“Success is an absurd, erratic thing.” - Alice Foote MacDougall
Until the early 20th century, most dining establishments were off-limits to women. Many were loud, bright, unadorned joints, jammed with working men gobbling steaks, oysters and beans. As more women entered the work force as stenographers, typists and clerks, they searched in vain for an agreeable place to eat.
That’s when Alice Foote MacDougall entered the scene. Growing up in a wealthy family on Washington Square North, where servants’ entrances and carriage houses were de riguer, Alice married very young and gave birth to three children. Her husband was a successful wholesale coffee jobber for a few years, and then went bankrupt. He died a broken man in 1907, leaving Alice with $38 and three kids to raise on her own.
A portrait of Alice by Jessie Tarbox Beale, c. 1925. (New York Historical Society). Select to enlarge any image. Phone users: finger-zoom or rotate screen.
As a single mom surviving on wits alone, Alice realized the only business she knew something about was her husband’s trade. Coffee would have to be her ticket out of poverty. Gambling everything, she rented a tiny space on Front Street in the Coffee District and became New York’s first female coffee jobber. For her initial deal, she bought, roasted and ground five pounds of coffee beans and sold them for a 70-cent profit. Alice Foote MacDougall had taken her first step to becoming a multi-millionaire.
In Erin Meister’s fascinating book, New York City Coffee, she describes Alice as “barely five feet tall and squat all around, she was like a walking combustion engine in a lace dress and a Victorian hat.” Brazen, outspoken, and determined to succeed, Alice began hauling and selling her roasted beans around town. In a few years she had saved enough to lease a booth in Grand Central Terminal, and opened the Little Coffee Shop to showcase her product. Decorated with silk curtains and blue-and-white china, Alice created what she called “a place of rest and beauty, a little haven to entice the weary commuter.” Gradually people, especially women attracted by the decor, came in and bought a pound or two of her roasted beans on their way home. Soon Alice set up a percolator and a few tables, serving brewed coffee as well.
A can of Alice’s coffee. Note the tagline “The Only Woman Coffee Expert.”
But business was slow. After six months of poor sales, her sons begged her to close the shop. She stubbornly refused, stating “I simply don’t believe in failure.”
Sure enough, one February day in 1921 Alice’s fortune changed dramatically. A furious ice storm engulfed the city, forcing frozen, wet New Yorkers into the station. While watching the human misery, Alice had a brainstorm: she asked her housemaid to mix up some waffle batter, grab a waffle iron, and rush them to the station. Posting a hastily-written sign in the window which read “Waffles,” Alice sold them for a nickel each, with a free cup of coffee. Her waffles were an instant smash hit. It its first year the Little Coffee Shop turned a small profit, and spawned an empire.
Alice entertaining sailors in her home during World War I, by Jessie Tarbox Beals, c. 1917-1918. (New York Historical Society)
Alice opened up a second restaurant in 1922 on West 43rd Street, with a phalanx of waffle irons cooking around the clock. She was soon serving 8,000 diners a month, three full meals a day. Her popular breakfasts were based on the abundance of her childhood: fruit, oatmeal, sausages, buckwheat cakes and hot bread, accompanied by coffee with “cream so thick you could cut it with a knife.” Although men disliked her restaurants, women loved them. Within a year she had to double her seating capacity.
At this point Alice was exhausted, overwhelmed by her success, and took a trip to Italy to restore her senses. It was a revelation. Alice discovered charming coffee bars and the exquisite beauty of Florence and Venice. Returning home, she turned this inspiring journey into an astounding success.
Portrait of Alice, photographer unknown.
Alice created three new midtown restaurants: the Cortile, the Piazzetta, and the Firenze, replicating her romantic Italian experience. They were decorated to resemble rustic Italian streets, including laundry hanging from overhead balconies, and waitresses refilling their water pitchers from a central fountain. The menu included sandwiches, seafood, imported cheeses, and, of course, her famous coffee. Alice had invented the concept of the “theme restaurant,” and reaped fame and rewards. When her fifth eatery opened, the Spanish-inspired Sevillia, her skills were so well-known that lines formed around the block. On the Sevillia’s first Saturday of operation Alice served more than two thousand people, most of them women who adored restaurants designed just for them. At its zenith, her empire employed 800 waitresses and had annual revenues of $3 million. She authored several cookbooks which featured her philosophy of creating “loveliness and perfection in all you do.” Alice Foote MacDougall had become the Martha Stewart of her day.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last. Loveliness and perfection could not sustain Alice’s operation during the Great Depression. Revenues sank, and the restaurants were eventually put into receivership. She reluctantly retired, and died in 1945. But a bit of her survives in every coffee shop and artistically-designed restaurant in town. As Ms. Meister puts it, Alice Foote MacDougall was “a true character, a true New Yorker, and an absolute individual.”
I’ll drink (coffee) to that!
