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Language: en

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I'm on 50th Street in Manhattan and behind me, underneath that scaffolding

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is Tad's Broiled Steaks, one of the first fast food restaurants.

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I mean, it wasn't quite what we recognize today. It's more of a cafeteria.

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But the idea that you went in and you ordered from a very limited menu with limited options,

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and it was cheap: that was the brainchild of the Townsend family and Tad's Broiled Steaks.

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But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

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What I'm here to talk about is a slightly less successful idea they had in the 1960s.

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Here, on the first block of East 42nd Street, about where that McDonald's is now,

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they opened Tad's Varieties.

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Now, there isn't much of a record of this. The only contemporary article I could find was in the New Yorker

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in 1963, which explained the concept.

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You would go in, pick a frozen meal that's been made earlier that day or earlier that week,

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take it to a microwave oven on your own table and heat it yourself.

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And, well, that's an astonishing idea - that was going to change the world.

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In fact, the guy who opened the restaurant said that in the future, there would be only two types of restaurants:

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Fancy, upscale ones where someone else did the cooking, and cafeterias like that one,

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where you went in, picked your frozen meal and set it up in your own microwave oven.

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And he was nearly right.

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But not quite. He failed to predict home microwaves and the ready-meals, and the TV dinners

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that actually went on to change the world.

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And the restaurant closed down soon after, but Ray Kroc, the guy who started McDonald's,

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he took advice from the Townsend family.

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That McDonald's over there is, in some ways, a descendant of a restaurant that might not

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have worked out itself, but still left a bit of a mark on history.

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Who knows, if history had turned out slightly differently, perhaps there'd be microwave cafeterias

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all over the world.

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