Restaurant Awards and Guides

The first American restaurant guides were produced locally in cities with vibrant restaurant cultures, namely, New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Among the earliest was The Restaurants of New York (1925) by George Chappell, the architecture critic for the New Yorker magazine. The first popular national guide to restaurants across the United States was produced by Duncan Hines, a traveling printing salesman who mailed a list of his 167 favorite restaurants to friends as a greeting card in 1935. The following year he published Adventures in Good Eating, which, according to his introduction, “let the public know where they might find decent food, carefully prepared by a competent chef in clean surroundings.”