FORD IN THE KITCHEN: ON TECHNOLOGY, PROGRESS AND FAST FOOD
I’m at an automatic restaurant at Joachimsthaler Straße. It’s called Quick. That’s American. And everything is so fabulous and happy.
— Irmgard Keun: The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932.
A postcard of Magdeburg's first Automat, early 1900s
Irmgard Keun’s masterful 1932 novel The Artificial Silk Girl portrays a young, somewhat naive woman moving around a roaring Berlin, hoping to make it big. The book name-drops every achievement modernity had brought along in the decades leading up to its publication: from Nivea cream to chewing gum, from Albert Einstein to Colleen Moore, and from artificial silk to automatic restaurants. What motivates Doris, the artificial silk girl, is her dream of ‘shining’: She wants to become a part of everything glamorous, to reflect the light of neon signs and be beamed onto the silver screen. In this world, whatever is new is good, and nothing could be more ‘fabulous and happy’ than an automatic restaurant with an American name. The notion of fast food having an air of chic, of something so wonderfully futuristic and worldly, will strike most people as odd today. In the nineteen-twenties, however, as all kinds of avant-garde groups were making waves with their ideas for new and better worlds, oftentimes brutally cutting ties with everything ‘old’ and ‘bourgeois’, these kinds of restaurants were typical proof of a changing society. They were bright lights and promises for a long-awaited better future.
Setting the scene
Even though this particular restaurant appears American to Doris, the idea for automatic restaurants — which essentially are restaurants in the form of big vending machines — came from Germany. It was in 1886 that the Deutsche Automaten Gesellschaft came up with the idea, and by November of that same year, the world’s first automatic restaurant opened its doors in Berlin. Shortly after, they began popping up around the country, usually decorated in a Jugendstil or Art Déco style, as was the rage in the late nineteenth century. It didn’t take long for other countries to follow, and by 1902, restaurateurs Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart had begun to roll out their chain, Horn & Hardart, across the United States. It was to become, at least for a while, the biggest restaurant chain in the world and, especially in New York, an important part of cities’ streetscapes. These restaurants, although cheap and made for fast, on-the-go eating, were indeed glamorous — with their mirrors, marble and shining chrome. So much so in fact, that after the last Horn & Hardart closed in 1992, the Smithsonian Museum of American History took on parts of its interior, calling the ‘Automat’ a “relic of Americana”. While many aspects of a changing culture contributed to this type of restaurant slowly falling out of style after World War II, one great misconception concerning its business model played a particularly important role in its decline. The Smithsonian described the automat as “the restaurant industry’s first attempt at emulating the assembly line” — and they were precisely that: a first, very flawed attempt. While shiny and futuristic on the customer’s side of the vending machine walls, the way these restaurants were actually run was all but modern and streamlined. If anything, automatic restaurants seemed to need more staff than conventional restaurants, rather than less. Every time someone inserted a coin into the slot and took out a plate, a restaurant worker would quickly fill up the empty space left behind. The next customer would then choose this new, freshest looking plate — creating an enormous amount of food waste. Horn & Hardart therefore soon began selling day-old dishes at a discount in special shops in less affluent neighbourhoods. These simple mechanical devices, that looked and smelled like future, were not much more than smart stage design.
Pushing forward
What the restaurants did deliver on, however, was convenience. They introduced what has now become commonplace in hospitality: self-service. The transactions were easy, tipping was not needed, and with the speed of it all, it seemed to be made for a new kind of urban living. But it took further crystallisation of this business model for it to become enduringly lucrative. In 1940, after many failed businesses and a somewhat successful hot dog stand, two brothers opened a small drive-in restaurant in San Bernadino, California. The restaurant quickly became a moderate success, but the brothers realised that the way to keep costs down and make more money was to introduce the self-service concept, which by then had also been implemented in dime stores and supermarkets alike. Looking closely at their business, they soon understood that in order to make it big, they would have to do more than getting people out of their cars. As the automat had proven before, self-service alone wasn’t enough. What drew their customers were the low prices, and in order to safeguard those, they needed to sell a lot. So the brothers renovated their restaurant, got rid of most items on their elaborate menu and streamlined the process of making only their best-sellers: hamburgers, fries, milkshakes. They got bigger grills, machines to make the patties, paper bags to replace the china, and chose for their customers which condiments would be on the burgers. Richard and Maurice McDonald named their restaurant, you guessed it, McDonald’s.
“By implementing these changes to their business, the brothers were able to cater to a changing society.”
Now this was the restaurant of the future, the truly automatic restaurant, the first to have turned the kitchen into an assembly line and Marxist nightmare: There were three men on the grill, who only grilled burgers, two on French fries, two on milkshakes, two on overall assembly and three at the till. By implementing these changes to their business, the brothers were able to cater to a changing society. In the nineteen-fifties, after unsettling war years and with more and more babies being born, a new type of family life started to appear. This was helped by the increasing amount of women entering the work field, needing quick and easy food options. Early on, the brothers had decided they would direct their advertisement towards young children, who represented the opportunity of life-long loyalty — and because parents had a hard time saying no to their persistent begging. This strategy was cemented with the introduction of the Happy Meal in the nineteen-seventies. As soon as businessman Ray Kroc got involved and started franchising the restaurant, it blew up big time. It was to become the largest restaurant chain in the country, and, eventually, the world. By then, however, other restaurant chains had also begun to adopt the assembly line-kitchen the McDonald brothers had introduced. Although there are notable exceptions, these restaurants came to define what was considered fast food in the West: burgers, fries, and other deep-fried snacks. In contrary, the automats before them had sold dishes ranging from sweet and savoury pies to salads and stews. All of these factors, from the ubiquity of the burger chains to their paper packaging, tailored marketing to children and families and their growing reputation of being unhealthy — while highly successful, now made fast food seem more like a guilty pleasure than a fashionable indulgence.
Fast food and the American Dream
Despite its growing negative connotations, an entire new generation came to define its identity through exactly this type of restaurant. A lot more prominent today than the ‘relics of Americana’ that the automats represent are the images in popular culture of teenagers sipping on milkshakes and biting into burgers. Burger chains have come to develop their own place in canon of what defines the American Dream. Rather than something aspirational and chic, eating at one of their restaurants has become a way to show a sense of ‘joie de vivre’, of lighthearted fun. It can also be an effective way for the rich and famous to show they are still ‘of the people’: Take Bella Hadid bragging about eating burgers before getting on the runway, or Donald Trump proclaiming his love for KFC. But even this kind of lightheartedness is increasingly suffering in light of the climate crisis: lightheartedly not caring, a trope of young people since just about forever, seems to be slowly losing its cool.
New York City's last Horn & Hardart that closed in 1991, pictured around 1987 (via Facebook '70s/80s New York City')
But then came the artisanal movement of the twenty-tens. With a particular brand of vintage flair, it not only re-introduced the old school barber, but also got its hands on The Burger Restaurant. For a few years, trying out the latest burger or hot dog shop around town became a trendy enterprise once again. In these new restaurants, burgers could now be vegan and fries be made of sweet potatoes or polenta. Still, they largely took the menu staples the chain corporations had defined out of reasons of streamlining production processes and lowering costs — but in their promise to make the food better, they also became less fast, less cheap and less accessible. The ‘new’ burger restaurant took the outward image of fast food and re-loaded it with a watered-down slow food philosophy. Turns out ‘progress’ works in mysterious ways.
To finish the story of the automat: In the seventies, Burger King slowly started moving into properties formerly owned by Horn & Hardart. The automats had come to occupy a shrinking market place. The food too simple for the men and women of Madison Avenue; the charm and novelty of its technology no longer interesting to younger, ever faster living generations. The closing doors of many locations made it easy to forget what these restaurants once represented. The automat had lost its chic and was on its way out. It would be a matter of time until the automatic restaurant (almost) completely ceased to exist. Along with it disappeared not only the once-biggest restaurant chain in the world, but the idea of fast food as progress.
Want to see an automat in the wild, in use, outside of a museum? Read more here to find out about the one country that can’t seem to get rid of them.
Text: Yannic Moeken
Copy Editing: Charlotte Faltas
Photography: Jip Moeken
