Americans eat out at every opportunity and in every way. Workers on the go can start the day with coffee and a chocolate-covered custard-filled at Dunkin' Donuts (DNKN) , then get a mid-morning Frappuccino at Starbucks (SBUX) and a lunch burrito at Chipotle (CMG) before picking up a bucket of fried chicken with mashed potatoes at KFC (YUM) for a quick family dinner.
At the other end of the social spectrum, New York machers can start their day with a $21 California omelet at Michael's, have the orchiette with lamb neck sausage at Mario Batali's Del Posto and finish the day by wolfing down a steak at Peter Luger in Brooklyn. The tab for this zealous patronage of restaurants was $55 billion last year, which exceeded for the first time the amount of money spent on groceries in the U.S.
Paul Freedman traces the history of our spendthrift foodways in his new book, Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Freedman, a professor of medieval history at Yale University, uses case studies to organize a subject that touches on numerous themes both culinary and cultural, from "the erosion and survival of American regional cooking, the role of women as customers and restauranteurs, the pressures of efficiency and standardization in American history, and the various obfuscations as well as explorations of what it might mean to talk about 'American cuisine,' " as Freedman writes in his introduction, to the rise of the automobile and a national highway system and the urbanization of the U.S. since 1900.
