The memories scan wide. There were German restaurants in Olney and Center City - the Schwarzwald Inn, Hoffman House and Ostendorff's. The Italians were below South. The great oyster houses were near Dock Street. The speakeasies of Prohibition. The grand hotels. The exclusive clubs. And the lesser-known neighborhood restaurants. In West Philadelphia it was Oscar's at 52d and Market Streets and Joe Littleton's at 40th and Lancaster Avenue. Bushman's father, Max, worked as a chef there from 1915 to 1925.
And there was Fritz Pflug's Arcadia International Restaurant, a post-repeal nightspot frequented by such performers as Rudy Vallee, Guy Lombardo and Gene Krupa. In 1936, the Arcadia became Bushman's first restaurant publicity job, and so, even 64 years later, the 85-year-old can't resist a plug: "It was the city's first big restaurant nightclub with good food."
But what about the great Restaurant Renaissance? The glorious blaze of sophisticated places bringing the 1900s to a close surely owe the pioneers of 1970 a debt.
Bushman won't contest it - "but when I read people write about the Restaurant Renaissance, you would think nothing existed before 1970."
He shakes his head and smiles. There is so much more to the story.
* By 1900, the first Golden Age of Philadelphia food had already ended. As food historian William Woys Weaver writes in The Larder Invaded: Reflections on Three Centuries of Philadelphia Food and Drink, the period began in the 1790s with the city's tenure as the cosmopolitan capital of a new country. Cut off from the British (no culinary loss there), the city gained a talented new pool of cooks and confectioners, thanks to the French Revolution and the Haitian slave rebellion.
This golden era came to an end in 1895 with the death of James W. Parkinson, "perhaps the greatest American cook," according to Woys Weaver.
