I'm on 50th Street in Manhattan and behind me, underneath that scaffolding
is Tad's Broiled Steaks, one of the first fast food restaurants.
I mean, it wasn't quite what we recognize today. It's more of a cafeteria.
But the idea that you went in and you ordered from a very limited menu with limited options,
and it was cheap: that was the brainchild of the Townsend family and Tad's Broiled Steaks.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about.
What I'm here to talk about is a slightly less successful idea they had in the 1960s.
Here, on the first block of East 42nd Street, about where that McDonald's is now,
they opened Tad's Varieties.
Now, there isn't much of a record of this. The only contemporary article I could find was in the New Yorker
in 1963, which explained the concept.
You would go in, pick a frozen meal that's been made earlier that day or earlier that week,
take it to a microwave oven on your own table and heat it yourself.
And, well, that's an astonishing idea - that was going to change the world.
In fact, the guy who opened the restaurant said that in the future, there would be only two types of restaurants:
Fancy, upscale ones where someone else did the cooking, and cafeterias like that one,
where you went in, picked your frozen meal and set it up in your own microwave oven.
And he was nearly right.
But not quite. He failed to predict home microwaves and the ready-meals, and the TV dinners
that actually went on to change the world.
And the restaurant closed down soon after, but Ray Kroc, the guy who started McDonald's,
he took advice from the Townsend family.
That McDonald's over there is, in some ways, a descendant of a restaurant that might not
have worked out itself, but still left a bit of a mark on history.
Who knows, if history had turned out slightly differently, perhaps there'd be microwave cafeterias
all over the world.
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