"Lunch Hour NYC" Opens at the New York Public Library Lunch Hour NYC The entrance to the exhibition. The evening restaurant meal is an elaborate ritual in which exquisitely prepared foods are eaten in a particular order, using fine utensils in select company. And then there's lunch hour. "Everybody talks at once; everybody orders at once; everybody eats at once; and everybody seems anxious to pay at once" is how a New York observer described the scene in 1868. In 1901 Munsey's Magazine observed, "Haste seems to be a controlling factor in the luncheon of the worker." All of which means that lunch hour is probably not the ideal time to see the new exhibition "Lunch Hour NYC" at the New York Public Library, because time will be too short, the galleries too crowded and the need to grab a bite too great. This show should ideally be seen at a more leisurely pace, to savor the repast prepared by its curators - the culinary historian Laura Shapiro and the library's Rebecca Federman, who has worked with the culinary collections - and to leave room to digest their offerings. Can an exhibition about the history of lunchtime in the city have that much to say? Yes: Going to this show is a bit like heading out to a street cart or a food truck and finding that there is much more to choose from than you thought possible. And so it is here. There are sections on street foods, on Horn & Hardart Automats, on home lunches, school lunches, charity lunches and power lunches. There are selections from the library's 45,000-strong collection of menus, a manuscript by Jack Kerouac written at a cafeteria and W. H. Auden's piquant 1947 poem "In Schrafft's," perhaps drafted on site. It is all playfully and elegantly designed. The Web resources are rich as well, including detailed links to images and invitations to help transcribe menus from the library's collection. Even after a quick visit, you might echo the young Parisians who have become fans of the American-inspired gourmet-food trucks in Paris: "Très Brooklyn," they say - a term "that signifies a particularly cool combination of informality, creativity and quality," The New York Times reported recently. You begin at the library with the mundane: New York's street scenes. The central gallery is almost a stage set in which carts and storefronts present their offerings: pretzels (which we learn once had a disreputable reputation because of their association with saloons); hot dogs ("before the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906," they were "the sort of food that mothers warned their children never to eat"); pizza (the Pizza Principle: "Since 1960, the cost of a subway ride and a slice of pizza has been nearly the same"). You see a 1932 menu from a Japanese restaurant on West 47th Street, and learn how Japanese restaurateurs have packaged their immigrant tastes for New York customers. A "Suki-Yaki Dinner" includes "beef tenderloin," olives and celery hearts, for $1.25. A display about "Chinese takeout" has a delivery bicycle with plastic bags wrapped over the seat that looks as if it had just pulled up on the sidewalk. And there is a video interview with Ed Beller, who invented the Admar stainless-steel hot dog cart, which became the standard. But all of this is something of an appetizer; street foods are a small slice of a larger phenomenon. The New York lunch is far more complicated and unusual. Historically, we learn, lunch had negligible importance. In English rural life the main meal during the day was known as "dinner." And you still can find a leisurely approach to the midday meal in Mediterranean climes. In his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson suggested that "lunch" was derived from foreign words referring to "a small piece" or "clutch." "Lunch" means "as much food as one's hand can hold." An 1841 version of Noah Webster's dictionary is here too, in which lunch is defined as "a portion of food taken at any time, except at a regular meal." Lunch, in other words, was traditionally unconnected to the rituals of dining; it was unscheduled, informal, eaten using the hands rather than utensils. Lunch is perhaps the perfect description for the food offered on street carts. But while this informality still thrives, lunch was transformed with the growth of New York as a trading, manufacturing and finance center. The midday meal could no longer be treated as a dinner. Nor could lunches be grabbed haphazardly. Eating schedules were codified. As the city expanded, and workers downtown could no longer return home to eat during the day, the lunch hour took off.