Hotel Dining Rooms

Hôtel means “town mansion” in French. When Americans began building grand public accommodations in the nineteenth century, these hotels were called “palaces of the people.” More than feeding guests, the hotel dining room showcased upwardly mobile, status-conscious, public leisure in a uniquely egalitarian, American context. As the editors of the Weekly Mirror observed about the Hotel Astor, “The distinguished, the fashionable, the dressy and handsome may all dine without peril of style in the public table. But,—since so may the opposites of all these, and anybody else who is tolerably dressed and well behaved,—the public table is the tangible republic.”