Vintage DINAH\'S SHACK Palo Alto, CA Mammy Restaurant Menu For Sale
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Vintage DINAH\'S SHACK Palo Alto, CA Mammy Restaurant Menu:
$41.00
Mammy Image - Black Americana
Nice used condition - taped lower right corner - wonderful imagery and LOOK AT THOSE PRICES!
The little restaurant with the BIG History:
Dinah’s Shack actually began with a tribute to a black woman. In 1926, during a horse and buggy ride down El Camino Real, the old State Highway, Charles McMonagle and his wife Hazel saw an old ramshackle structure.
According to legend, Hazel cried out, “It’s Dinah’s Shack!” --- the home of the beloved black woman who had cared for her in her Kansas childhood. The McMonagles decided to buy the shack and turn it into a roadside carry-out restaurant catering to the many highway travelers on their way back and forth from San Francisco. They also purchased a 20-acre farm across the street where they grew the produce used in the restaurant.
In those early days, the restaurant was staffed almost entirely by black cooks and waiters, many of them former sleeping car porters, lured off the Southern Pacific. Dinah’s Shack featured the cuisine of the South, largely African-American influenced --- Southern-fried spring chicken on toast, biscuits and honey, waffle potatoes --- as well as musical acts such as Lou Foote and his Two Toes.
Between the 1920s and 1950s, Dinah’s became a nationally famous stop along the old highway, known for “authentic southern hospitality,” as well as for being a favorite hangout for better-off Stanford students like John F. Kennedy, who was attending the business school in the fall of 1940.
By that time, the McMonagles had introduced a kind of salad bar of hors d’oeuvres representing the cuisines of different states and regions of the country in which they often traveled to research local foods.
The ambiance of the restaurant was a selling point. Writing in 1936 in The San Francisco News, Ruth Thompson described “a large fireplace which on cool nights is cozily ablaze. Pictures adorn the walls; kerosene lamps flicker on shelves, on the old piano, on the mantel. Outside the gardens, there are attractive winding paths edged with fragrant blooms.”
By 1968, blacks were gaining political power and speaking out against blatantly racist symbols of the day. Not surprisingly, the Palo Alto/Stanford branch of the NAACP went after Dinah’s. The group called the restaurant’s bandanna-capped mammy and stereotypically drawn stable boys “offensive,” while a group of professional journalists in a Stanford fellowship program publicly boycotted the restaurant because of its “offensive racist symbols” and “perpetuation of stereotypes.”
Finally succumbing to the economics of earthquake retrofitting, Dinah\'s was forced to close in 1989. Having long forgotten any racial controversies, the local papers wrote tributes to the restaurant, recalling its glory days and vibrant history. Some recalled that original story behind the Dinah’s Shack name. And perhaps in the end, having considered and noted the bitterness bred by caricatures of Dinah.
PLEASE REFER TO PHOTOS