Politics & Power Quote by David Joseph Schwartz

A “golden age of restaurants” sounds like nostalgia, but Schwartz is really describing an economic machine: immigration plus urban concentration plus fresh money equals a new kind of American leisure industry. The sentence is built like a supply chain. “Manned by the available talent from abroad” reduces immigrants to a ready labor pool, not neighbors, not citizens-in-the-making. The diction is coolly managerial, a businessman’s gaze that admires the product while flattening the people who produce it.

The context implied is the early-20th-century city: waves of “new Americans” arriving, old-country culinary knowledge landing in neighborhoods, and a newly affluent class looking for places to spend. Restaurants become a middle ground where status and assimilation negotiate in public. The “newly rich” are “restless,” which is both a compliment and a jab: they’re eager, unsatisfied, hungry for novelty. That hunger gets “fueled” by immigrant labor and expertise, a verb choice that makes wealth itself seem combustible and in need of outlets.

Subtext: America’s celebrated cultural flowering often rests on an unequal bargain. Immigrants supply skill, stamina, and tradition; capital supplies demand and reward. Schwartz frames it as a win-win, but the framing gives away the hierarchy: immigrants are “available,” wealth is the protagonist, and the city is the stage where consumption becomes a civic identity. The line works because it captures how taste, money, and migration intertwine - and because it quietly admits that what we call a cultural renaissance is frequently an entrepreneurial side effect.