Scribblings and Dribblings

Image from the Automat.net.

The wonder of impersonal food service.

• Automats almost experienced a brief revival in NYC, where Bamn!, located on 8th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues offered a modern American comfort food menu. They opened in 2006 and sadly closed in 2009.
• The interiors of automat restaurants were generally in the Art Deco style.
• The first automat restaurant was opened in 1902 by Horn & Hardart, and remained popular until the 1950’s. See the Smithsonian’s online article for more details.
• The last original automat closed in NYC in 1991.
• By all accounts, the automat was done in by fast food restaurants.

I have no personal memories of automats, as the last one in the Boston area went defunct in my childhood. I imagine the experience was similar to picking from a Woolworth’s lunch menu, being served by vending machines, and eating in the atmosphere of a Johnny Rocket’s. Does anyone remember eating at an automat?

Image from D & S Vending.

The RMI 8050.

Back when I was in high school, attending the High School Studies Program on Saturdays at MIT, there were a series of ancient vending machines, including this one (or one similar enough to it that it may as well have been this one), in the basement of Building 7 near the elevator. As a kid who essentially ate school lunches, I thought that the machine was alright. It dispensed chicken soup that was occasionally a little darker than normal, but on a cold winter day, salty soup was good.

I guess the tip off that the machine wasn’t well maintained was when I went to purchase a cup of tea that tasted like it had coffee in it. And again when my hot chocolate had a couple of noodles floating in it that I had convinced myself were actually malformed marshmallows extruded from some sort of tube that needed cleaning inside the device — after all, if MIT could make extruded french fries in their cafeteria, why not extruded marshmallows for the hot chocolate?

Extruded french fries, I hear you ask? Well, that’s another story. At the time — and now I’m dating myself — in 1984 the MIT cafeteria used to sell extruded french fries. My best friend Max and I would go to the corner vendor for a cup of chili with cheese and onions, and then go into the student center cafeteria for the french fries. This part of the experience was kind of a ritual. The cook would place a wire deep fry basket under the receptacle of a big machine attached to a water pipe. Occasionally, the cook emptied a bag of powder — ostensibly potato flour of some sort but it might also have been plaster dust — into a hopper at the top of the machine. He pressed a button on the front, which was inordinately large despite being the only button on the machine. After a compressor kicked on, french fries extruded into the fry basket. Within seconds, the basket was removed from the machine and plunged into oil the color of a raven’s wing at midnight. If the cook wasn’t fast enough, the potato sludge would congeal back into a single mass and have to be discarded.

Those are my memories of the food machines at MIT. Does anyone have other stories of vending machines they’d like to share?