Sometime around 1940 Hines began a personal crusade to clean up America’s restaurants. As the decade unfolded, his stratagem for accomplishing this goal became more apparent. Taking advantage of the respect his name commanded, he told Americans they should demand that restaurants either clean up or close up. He knew if he kept harping on the subject at every opportunity, restaurateurs would eventually have to give the public what he wanted.
By 1941 Hines had attended several conventions organized by the National Restaurant Association. He was repeatedly invited to speak at the organization’s annual gathering because he had drawn so much attention to their industry. And he never missed an opportunity.373 So popular was he at these functions that beginning in 1941 he inaugurated, with the convention’s permission, a separate function of his own: the Annual Duncan Hines Family Dinner, a meeting and banquet that united the restaurateurs and innkeepers fortunate enough to be listed in his books. Through 1958 Hines told his “family” members at these meetings how wonderful they were—after he lightly chastised their imperfections and offered suggestions for improvement.374 When Hines addressed his audience, he enumerated a long list of complaints, told them of his recent activities, and exhorted them to continue their good work. He concluded his criticisms and remarks by promising that he and Emelie would try to visit their respective restaurants during the coming year, which was a likely prospect since each day, he said, they usually ate “two breakfasts and lunches and sometimes have as many as seven or eight meals a day.” But, he cautioned, “We merely taste, and don’t eat all the food that is set before us.” If they did, he said, they “would, no doubt, spend most of [their] time in a hospital.”
At this same function, Hines observed that for every 100 copies of Adventures in Good Eating sold, the public bought seventy copies of Lodging for a Night and 40 copies of Adventures in Good Cooking. His cookbook, he said, was selling “far more copies than I ever expected.”375 And because he was selling more copies, he could employ more people. In addition to his secretaries, Hines said, he now employed five salesmen to call on bookstores across the country. Things, overall, were looking pretty rosy. But, as with any business, there were some problems.
First of all, his books were not distributed adequately. Not all his listed restaurants bought them. In his eyes, those restaurant owners in his book who refused to help him in this small matter were nothing but ingrates. As far as he was concerned, should a contest ever be held for those who turned white as a sheet when asked to spend a penny more than they had to, hundreds in the restaurant industry would vie for first place. Hines found their penury frustrating. He was trying to improve their industry and the public’s perception of it, but those in whose interest he was working frequently could not see past the day’s receipts. At one of his annual meetings, he noted that only half the places listed in Adventures in Good Eating had ever bothered to order a single copy. This type of proprietor was a mystery to him. Though they were successful, they were narrow-minded, paranoid and consumed with the unadulterated conviction that their next meal would be their last. In their eyes, nothing was ever good enough. Something was always wrong. Not even a much sought after recommendation by him mollified them. When Hines met with these types, he often had to endure their ungrateful, petty, insignificant gripes. Once, while speaking to an audience, Hines expressed his annoyance with these individuals. He shook his head and rolled his eyes heavenward when speaking of them. “Many places complain that their listing is not larger than their competitors, or that the description should say theirs is the BEST PLACE. Lengthy descriptions do not necessarily mean that any place is superior to all others. THERE IS NO ONE SUPERIOR PLACE. If all descriptions were about the same, the book would not carry the reader interest it does, and this applies to the use of photographs as well.” If some owners of restaurants and inns refused to sell his guidebooks because of base selfishness, there were others who insisted on selling only the volumes that featured their listing, conveniently ignoring the fact that the public might possibly desire additional information about other places to eat and sleep. Then there were those establishments that ordered books—and then refused to pay for them. This always called for a bottle of aspirin. Yet another needless irritant were those establishments that changed locations but had not the courtesy to inform him.376
When a restaurant or inn was included in Hines’s guidebooks, the establishment’s owner often wanted to capitalize on it. Since they could not advertise in his books, Hines provided them with an inexpensive, yet ingenious service. For an annual rental fee of about ten dollars, he let them display the soon-to-be famous Duncan Hines Seal of Approval. The sign stated, in a facsimile of his signature: “Recommended by Duncan Hines.” The idea was that renters could place it in front of their establishments for passing motorists to see. For those intelligent enough to rent one, a Duncan Hines sign meant financial salvation. And yet, once in place, for some the sign was both a blessing and a curse. If the sign was removed, for whatever reason, financial doom sometimes ensued. Potential guests, if they discovered the removal, sometimes suspected something was wrong and avoided it. Word-of-mouth spread quickly, and it soon closed.377
At Hines’s insistence, the signs were uniform in design so they would be instantly recognizable. They were also color-coordinated. Like the books, restaurant signs were red, lodging signs were blue.378 When a red sign was posted in front of a restaurant, its owner never worried about having a full dining room for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Likewise, when a blue sign was displayed in front of a motel, hotel, or guest house, the innkeeper usually filled every room by eight that evening.
His sign business presented its own set of problems, ones which irritated him endlessly. When a restaurant or motel was dropped from the book, Hines made arrangements with the Staley Sign Company in Indianapolis, who manufactured his signs, to have one of its representatives drive to the scene and reclaim it. When Hines was alerted to a restaurant or inn performing poorly, he would sometimes travel to the offending location and haul the sign away himself. After all, it was his. Some restaurants painted Hines’s famous slogan on the side of their buildings—with a twist. They proclaimed their establishment was “NOT Recommended by Duncan Hines.”379 After they had been dropped from the guidebook the perpetrators who used his signs illegally usually desisted after Hines wrote them a direct, curt letter, telling them in no uncertain terms to remove his sign from their premises and return it to him or else he would settle the matter in court. When the violators returned his signs, Hines did not reuse them; instead he ordered his handyman to throw them into the trash.380
Due to his influence in the restaurant industry, Hines criticized it and its practitioners more than ever. Now that he increasingly had the public’s ear, he made plenty of noise over a host of matters, the repetition of which, he believed, would force the industry to abandon some of its abominable practices, particularly those found in low-grade restaurants. In a profile in a Kentucky newspaper, Hines discoursed on the condition of dirty lunch-counters. He asked his interviewer, “Have you ever looked at the water in which they wash the dishes? Or the color of the towels they use?” In his mind, lunch-counters were just “plain filthy.” And so was their food. When Hines spoke of such places, he grew “quite red in the face, as he graduate[d] from one pet hate to the next.” When he mentioned steam tables, for example, Hines thundered that it was, “a perfect device to take all the flavor—and, incidentally, most of the vitamins—out of the best vegetables. Steam table spinach. Can’t you see it? Green and slimy, dripping off the end of a tarnished fork.” The proprietors of lunch counters, he declared, could learn a thing or two from their competitors. “There is a place in Chicago,” Hines said, “where your vegetables are cooked to order…. Your vegetables are cooked under pressure—and are served up after five minutes of cooking—succulent and fresh. That,” he stated flatly, “is how vegetables should be prepared.”
Hines theorized that many of the coarse public troug
hs he spoke of were not really restaurants at all. These “roadside eating-houses—barbecue depots and short order places,” he said, shaking his head sadly, were “not run by chefs—some not even by cooks.” Instead they were operated “by men who have decided to try to pull a few chestnuts out of the fire by the old procedure of feeding the weary traveler.” He offered as an example the “farmer whose farm isn’t doing so well—and who happens to own a few hundred feet on the pike.” That person, he said, “will put up an eating joint,” and the innocent traveler has no way of knowing if the man behind the counter can cook until he sinks his teeth into his meal.
He gave another example: “A gas station, trying to make a little more money, will advertise short orders…. Well,” he snorted in a tone of exasperation, “these fellows aren’t cooks.” Such places, in his estimation, were better left boarded up. He was not alone in his opinion. His experience with these roadside hellholes was duplicated every day by millions of Americans, and the widespread contempt these amateur chefs generated no doubt explained the popularity of Adventures in Good Eating. The hundreds of dreadful little roadside restaurants that littered the American landscape reminded Hines of his early years on the road. Recalling those days, when he wished he had had his own guidebook to help him detour around these culinary armpits, Hines said, “I’d eat a terrible meal, and then discover that perhaps twenty miles farther I could have stopped at an excellent restaurant. If I’d only known about it. And it’s worth traveling twenty miles or even 200 miles to get the food you want. At least it is to me. I’d rather spend my money on gasoline and food than on doctor’s bills.”381
In June 1941 Frank J. Taylor profiled Hines in a magazine article for Scribner’s Commentator. That same month, the article was reprinted in Reader’s Digest. Taylor’s article was entitled “America’s Where-To-Eat Expert.” What the Saturday Evening Post initiated in December 1938, Taylor’s article solidified. The Digest had a vast readership, which stretched into the tens of millions, if there were Americans who had never heard of Duncan Hines before, there was no excuse now.
In the piece, Taylor quoted a famous chef who said Duncan Hines had “done more in four years to lift the standard of the American cuisine than all the cooks had done in the previous forty.” The Digest’s readers learned how he had accomplished this impressive feat. He had essentially rigged the industry to satisfy not only his wishes but the patron’s, too—and had done it all with a book. Taylor explained, in a nutshell, that because Hines’s restaurant guide had become the most trusted book in America on where to dine, any supposedly good restaurant not listed in its pages aroused public suspicion or skepticism concerning its cleanliness and worthiness. Because of this reaction, restauranteurs who wanted his approval were forced to keep their kitchens extraordinarily clean. When they kept their kitchens clean and served excellently-prepared meals, they generated public attention. If they generated enough attention they were inspected by Hines’s dinner detectives or Hines himself. If they met his criteria, they were awarded with a listing in Adventures in Good Eating. To restaurateurs, a listing in its pages meant more customers, and more customers meant more profits. Restaurateurs wanted higher profits so they kept their restaurants clean. They kept their establishments in pristine condition because some restaurateurs feared Hines—not for what he would say, but for what he would not. They never knew when he might seat himself in their dining room or ask to inspect their kitchen. And they knew the consequences of refusing to show him around. So it paid greater dividends to keep their kitchens well-scrubbed, uncontaminated, and modernized than to keep things as they were. In short, Hines pushed them into excellence.
Soon after the Reader’s Digest article came out, nearly every diner in America knew that when a restaurant proclaimed itself to be “recommended by Duncan Hines,” the meal served there was not only one to savor and long remember, it was also prepared in one of the cleanest kitchens in the country. Therefore, most travelers who knew of Adventures in Good Eating and understood its value patronized only the places he recommended. “His word is gospel,” wrote Taylor. And so it was.382
The publication of the Digest article had one additional benefit: it secured Hines’s fame and influence. The article also benefitted Hines financially. Sales for his books rose to an unprecedented level. Requests for him to speak, requests for him to investigate restaurants and hotels, requests for country hams, all flooded into his Bowling Green office like a torrential rain. Hines could not have been happier.
By 1941 Hines was dropping scores of restaurants and lodgings from his guidebooks, particularly the former. Again, cleanliness was the determining factor. One that was eliminated from its pages was “one of the country’s famous, century-old restaurants” in Washington, D.C. Hines walked in one day, discovered a dirty kitchen, walked out, and removed it from the book’s next edition. Whether the restaurant later took Hines’s suggestion—that all restaurants install a glass partition between the kitchen and the dining room so that diners could watch their food being prepared—is unknown. But other restaurants previously listed in his guidebook instituted this recommended design change so they could work their way back into his good graces. Hines liked the idea of the glass partition because, he said, it put “the kitchen staff on its mettle.”383
Shortly after the Reader’s Digest article was published, Hines armed himself with scores of new wisecracks contrived to shame restaurants who not only operated on the cheap but who surrounded their premises with fads and gimmicks instead of good food. One of the fads circulating in the early 1940s that drew his ire was the practice of lavishly decorating establishments to impart an air of “atmosphere.” Under the delusion that “atmosphere” would lure in more customers, some places covered their dining rooms with expensive drapes, slung impressive-looking white linen tablecloths across their scarred-up tables, and placed flowers and candlesticks between their guests to impart a sense of “romance.” Yet, despite their expensive efforts to dress up their businesses, they did not make the one necessary change that guaranteed them a continuing clientele: serving good food. Instead, serving high quality, sanitary meals never crossed their minds. Hines scoffed at their laughable endeavors: “Candlesticks and decorations don’t make a restaurant.” And why should they? After all, they were not on the menu.384
An emphasis on flowers and candlesticks were not the only thing that drew his contempt. He had a host of pet hatreds, and he volubly aired them as frequently as possible. He told Frank Taylor that veal listed on a menu as “baby beef’ made him see red. Said Hines, “There’s too much baby on the menu. Baby beef, baby lamb, baby lobster, baby chicken, baby this, baby that. Who wants to eat babies, anyway?” Another pet peeve that made him develop a coat of froth around his mouth was when a restaurant seated him at a table that had not yet been “cleared of the last patron’s dishes.” This practice, he said, had to stop. He also wanted restaurants to stop packing its patrons within its walls “like sardines.” This policy, he said, induced even mildly claustrophobic people to go mad. Lastly, he insisted he would not list—let alone eat in—a restaurant “where chefs smoke while they are cooking.” The practice was barbaric. Who wanted to eat someone else’s cigarette ashes?, he asked.385
In the dining room, he had certain culinary predilections. His face clouded over with intense annoyance when he swallowed a mouthful of soggy mashed potatoes or tried to chew a portion of ham that tasted like veal, or sipped muddy-looking coffee.386 However, what particularly vexed him were those restaurants that “denied their geography.” These he disliked passionately. Hines had no time for seafood in Nebraska or Mexican cuisine in Maine. A restaurant, Hines fervently believed, should serve the cuisine popular to the people who inhabited the area. He believed the best American cooking was regional cooking.387 Lobster in Iowa was simply not as genuine as lobster in Maine. A Kentucky hot brown served in North Dakota was simply a denial of the Midwestern state’s German culinary heritage.388
When asked about
the worst place to eat in America, Hines wouldn’t name a candidate, but offered that “the most barren” stretch of good restaurants in America was “the region between Chicago and Indianapolis.” Between those two cities, he said, there was not one restaurant on the main highway that he could recommend.389 However, his focus was usually on good restaurants—particularly those that served regional specialties, which he urged all his readers to indulge in for a bit of roadside culinary adventure. He urged them to “insist upon fresh chowder in New England, freshwater fish in the Great Lakes region, soft-shelled crabs in Maryland, shrimp in the Southeast [and] Spanish dishes in the Southwest.”390 Massachusetts may have been his favorite New England state when it came to food, but Maine was close behind. When he thought of the Pine Tree State, he thought of the clam chowder served in Portland. Said Hines: “It’s a chowder thick with clams fresh from the sea, free of tomato. It carries the sweet breath of onion, it’s enriched with salt pork.” Asked to describe a single word for it, he replied, “rib-comforting.”
Despite his acidic remarks about Southern restaurant cooking, Hines had more than a few favorite restaurants there. Maryland, he said, was the place to go if one wanted crabs. South Carolina was the destination for the palate that longed for okra and “corpulent” shrimp. Florida was the place to go if one wanted to indulge in devouring “giant stone crabs.” Florida also was home of the pompano, he said, “but cooks there invariably ruin it in preparation by adding a spicy sauce which muffles the delicate flavor.”391
The upper Midwest was full of surprises, too. The area comprising the Great Lakes states, he stated, was the best place to go if one wanted to dine on inland seafood. One of his favorite places in that area was the Fish Shanty restaurant in Port Washington, Wisconsin. Hines wrote that it had “long been a famous place for those who enjoy fresh fish caught right out of Lake Michigan by their own flotilla of troller boats.”392 Pennsylvania was the destination for travelers who drooled for the cuisine of the Pennsylvania Dutch. In 1938, noted Hines, one could still find places that served schnitz und knepp. Hines often spoke and wrote of the region’s food, especially its “shoofly pie, that molasses crumb pie, so perfect for Sunday breakfast with salt mackerel and coffee. But try to find it in a restaurant!” The search was difficult. Ohio was the place to go if one wanted good average American cooking, like old-fashioned chicken with dumplings. “I don’t mean that disgraceful travesty you get along with two leathery waffles,” he said. “I mean stewed chicken [that] is delicate in flavor, tender, the dumplings light as thistledown, cooked in … rich creamy gravy.”
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