The rise and fall of kitschy 90s restaurants

How did restaurants become so chaotically wonderful? And why did it all disappear?

You can watch the full video here.

How this video happened

I got the suggestion on Instagram. High five to Alex. I think he may have anticipated a less cultural evolution story — this video gets into some "why do we have nostalgia" territory and is a bit more touchy-feely/historical than most of my recent tech and biz stuff.

But once I found out about the weird history of fern bars, I knew I had to follow it.

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Here's a link to the commentary video (for some paid tiers).

The mad genius behind the fern bar

Norman Hobday, the founder of the fern bar and the man behind Henry Africa's (who, according to some reports, changed his name to Henry Africa), was the type of figure you rarely run into in 2025. He was unapologetically eccentric and also unapologetically a jerk, and while I don't think the two have to be connected, there might be a throughline.

In the video above, I touched on his creation of the fern bar, which Martin Cate calls "the unholy love child" of the 1890s revival and the California ecology movement. Martin and I talked for a while about Norman — Martin was one of the last people to interview the bar owner — and though I can't say I came away understanding him, I definitely understood what a character he was.

The confusion starts with Hobday's origin story, which nobody can get straight.

"He told me he was born in Pumpkin Bend, New York, a little nothing town," Martin says. "I can't find a Pumpkin Bend in New York State anywhere."

Hobday joined the Army and served in Korea at some point before landing in San Francisco in 1954. He worked in bars and ended up owning gay bars in the 1950s (still taboo at the time). At some point, he joined the French Foreign Legion (of course, nobody knows if that's actually true). Emerging from this fog of mystery, the name Henry Africa appeared. So did the bar that bore "his" name. There are some reports he officially changed his name, but it's hard to know.

Once Henry Africa's was up and running it caught fire — and, to my eyes, it still epitomizes the fern bar that I encountered in bastardized chain restaurant form in random suburbs and small towns, looking up at a quirky statue of a rooster while eating a half-rack of ribs. The drinks were sweet, the windows were big, the ferns were omnipresent, and the Tiffany lamps — unlike at so many imitators — were real and very expensive.

He seemed to care a lot about the experience of his patrons. Waitresses wore Gucci and were quickly hired if they graduated from one of the Seven Sisters colleges, because it meant they were "well bred." Martin praised the quality of the drinks and the freshness of the ingredients at Norman's establishments. The food was simple, but good. Most people agree that Norman invented the Lemon Drop.

But this man who brought the grandma aesthetic to the bar was a tough leader.

"I talked to one former bartender who worked at Henry Africa in the '70s," Martin says, "who said in just one year at Henry Africa, not a big bar, in one year at Henry Africa they filed 272 W2s. So that tells you how he was churning staff at this extraordinary rate...You came in and you joined 'Henry' and Norman and you either were gone within 48 hours, or you ended up with a kind of crazed Stockholm syndrome and you stayed forever and kind of enjoyed the abuse."

Henry Africa's wasn't his only project, but it was his most famous. When he said he was closing the bar in 1983 (it shut down in '86), he claimed it was to become an auctioneer. In reality Henry Africa's became one in a whole portfolio of drinking establishments. The rest are like 30 Rock cutaway jokes — so random they confound logic.

• Dartmouth Social Club — a place themed around Dartmouth that only hired Dartmouth alums.

• Mouse House — a saloon that hosted betting on mouse races.

• Eddie Rickenbackers — a bar where they hung motorcycles (and Tiffany lamps) on the ceiling.

Eddie's was where Hobday died in 2011. Cate says:

"He had a hospital bed in the front window right on the street and he slept there. And he had an IV bag and an oxygen tank and he sat there on oxygen and he just sort of laid around all day. He had a TV right in front of him. So he just sort of sat there and watched TV. It was like a hospital room in front of the bar."

My mind first goes to the idea of domestication — the idea that people like Norman just aren't around anymore, but I think there's a bit of selection bias when it comes to eccentric people, since those are the ones we remember.

I do think Henry Africa's and Norman represent a lost San Francisco, however — one whose eccentricities weren't defined by elites, the whims of tech companies, or the failures of public policy, but by the gloriously wide range of people who lived there.

Sources

• Check out Martin's Tiki book and even get a signed copy!

• Enjoy Merrill's food writing! And, of course, his original 1975 fern bar survey.

• I want to underscore that in this video, people like Merrill and Martin are really helpful since there's not a lot of academic work to reference. My job was mainly finding proof — in archives — for their contentions (which I did).

• Dunno if any nerds out there are curious, but this was the model I modified for my little "restaurant" dioramas.

• Most of the old photos of Friday's come from CC Flickr like this or from this Collector's Weekly article in which they're listed as old promotional photos. Do check out the CW article — I think this video is an overlapping Venn diagram with it, but it gets more into the warehousing of antiques. It also features a bit of Cracker Barrel, which I felt was a little different than the other chains due to its origin as a gas station restaurant, so I didn't spend time on it (even though it's clearly an 1890s revival).

• I hate to call out anybody for the mediocre modern design, but the examples in the video are just culled from searching "TGI Fridays Redesign" and finding stuff like this. The example I feature in the thumbnail (as of this writing) is a particularly egregious concept store.

• Here's the New York Magazine article about being Single in the City.

• And here's "The Gay Nineties" book of drawings. I'm hesitant to put too much weight behind any one book, but at the very least it's a good example of the sensibility that pervaded 1890s nostalgia.