In Eating Across America, Kim and Leigh talk about diners and more specifically, the Harvey House concept helps to create travel communities and good manners.
To start the conversation, Leigh recalls how her hometown diner played a role in community building. She shares the definition of a diner from the sounds of conversation, diner coffee culture, serveware, and interior decor.
In an effort to understand diner culture, she discusses the evolution of the diner from a small lunch wagon in Rhode Island to pre-manufactured diners fabricated by the Worcester Lunch Car and Carriage Manufacturing Company.
These small mom-and-pop shops have weathered two World Wars, the Great Depression, by skillfully adapting themselves to the wants and needs of their communities.
A location for politicians to meet constituents, scenes from popular movies, and even subjects for songs and pieces of art, the diner has become an American icon. A place where your food comes quickly, but the conversations are slow and easy.
To continue with the theme of eating in community, Kim dives into an establishment whose purpose was to provide an eating service to railway passengers.
After testing two locations along the Kansas Pacific Railway line, Fred Harvey determined that there was a market for a high quality food service for people on the railways. This led to the development of the Harvey Houses that would dot the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway line from Kansas to Arizona.
These eating houses offered a consistently high quality experience in a very short amount of time making it easy for passengers to enjoy white table cloth experience in the time it took the train to take on necessary fuel and/or water. The service also helped to develop rail travel and would ultimately result in dining cars being introduced to passenger trains.
If you’d like to visit one of the still-standing Harvey Houses, visit La Posada in Winslow, Arizona which is also a Harvey House museum.
Whether it’s an American diner or an iteration of the Harvey House, these eateries provide travelers with a sense of familiarity.
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MORE GOOD STUFFSources We Found Helpful for this Episode
La Pasada Hotel
Books We Think You’ll Enjoy Reading
Harvey Houses of the Southwest, Richard Melzer
The Harvey House Cookbook, George H. Foster and Peter C. Weiglin
The American Diner Cookbook, Elizabeth McKeon
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