by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The history of the Imperial Café, in downtown Los Angeles on Broadway next to City Hall on one side and on Spring street on the other, between 2nd and 3rd streets, after the publication of the September 1902 musical program that is the highlighted artifact for this post, is a remarkably topsy-turvy one over its remaining seven years of operation.
In early 1903, Alois Fischer, proprietor of just a year, sold the lease to Frank J. Cotta and his brother-in-law Charles Zinkand of San Francisco and the two were among the trustees of a newly formed Imperial Café Company, capitalized at $75,000. In a 31 January ad in the Los Angeles Times, Cotta inquired of readers whether they’d been to the establishment recently and, if not, “you’ll be agreeably surprised when you get there” because he and his associates left “nothing undone to make it perfect from every standpoint” including daily musical offerings.
The 23 February edition of the Los Angeles Express reported that, “the details of which are shrouded in the deepest mystery,” local brewers Maier and Zobelein, who were involved in the Imperial from its start nearly four years prior, sold their interests to Zinkand, said to have been a caterer. The secrecy surrounded the price paid and what the new owner’s plans comprised, though “extensive improvements and the acquisition of the abutting property to be included in the plant are hinted.”
On 11 April, remarked the Times of the next day, Cotta got into a row with one of his waiters at 2 a.m. in which he fired off a gun and the manager was hauled off to jail and held without bail because he was “in such a condition from drink and excitement that it was not safe for him to be at large.” The dispute occurred during business hours, but, after closure, a group of servers were out in front of the Imperial’s Spring Street entrance. A fist fight then took place and officers called at 1 a.m., but Cotta refused to say what transpired.
Thirty minutes later, a pair of officers were nearby and heard a gunshot and rushed to the eatery and saw Cotta peel off another round from his pistol, after which he ducked behind the bar. When the officers entered and arrested the manager, they did so with great resistance as Cotta “had to be dragged from behind the bar” and Zinkand and others “tried to interfere.” The latter and others accompanied the officers and Cotta to jail and raised a ruckus, as they “threatened to secure the dismissal “of every policeman who entered” the café, but it was insisted that the manager be arrested and held because he was likely to turn to his weapon again.
The Los Angeles Record of the 14th commented that LAPD Chief Charles Elton released Cotta on his own recognizance but that, when it came time for a preliminary hearing, the latter was a no-show. When he did arrive later for the proceeding, he claimed he could not remember anything about the incident “since the Wurzburger [beer] began to flow about midnight.” It was not clear if he fired in anyone’s general direction, as a bullet hit a fireplace away from where his opponent was standing, but Cotta pled guilty and was fined all of $10. The Times observed that the sentence was because the defendant was “struggling with a dose of booze.”
Another spate of violence occurred in mid-June with the Express of the 16th reporting that head waiter F.W. Robinson went to a table and asked its occupants to move because another party was to be seated there. J.H. Turner, a singer at the Cineograph Theatre, had already been relocated once during the evening and took umbrage at this second request. Robinson “at once assaulted him with a beer bottle” inflicting some heavy wounds on Turner’s head. Significantly, concluded the article,
As patrons of the place have been assaulted by waiters in the cafe before, Chief Elton warned the proprietors that unless better order is maintained he will take steps to bring the matter before the police commissioners and recommend that the license of the resort be revoked.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, two weeks later, recorded the Record of the last day of the month, J.S. Hendrickson, the watchman at the establishment was appointed a special policeman at the Imperial—this was not the first time this had been done, as part one noted. The 19 September edition of the paper tersely noted that Cotta “retired” and Zinkand assumed direct management, with company secretary Max Nickel offering the typical reason as being that the former “is in need of rest and relaxation.”
The next controversy came shortly afterward when forty waiters of the establishment decided to call a strike after Zinkand asked Robinson to call the servers to a meeting in which it was stated that they were to be paid $35 monthly, with a day off a week, instead of $10 weekly on a 10-hour daily schedule. The vociferously anti-union Times noted that a union president “played shepherd dog for the union sheep and drove them all out on strike,” raising Zinkand’s ire (the press frequently quoted him using German phrases like “Gott in Himmel” [God in Heaven] as he worked up a lather) as he commented that the union tried to get the cooks, bartenders and orchestra members to join the strike.
The paper, all-too-happy to highlight the purported greed of unions and promoting the virtues of arbitration over strikes, further quoted Zinkand about the nature of tips (something in the news now today during the presidential campaign concerning the taxing of gratuities) as he explained that he invested heavily in the restaurant so that waiters could “make from $2 to $3 a day here in tips and the job is worth $100 a month to almost all of them.” Yet, the manager railed against the tip system, stating he’d tried to eliminate it calling it “a foreign fad.”
Zinkand, however, caved and agreed to pay servers $10 a week and give them a day off a week and the “genial” proprietor professed to have no hard feelings against his employees, even as he declared that the dust-up could have been handled between the parties “if the walking delegate had kept his nose out.” Despite his claim that there were no issues between him and his staff, Zinkand then provided the Times an extraordinary comment,
An exclusion act against the Japanese is talked up. I for one would like to see enough Japanese shipped into this city to stand behind every restaurant chair in the place. They make the best of waiters, and do their work cheerfully for what they are paid, without holding out their hand for a tip. If you do tip a Jap you get an oriental salaam [a bow], but if you tip one of these fellows 10 cents, which is probably 25 per cent of the price of your meal, you get a grunt, and he goes away muttering because you did not give him a quarter.
The Zinkand era came to an end in June 1904 when Nickel and Harry Milling took over and an ad in the Record on the 23rd boasted that the Imperial had the “best chef in [the] city” with chafing dishes used and that “everything [is] new, clean and bright” including the “best music on the coast.”
By the start of 1905, that latter was enhanced by the hiring of members of the Wiedoeft family of musicians, who, an ad in the Los Angeles Herald of 8 January, stated, “have accustomed the Imperial patrons to the highest class, most pleasing music and never disappoint.” The food was also again promoted with the best cook in town and “the choicest that the market affords.”
As happened under Zinkand and the wait staff, however, Nickel and Milling ran into union issues, this time with the musicians. The Times was more than happy to take the managers’ side by writing in its edition of 15 April that,
The Imperial Café is on the “unfair” list of the Central Council of Agitation [the paper routinely called union members and organizers “agitators”]. The laborites came to their decision night before last, and the restaurant is now expected by them to shrink, wither and shrivel utterly away under the blight.
The establishment, the paper was pleased to report, “is at last completely out from under union domination, and the escape from thralldom is agitating indeed to the boycotters and trouble-makers.” Nickel and Milling joined the Citizens’ Alliance, an anti-union (euphemistically, “open shop) organization, though it was added that the unions held sway first with the servers and then the musicians, with brewery unions, because of the close ties to restaurants, especially effective.
Continuing that the owners were steadfast in their views, the Times accused union organizers of being susceptible to “lay awake nights to think out an evil remedy” and this came after problems between Nickel and Milling and the union orchestra led to the owners firing the ensemble because “the restaurant wouldn’t stand for complete tyranny.” The result was the hiring of the Wiedoefts, comprising a half-dozen members, from Detroit and who were formerly union members.
When, however, the family accepted the gig with board and lodging, the paper complained that this in violation of the constitution of the American Federation of Labor, headed by Samuel Gompers, who was mentioned in part two of the post. A fine of $75 was imposed, while the Wiedoefts were reminded about the musical union in the Angel City, but “they refused to cash in, and were immediately blacklisted.” This induced Milling to tell the paper “he’ll see the fight run a year and a day before he’ll desert faithful employés [sic] at the behest of any man-driving organization.”
Two weeks later, on the 30th, the Times was at again, howling that “a new example of labor union greed—raw and bold, but of tradition nature—has just come to light in Los Angeles.” Affecting the Wiedoefts, the ploy was said to be “of so crude a character that even the ardent local devotees of totem tyranny have expressed their disgust to the persecuted people.” The strongarm tactic decried by the paper was that union leaders in Detroit wrote the musicians “demanding the payment of a goodly sum of money within a certain time or ‘they will no longer be allowed to play for a living.'”
Patriarch Adolf C. Wiedoeft called the letter “simple extortion” and greed regarding the insistence that he and his six children pay $29 each as back dues and fumed that the “secret society” tactics was “simply a bold attempt at graft and intimidation” after he’d left the union. After reiterating that Wiedeoft and his children (a post here featured son Herb, who became a noted bandleader in the Angel City) came to Los Angeles to play at the Imperial with the room and board deal, the Times asserted that this “incurred the jealousy of a number of laborites” who schemed to get revenge. He averred, however, that “some local union men have come to him with expressions of sympathy, saying this is too much for any reasonable man to accept.”
Whether the unions had anything to do with it or not, the Imperial was soon subject to liquor license issues, something alluded to in the first part of this post. The Record of 1 August reported that a Police Commission member targeted the “Solid Three” cafés, the Bristol, Palace and Imperial establishments for revocation of their licenses. It was added, though, that “the solidness with which Mayor [Owen] McAleer, and Commissioners Gates and James have acted for the protection of the saloons was congealed, hardened and cemented.”
While the latter sought delays in action, their compatriots in the minority answered that investigations revealed that all three places “violated the rules of the commission in regard to the sale of liquor to women.” There were discussions among commission members apart segregating restaurants from saloons with respect to such prohibitions, including “a repeal of the iron-clad rule which insists that a feminine appetite for drink must be accompanied by hunger.”
It was claimed, moreover, that “the worst conditions existed at the Palace. The Imperial is nearly as bad. The Bristol is better, but violations of our rules have been committed there.” The commission members in the minority were supported by a member of the clergy who supplied them with the evidence cited in their investigation.
The Herald of 6 September, however, reported that the majority trio of the Mayor and two other commission members “found the Palace and Imperial cafés not guilty of violating the laws regarding the sale of liquor to women,” while four members determined the same to be true for the Bristol. One commissioner added that a local ordinance could not trump state law, under which “a woman has just as much right to drink as a man.”
With reform movements targeting alcohol sales along with prostitution and other issues that marked what has been called the Progressive Era, the situation would only become more contentious and we’ll return tomorrow with part four, so please join us then.
It’s very intriguing to observe in this post that the challenges posed by labor unions were significant even for running a restaurant in the early 1900s. While everyone knows the importance of balancing the power and improving the relationship between management and labor, I’ve found it difficult over the decades to see many businesses, either domestically or internationally, that truly benefit from unions. Originally established to protect employees from being overworked and underpaid, unions have, in many cases, led to employees becoming underworked and overpaid. The evidence is clear: enterprises have been driven out of the U.S. due to high costs and low productivity brought about by excessive protections. It’s easy to learn lessons from history, but it’s never easy to change practices deeply rooted in history.
I was shocked to learn from this post that tipping had already reached 25% or more as early as 1903, though the rate apparently declined afterward. Now, more than 120 years later, tipping has gradually inched back up, and we’ve nearly come full circle approaching 25% once again.
Tipping percentages surged during the pandemic, as higher tips were encouraged to support restaurant workers who heroically worked on the frontlines. Additionally, many restaurants seized the opportunity began adding health surcharges to cover employee medical insurance; while some, like certain restaurants in Las Vegas, quietly introduced a 5% consignment fee in fine print at the bottom of the bill. These days, it has become common practice to push customers into selecting from suggested tip percentages on payment screens, with those percentages steadily increasing.
These annoyances have triggered a backlash – patronage has noticeably declined, and more and more customers are opting to skip the tipping screen altogether, claiming, “I’ve left a cash tip on the table.”