The Four-Bit Meal

More Restaurant Prices from 1930's Los Angeles

In the 1930’s, Central Station was east of downtown Los Angeles at Fifth and Central Aves. It was replaced by Union Station in 1939 and demolished in the 1950’s. Today, that corner is ground zero of Skid Row

Last week, my piece on cheap dining in Depression-Era Los Angeles, The Dime Meal, elicited a number of comments at various places, all trying to figure out what a dime was worth in today’s money. I’m not an economist, so I did what any reasonable, lazy person would do and went to the internet, where I plugged 10 cents into two different online calculators: the US Inflation Calculator and the Food Price Inflation Calculator. The result was $2.15 and $2.52 respectively, or well less than $3 in today’s money.

This surprised me, as it seems well below the level at which it is possible to serve a multi-course meal, with beverage, and make a profit.

Remember, here’s what LA Times reporter A.C. Faith was fed at the Sunrise Cafe:

What do they get to eat for their 10 cents?

My first meal was grease and cabbage soup, not so good; a big hamburger that was fit to eat, a heap of fried potatoes, a piece of fried egg-plant, a small salad of raw carrots and cabbage, white and whole-wheat bread—all anyone could eat of it—a bowl of celeray, radishes and onions that everyone dipped into, a small dish of bread pudding, two glasses of ice tea. Coffee was available.

Cabbage soup, hamburger steak, small salad, bread, fried potatoes, vegetables, pudding and ice tea. All for a dime! Could you produce that meal for $2.52 per person at home, today? Maybe, if you bought in bulk and limited your portion sizes. Now do it at a restaurant and turn a profit, however small. Good luck with that.

Obviously, modern restaurant costs are much higher than during the 1930s, out-pacing inflation by a significant margin. I suspect it’s a combination of higher rents, increased labor costs, insurance and other sundries that weigh heavily on modern restaurateurs.

In any event, a dime was an exceptionally low price, which was my original point.

But, what about restaurants that weren’t on Skid Row, restaurants where respectable people took their meals? Luckily, in the last decade, the number of menu collections that have been digitized and placed online has skyrocketed, making figuring this out painfully easy.

So, for example, the Los Angeles Public Library now has a decent menu collection with a good search function, which in less than a minute returns this: a menu from the coffee shop in the Villa Riviera apartments in Long Beach, dated October 27, 1934.

Opened in 1929, Villa Riviera was one of the nicest condominium-apartment buildings in Long Beach, with a restaurant, beauty salon and parking for 100 cars. Now, it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

At the Villa Riviera your dime bought a plate of pickles, a piece of pie or a glass of lemonade. Happily, you could get a complete, multi-course lunch, featuring a grilled barracuda filet, dessert and drink for a mere 45 cents.

It should be noted that this is not high-end dining. It’s squarely in the middle. In fact, the experts at the Los Angeles Public Library have categorized this as “Price Range: inexpensive-moderate”. The more expensive lunches, at places like the Brown Derby, started at a dollar and went up from there.

Here’s another example of a mid-1930’s Los Angeles menu, this time from the library of the Culinary Institute of America. It’s the table d’hôte luncheon menu from Los Angeles’s Central Station Restaurant, dated February 10, 1936.

According to the Food Inflation Calculator, 50 cents in 1936 is $11.65 today. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?

It was four blocks and forty cents from Los Angeles’s Skid Row to Central Station, where two quarters—four bits— got you a multi-course lunch with a cup of coffee, all while you waited for the Streamliner to get in from Palm Springs. Maybe you might even see Clark Gable!

And what are today’s specials, Mr. Schilling?

Did we eat all the barracuda? It seems like you never see it anymore on menus.

As you can see, the lunch entrees start at fifty cents and go up from there. On another page of the menu, you find that, after five pm, the table d’hôte dinner at the station restaurant was $1.25. For that buck and a quarter, you got a sirloin steak, a filet mignon, half a broiled chicken or lamb chops, plus all the fixings, dessert and a beverage. So, even at a mid-priced restaurant, a dollar and a quarter was a reasonable amount for the evening meal. Add twenty cents for a glass of wine or a bottle of beer, and you’re talking almost $1.50, or 15 times the cost of a meal at the Sunrise Cafe.

One again, a dime is almost unbelievably cheap. I’m not sure how the restaurant owners did it, although I’m going to see if I can find out. And that’s yet another topic for a future piece.

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