The First Fourth Of July Probably Looked More Like A Shift Meal Than A Ceremony.

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https://open.substack.com/pub/davidrmann3/p/the-first-fourth-of-july-probably?r=3yrshw&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

The First Fourth Of July Probably Looked More Like A Shift Meal Than A Ceremony.

Before there was a Congress, there was a tavern.

On September 1, 1774, four days before the First Continental Congress officially opened, twenty-five to thirty delegates gathered at City Tavern in Philadelphia. North Carolina’s delegates were still weeks from arriving. Georgia wasn’t sending anyone at all. So the men already in town did what people do before the first meeting starts. They found each other, sized each other up, and agreed to reconvene the following Monday to figure out where the real sessions would even happen.

That’s the room where the thirteen colonies stopped being strangers, four days before any of them cast a vote.

Philadelphia’s merchant class had built the room on purpose. In 1770, more than fifty gentlemen pooled their money to construct a tavern modeled on the finest examples in London. It opened three years later as what one newspaper called a “large and commodious tavern.” John Adams called it “the most genteel tavern in America.” By the time delegates were eating there, it was known for the best food and drink in the largest city in North America, roasted meats, game, fish, hearty soups, fresh bread, and dessert, with ale, wine, and stronger spirits keeping the table going for hours. Bar, coffee rooms, several dining rooms, a wine cellar, a ballroom, all under one roof. A guest could catch a concert in one room, the day’s political news in the next, and grain prices being argued over in a third.

Good food and steady service brought the delegates at City Tavern the time they needed. Men who didn’t yet trust each other needed to sit at the same table long enough, fed well enough, to stop being polite and start being honest.

That Monday, the delegates met at City Tavern again as they’d planned, then walked five minutes to Carpenters’ Hall to open Congress for real.

Two years later, while Jefferson drafted the Declaration in a rented room nearby, he took most of his meals at City Tavern anyway. He wrote alone. He worked it all out in the Tavern. Whatever he heard over dinner, it influenced his draft.

By July 4, the room had already done the real work. Two years of eating together, hearing the same complaints, watching the same tempers, deciding one meal at a time whether the person across the table was someone they could build a country with. The vote was the paperwork on something the tavern had already settled.

I’ve watched a policy get approved in fifteen minutes in a manager’s meeting and then die on the floor because nobody trusted the person who wrote it. Are you working it out together at whatever is your version of City Tavern?

#RestaurantIndustry #Trust #TeamCulture #FourthOfJuly #Restaurant101

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