Astor House: Three Times Daily

We'll see more of the interior of the Astor House in future entries, but I wanted to start off with one of the more impressive photos in the collection. This is the Main Dining Saloon.

In late 1910, just a few month before the reopening, the Astor House dining room is advertised in Shanghai's papers as "Seats 500 Guests, and is Electrically Cooled".

When I first read this I was intrigued by how the cooling would have worked? The answer, as it turns out, is visible in this photo: Electric fans were mounted along the length of the dining hall on posts above the diners. Only a very mild relief during sweltering summers in the Yangtze delta.

This dining room might feel oversized for a hotel with a few hundred rooms, but the hotel had already been one of the focal points of Shanghai's society for many decades, and many people came here for their meals and to meet friends and business associates.

In fact, when we turn the card around, this was the note on it:

"Hither I travel three times daily. S."

It's not clear if our "S." came here from outside of the hotel or if they were a guest, but this was definitely a grand place to have breakfast, lunch and dinner. The card is postmarked March 5th, though unfortunately without a clear year. It was certainly after 1910, and perhaps as late as the late 1920s.

For many years during that time, this was one of the best restaurants in town with excellent service and sumptuous food. Passenger liners on round-the-world routes would feature a dinner at the Astor House as a scheduled feature on their itinerary as many large passenger liners would dock very close, just downstream of the hotel along the Northern Bund.

If the dining room was too swanky or too public, the hotel also had a large buffet and bar on the ground level, a half dozen private dining rooms, and a large ballroom that would have been open for large parties and events.

So what did a typical meal here actually look like? We are going to pull up a chair under these wondrous electric fans and take a look in the next post.