia and longing for these restaurants. 

Explore the Map

Out of the 248 restaurants, only 21 are still operating. The closure of a majority of these restaurants seems to have been inevitable. Owners struggled against rising rents and operating costs. Others, in quieter, bittersweet endings, closed simply for the owners’ retirement.

Out of those that have persevered, P.J. Clarke’s, now with five locations, has been open the longest for a total of 140 years. Other restaurants that have been open for 100 years or longer include Keen’s English Chop House (139 years), Barbetta (118 years), John’s of 12th Street (116 years), Grand Central Oyster Bar (111 years), and Sardi’s (103 years). 

In the end, it is important to remember that Canaday’s guide book is one small sliver of the city’s actual gastronomical landscape in 1976. Since Craig Claiborne first established the column, all of the Times’ restaurant critics have been white men and women, and their coverage of certain restaurants over others will inevitably be tinged with their biases. It is my hope that my work started here can also eventually tell the stories of restaurants and other community establishments that may not have been given the same attention in the history of food writing.

Sources

Canaday, John. The New York Times Guide to Dining Out. New York: The New York Times, 1976.
https://ny.eater.com/2011/9/16/6650353/a-timeline-of-all-new-york-times-restaurant-critics
https://acravan.blogspot.com/2010/10/some-places-i-would-like-to-revisit-but.html
https://www.cjr.org/feature/everyone_eats.php
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/10/archives/in-search-of-the-czechoslovak-east-side.html
https://ny.eater.com/2009/12/29/6748933/remembering-when-there-was-an-italian-four-star-in-nyc
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/dining/craig-claiborne-set-the-standard-for-restaurant-reviews.html