If H. G. Wells had decided to send his Time Traveler to report on the early restaurants of New York, I doubt he could have provided us a much better description of the city’s rich culinary history than the one William Grimes has just written. Grimes, a longtime food writer for the New York Times — perhaps the most prominent journalistic organ when it comes to food, a maker and breaker of chefs and restaurateurs — has specialized in observing New York’s contemporary food scene. Now he looks back, tracing its bewildering maze of food cultures and traditions, from its early markets and oyster bars to today’s molecular-gastronomy-influenced restaurants.

Grimes’s anthropological study of New York’s early food scene begins with a chapter aptly titled “The City Without a Restaurant.” To modern New Yorkers, it is inconceivable that their city once “offered scant hope for the hungry.” But Grimes expertly shows the reader — with the help of early-19th-century newspaper stories and quotes from journal-keeping tourists, business travelers, and food-loving residents — that the New York of 200 years ago had little more to offer than a patchwork of oyster bars, taverns, chophouses, and lunchrooms selling mainly English fare of meat and bread. Despite the romantic visions we may have of New York’s age of innocence, the city actually took decades to develop a basic hospitality industry, and those arriving from Europe had difficulty finding civilized accommodations.

Grimes makes the early, difficult decades of life in New York come to life with his descriptions of two very distinct worlds — the grand yet intensely sheltered world of the privileged Knickerbocker families eating lavish meals in their private homes, and the recently arrived immigrants who relied on the overcrowded (and rather unappetizing, in Grimes’s description) open-air markets and on “plain-fare establishments serving crowds of customers at lightning speed and rock-bottom prices.”

Less picturesque, but just as important, is Grimes’s account of the habits of the majority of New Yorkers who fit somewhere in between these two extremes. He richly describes the popularity of the early and more relaxed oyster houses and English chophouses, the ice-cream saloons serving a female clientele, and the lobster palaces with their naughty dancers (the food was an afterthought); the emergence of German beer gardens and Jewish delicatessens with the influx of German and Jewish immigrants; and the rooftop gardens designed to beat New York’s oppressive heat.

The book also explores some of New York’s legendary early restaurants: the Hoffman House, Sherry’s, the Pompeian-garden-themed Murray’s, and the short-lived but fantastical Taylor’s — a 7,500-square-foot “temple of sweetness and light” with a “thirty-two-page menu running to 500 items,” and dedicated to serving women ice cream and confection.

Grimes spends a considerable amount of time on the best of all New York restaurants. Delmonico’s, opened in 1827 by two Swiss brothers, became the premier New York restaurant and held that distinction for decades, until Prohibition finally forced it to shut its doors in 1923. The opening of Delmonico’s marked a “before and after” point for New York dining. Grimes defines the restaurant’s impact bluntly: “Delmonico’s brought a whiff of Paris to the crude, bustling streets of a city long on ambition but short on amenities.”

That whiff of Parisian luxury soon caught on with New York’s elite. Grimes’s examination of some of the surviving menus from the gold-fevered 1890s illustrates the mind-boggling number and assortment of dishes offered — every kind of meat and salad and confection, using every conceivable preparation method. Grimes uses one British traveler’s diary entry to illustrate the bounty offered at many of New York’s higher-end restaurants: The traveler was offered “two soups, two kinds of fish, ten boiled dishes, nine roasted dishes, six relishes, 17 entrees, three cold dishes, five varieties of game, 13 varieties of vegetables, seven kinds of pastry, and seven fruits, with ice cream and coffee.”

The private events were even more opulent. One memorable event held at Delmonico’s, the Swan Dinner, was “the first in a series of tastelessly extravagant events that would enrich the city’s restaurants and appall the public”: “Seventy-five guests sat at an oval table nearly as large as the dining room. The center of the table was a thirty-foot lake surrounded by an artificial landscape featuring waterfalls, streams, and grassy hillocks planted with elaborate floral beds. As the guests ate, white swans — on loan from Prospect Park in Brooklyn — paddled across the lake.”

But not everyone got away with it. One press-fueled outrage involved a sort of Bernie Madoff–meets–Top Chef scandal. In the Versailles-themed Bradley Martin Ball of 1897, an eager, ambitious socialite planned to give New York’s high society the grandest party ever seen. However, reports Grimes, the ball quickly became “a moral text,” with loud complaints from a judgmental press: “At a time when crusading journalists like Jacob Riis were exposing New York’s lower depths, and when immigrants toiled endless hours in the city’s sweatshops, the Bradley Martin Ball struck a nerve. It dramatized, in one let-them-eat-cake moment, the gulf between Ward McAllister’s top tier [a list of New York’s wealthiest families] and the heaving masses far below.”

Grimes spends a good deal of time on the culinary habits of those heaving masses, and also on the increasing popularity of “ethnic” dining — which he believes may be New York’s greatest achievement as a “food city”:

New York’s hallmark as a dining city is not the excellence of its best restaurants. Paris has better French restaurants, Madrid has better Spanish restaurants, and Tokyo has better Japanese restaurants. No city, however, offers as many national cooking styles, at all price ranges, as New York does. This diversity became evident in the mid-19th century, and has only increased with each passing decade. Today, New Yorkers in search of “ethnic” food have in mind a meal that is exotic, informal, and cheap. This is exactly what their 19th-century counterparts were looking for, too.

Grimes lets no national event go unmentioned. The Civil War, Prohibition, the Depression, and even the emergence of the automobile and the entry of women into the workforce — each had an impact on New York’s restaurant industry. The book also offers interesting nuggets about modern restaurant traditions, including tipping one’s server, which was a “sore point for decades” before becoming the norm. Grimes explains: “Everyone dreaded the cold stare of a menial offended by an insufficient tip, or — the reproof churlish — a too-small coin returned with a look of withering scorn.”

No doubt some food mavens will read this book and feel slighted at the omission of a particular neighborhood or type of food. Perhaps some will feel not enough attention was given to the hot-dog stand, or the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach . . . and what about Polish food? The list of omissions is large. But Grimes had a lot to cover in this book and he touches on an amazing breadth of subjects — beautifully, thoroughly, and with a depth of research.

What does the future hold for food in New York? Grimes views New York as “a present-tense city” whose diners have “an informed, passionate interest in the new.” But he also knows New Yorkers are proud of their past. This makes for a rather schizophrenic food culture that Grimes neatly sums up with an amusing observation: “It spoke volumes about New York that just around the corner from Katz’s delicatessen [one of the city’s oldest sandwich shops] you could get venison medallions glazed in bee pollen.”

Join the author on his time-traveling journey through New York’s rise as an appetite city, and you will be richer for the experience.