In the age before everyone was eating vegan, gluten-free, or just not eating at all (gentle shout-out to all you Ozempic “practitioners”), women considered a day at the local department store incomplete unless it included lunch. And lunch meant a table for two to four lady friends, typically from soup to nuts, with heaping buttery carbs in the middle, plus cocktails.
The practice began during the Gilded Age, when stores like Lord & Taylor in New York, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, and Hudson’s in Detroit first opened their doors to one of the newest pastimes for society women—shopping and dining out in public. As Nancy MacDonnell writes in Empresses of Seventh Avenue, “department stores provided a place where women could respectably socialize in public at a time when such venues were scarce,” having become “an indelible part of consumer culture.”
