From Delmonico’s to Sylvia’s to Chez Panisse, a daring and original history of dining out in America as told through ten legendary restaurants

Merging a historian’s rigor using a foodie’s palate, Ten Restaurants That Transformed America reveals how the history of our restaurants displays nothing less than the history of America itself.

Whether charting the rise of our love affair with Chinese meals through San Francisco’s fabled the Mandarin, causing the richness of Italian meals through Mamma Leone’s, or chronicling the rise and fall of French haute cuisine through Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon, meals historian Paul Freedman uses each cafe to tell a wider story of race and course, immigration and assimilation. Freedman also treats us to a scintillating history of the then-revolutionary Schrafft’s, a string of convivial lunch places that catered to women, and that bygone favorite, Howard Johnson’s, which pioneered on-the-road dining, only to end up being swept aside by McDonald’s.

10 Restaurants That Changed America is a significant and highly entertaining public history.

“A robust historical trek through America’s cafe cuisine over three decades.”-Kirkus Reviews