In 1889, two brothers in New York City opened a restaurant that was a direct response to concerns about food safety. Samuel S. Childs and William Childs opened the first Childs Restaurant on Cortlandt Street in Manhattan’s Financial District, focusing on affordable meals for the working class coupled with extremely high standards (historically speaking, at least) for hygiene, cleanliness, and food safety.
The Childs brothers knew it was not enough simply to tell their customers about their emphasis on hygiene—they had to show them. The brothers accomplished this by outfitting the interiors of their restaurants with white tiles, conjuring images of the sterile environment of a hospital. (Samuel Childs studied both medicine and engineering, and drew upon his education when designing the interior of the restaurants.)
In the same vein, the restaurant’s waitresses were clad in pristine, starched white uniforms—reminiscent of those worn by nurses—and made a point of having janitorial staff visibly cleaning in front of customers at all times. Another significant selling point was the milk brought in daily from the Childs’ Dairy Farm in New Jersey—a particularly enticing feature for New Yorkers for whom the swill milk scandal still lingered in recent memory. In fact, “Fresh milk expressed from our own dairy every morning” was printed on the side each menu—a precursor to our farm-to-table fervor.
This unique emphasis on food safety and hygiene—coupled with other features, such as being one of the first cafeteria-style restaurants—made Childs Restaurants very profitable, and the brothers opened other branches, paving the way for the now-ubiquitous chain restaurants and their more short-lived cousin, the sleek, smooth-surfaced automat (now making a bit of a comeback).
The Childs Restaurant chain reached its peak in the 1920s, with more than 120 restaurants in cities including Cleveland, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Miami, and Milwaukee in addition to a number of locations throughout the New York metropolitan area. The restaurants were frequently located in high-traffic commercial districts, providing the ideal respite for weary shoppers. The cafeteria-style dining also appealed to women—both workers and shoppers—as a quick and more socially acceptable way to dine on their own.
While the original focus on hygiene and sanitation reflected the zeitgeist of the end of the 20th century, by the 1920s, William Childs believed “the public has long since become convinced of the purity of Childs kitchens” and set his sights on designing fashionable exteriors, a 1928 article in New McClure’s explained. For example, in 1925, facing opposition from the Fifth Avenue Association—which could not envision an affordable luncheonette alongside the likes of Tiffany’s or Altman’s—the Childs brothers enlisted the services of architect William Van Allen, the designer of the Chrysler Building, for their Fifth Avenue location, the first of eight Childs Restaurants on the avenue.