H.D. MILLER: The Dime Meal —  Eating Cheap in the Great Depression.

And, boom! Just like that we can see exactly what was on the menu at the cheapest restaurant in Los Angeles in 1934: pie and coffee for a nickel, corned beef and cabbage for fifteen cents. Given that clean flophouse beds in Los Angeles were, according to A.C. Faith, 15 cents a night, it was possible to live on less than 50 cents a day during the height of the Great Depression.

One more detail to add, that is, that, for a long time, most of the really cheap cafes on the West Coast were owned by first and second generation Japanese businessmen. This is something I wrote about in the second part of my article, The Great Sushi Craze of 1905, how Japanese cooks dominated the market for cheap meals in the period before World War I. By the Depression, however, competition emerged from restaurants run by Greeks, Balkans, Chinese, African-Americans and others.

Read the whole thing.