A journey one hundred years into the past, price-wise

Mike Berman wrote at around noon today:

My wife and I had a meaningful experience this morning. I dragged her out of bed and we got ourselves up to Barney Greengrass at 86th St. and Amsterdam Avenue 35 minutes before opening time for its 100th anniversary. The line was not as bad as I anticipated, we gained entrance as soon as they opened, and everything was terrific. We had a sturgeon appetizer, scrambled eggs, lox and onion, a sturgeon sandwich, coffee and iced tea for the amazing sum of six bucks for the two of us. I thanked Gary Greengrass and told him I felt I had died and gone to Jewish heaven. If you have the time, they close at 4.

I replied:

Mike, is there a special deal today and only today?

Mike B. replied

That’s what it’s all about. 1908 prices in 2008. Here is the article from today’s New York Sun.

I had never eaten at Barney Greengrass, so a female VFR reader and I went there around three o’clock. We had to wait about a half hour to get in. It was of course extremely crowded and hectic. The two us had:

Fresh orange juice
Coffee
Two Dr. Brown cherry sodas
Scrambled eggs with nova and onion
Scrambled eggs with sturgeon and onion
Two large bagels each with two pats of butter and a huge slab of cream cheese
Appetizers (which we ate after the eggs):
White fish platter with tomato and onion (the white fish was plentiful and by far the best part of the meal)
Chopped liver platter with tomato, onion, pickles, and lettuce

The bill for all this was $5.75. In fact there was a mix-up and to straighten it out they gave us the chopped liver appetizer free. If they had charged us for it, the total would have come to a big $6.50. We left a $6.00 tip, since, as the menu reminded us, while the prices were 1908, the waiters were living in the 21st century.

- end of initial entry -

Alan Levine writes:

Read the item on the restaurant with amusement. I just recently read a book on the Pearl Harbor attack which happened to give the menu of a Honolulu restaurant in 1941. The most expensive item was a Porterhouse steak—for one dollar.

Hawaii, by the way, was famous for high prices.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 11, 2008 06:55 PM | Send