A Century of Restaurants in Northampton

A Public Talk by Jan Whitaker, Restaurant Historian and Author

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Date:
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Saturday, December 7, 2019
4:30 pm
$5 members and donors; $10 all others.
Registration is full.

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Sponsored by Sylvester's and Roberto's Restaurants

Registration for this talk is full.
Please email Historic Northampton at info@historicnorthampton.org to be placed on the waitlist.

Restaurant historian Jan Whitaker will present an illustrated history of Northampton’s restaurants of the 20th century. Jan will discuss the town’s prominent and influential restaurants of the past, along with its ordinary and forgotten places. She will look at the highs and lows of the city’s restaurant history, from the Great Depression to the “renaissance” of the 70s and 80s.  She will focus on how Northampton’s downtown revitalization was energized by an influx of new restaurants, but will also look at the city’s everyday restaurants, such as the lunch rooms of the early years of the 20th century and the chain restaurants of the 1960s and 1970s.

Jan Whitaker’s interest in restaurants grew out of her collection of vintage postcards, but soon broadened into a wider inquiry about the role restaurants play in communities and the lives of their patrons. Her first book, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn, investigated tea rooms of the teens and 1920s and led to the discovery that they were some of the first eating places to welcome women into what had been a largely male-dominated restaurant world. For over a decade she has produced a blog exploring the history of American restaurants (restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com) in which she covers a broad range of topics from toothpicks to club sandwiches.