Anyone interested in this might also like the tidbit that in Germany, they used to, and still count beer consumed as pencil strikes on the beer paper mat. Altering the number by the guest is legally considered forgery and the disappearance of the beer mat is also punishable by law.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierdeckel#Urkundencharakter (in German, English wiki doesn't have this info)
RCrconti1 天前
Beer mat = "coaster" for the curious. I was originally thinking a paper tablecloth. It was pretty straightforward to understand via browser translation of the wikipedia article, thanks!
ITiterateoften1 天前
In Brazil they have a little pad they leave on the table next to the napkins
DAdataviz10001 天前
This is exactly the first thing I thought of considering the influence of Germany in Brazil culture especially in the south like Curitiba.
FSfsckboy1 天前
at dim sum, you stack up the little empty plates.
RIriordan1 天前
And alligator pears are avocados!
RCrconti17 小时前
TIL!
ALal_borland1 天前
> In some breweries and countries, the beer mat placed on the glass signals to the waiter that the guest does not want to drink any more beer.
Interesting. I’ve always seen this as a signal that a person was stepping away, but coming back. The person would cover it while going to the bathroom, in part so it isn’t as trivial for someone to slip something in their drink. Implying that they intend to keep drinking it once they return.
I’d be interested to know where it means that the guest doesn’t want any more beer.
SHshellfishgene1 天前
In traditional Cologne brewery bars where they serve the local light beer (in small glasses of 200 ml) the waiter replaces empty glasses with full ones without asking. Unless you put the coaster on top.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6lsch_(beer)#Serving
GNgnatolf1 天前
All over Germany, and it's been around much much longer than the fear of having something slipped in your drink.
CUculturestate1 天前
To be fair, in the summer you need to make sure the wasps don’t slip themselves into your drink.
RIricardobayes1 天前
Yes, I believe it stems from the tankards having lids back in the day, which is due to the belief that plague-ridden flies could fly into your beer, and also against "night air". Interestingly some Germans still believe "moving air" (well, draft) is unhealthy, especially from an AC, and the cold air is what makes you sick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
DIdismalaf1 天前
It's useless for preventing someone from slipping a pill into the drink.
Works for preventing insects from flying in when sitting outside though.
FHfhars1 天前
I have always seen this a a signal that the drinker doesn't want drowned wasps in their beer.
JYjyounker1 天前
The wasps drown. The hornets just drop in for a sip, and then fly off.
PRprmoustache1 天前
In Málaga, Andalusia, Spain there is churinguito (a seafood place next to the beach) that doesn't really have a menu after 9pm. Waiters just walk in the dining area with a plate in hand and yell the name of the fish/seafood for peoole to ask for it. Each fish has a different kind of plate with a different price. When you ask for the bill, they just do the sum according to the plates left on the table.
They had to cement the dining area because people used to bury the plates in the beach sand.
OUoutime1 天前
Also in Spain, specially in the Basque country, you pick pintxos from the counter and at the end they just count the "skewers" left on the plate.
HEhendersonreed1 天前
This is also how conveyor-belt sushi restaurants near me calculate your bill - the plates are different colors, and each color has a price associated with it.
CUCurtMonash1 天前
My grandfather told me that it was deemed time to stop drinking when you couldn't see over the pile of coasters.
REretired1 天前
In the Netherlands that person would be considered an eetpiraat (food pirate) or flessentrekker (bottle puller). Those are terms used in court.
https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/resultaat?zoekterm=Flessen...
https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/resultaat?zoekterm=Eetpira...
WXwxw1 天前
If you’re ever in NYC, many of the hole-in-the-wall takeout Chinese restaurants have awesome 2000s era menu aesthetics.
Word art, clip art Lamborghinis next to the takeout number, all kinds of coloring. I love them.
TEtemporallobe1 天前
As a foodie, I love this. In many respects, menus don’t seem to have drastically changed over the past 175ish years but it looks like a “Boiled” category was common early on, which I assume was because boiled foods were popular and/or easy for restaurants to make in bulk.
EXExoristos1 天前
Boiled would have included braised -- but there were meats that you grilled, because they were young and tender, and meats that you "boiled" to break down the collagen because they were mature and tough. Nowadays we rarely consume animals of that age, but then they often did so for economic reasons.
ZEzer00eyz1 天前
> menus don’t seem to have drastically changed over the past 175ish
After looking at a dozen of the ones from the Boston area I have to say that my sampling disagrees with yours.
Turtle, Sweetbreads, Venison, Mutton are all things that would get a foodie OUT to eat today and seem to have been much more common then.
Also much of what I am seeing as "boiled" is going to range from "poached" (salmon) to "braised" (some of the tougher organ meats). Stumbling across a "boiled" chicken, served with rice and cucumbers in an 1800's menu made me jump to "Hainanese chicken rice". That preparation seems exotic to the modern American style but might not be as alien 100 years ago (Flavoring aside).
WQwqaatwt1 天前
Presumably eating in a place that had printed menu was a middle/upper class thing which would be a pretty small proportion of the population.
So it’s probably not exactly fair comparing with more casual modern restaurants.
ZEzer00eyz1 天前
> printed menu was a middle/upper class
Distinctly and many of the menu's I looked at were from private events.
But mutton was fairly common then and has fallen out of fashion in the US.
Venison went from "common" (1800) to rare (by 1900 we at all of them). Early restrictions on hunting were around deer.
The same with Turtle soup and mock turtle soup. Interestingly the mock version was made with calf's head. Apparently this was a texture thing (Im guessing high gelatin content in the head).
The interface into the data is, well, shameful. It would be nice if one could pull up hotel menus (rather than private events) by year. From browsing Boston menus it was interesting to see the early ones (for dining not event) be limited and the later ones (1907) look more like a cheese cake factory or diner (a bit of everything). Im guessing this has to do with the availability of industiral refrigeration (made not harvested ice) coming into use.
APapical_dendrite1 天前
One massive change is that there is almost no ethnic food on these menus (unless you include French). I looked at some of the LA menus and there were zero Asian, Mexican, or Italian dishes. It's impossible to imagine today that you could look at a bunch of hotel restaurant menus in LA and not find at least some dishes that were inspired by those cultures.
EXExoristos1 天前
If you wanted Chinese fits in the 1800s, you went to a "chop suey" shop in Chinatown.
EXExoristos1 天前
*food
ARArchieScrivener1 天前
[deleted]
PCpcrh1 天前
I noticed the prominence of celery, which might surprise a modern diner. I had reason some years ago to look into this and the history is interesting. Celery was at one time difficult to cultivate, growing only in select marshlands. In the absence of refrigeration it was also difficult to transport to city diners, so was considered a delicacy.
This also lead to the production of specific table items intended to display celery such as the vase shown in the menus above.
https://slicesofbluesky.com/celery-restaurant-menus/
THthrowaway892011 天前
The second chapter of the included tour [1] is about celery: "In fact, it's the fourth most common item among the Buttolph Collection menus, after coffee, tea, and olives."
[1] https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/
LOlongos1 天前
For those seeking another, historically oriented commentary I would recommend https://www.theamericanmenu.com/. The author makes note of significant, famous restaurants like Delmonico's in NYC, current events of the time, and also culinary trends and menu images.
HAHardwareLust21 小时前
Good stuff man, thank you!
MOmonkeydust1 天前
Very cool. Recommend walking through the curated story here first then exploring the menu visualization
https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/
DAdang1 天前
Thanks! I've made that the top link and put the collection link in the toptext. Could go either way really...
GRgreyb1 天前
Whomever finds great enjoyment in reading this may also enjoy Jan Whitaker's blog 'Restaurant-ing through History'. [1] They are an old-school blogger with a particular interest in American restaurants, and enjoys email correspondence as well.
[1] https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/
HAHardwareLust21 小时前
Excellent link, thank you!
BABashiBazouk1 天前
Really cool. I have A Treasury of Great Recipes by Mary and Vincent Price and it is similar. It has recipes from all the restaurants that they went to all over the world but every section has a menu from one of the restaurants that gave a recipe for that section, which is the real charm of the book. Interesting to see how little has changed except the prices...
GHghaff18 小时前
Ha! I have a signed (after a talk in undergrad) copy for my mother that I gave to her. I guess my dad didn't want it after she passed away so it survived the fire at his house many years later.
Lots of classic restaurants. Many of which are no longer with us and, to be honest, many of which I wouldn't eat in today.
COcodazoda1 天前
Many of these, from the mid 1800’s, would have been printed on a press with metal letters.
A modern open font that might match the style is Old Standard TT.
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Old%2BStandard%2BTT
I was curious how these were made back then and what modern fonts might look best.
GOgoosejuice1 天前
Must have been super weird working with such low absolute prices. If the food cost for your sando is 5c, your first step is a 20% margin. I imagine that had a decent influence on the dishes themselves.
CScs7021 天前
Interesting, these really old menus would not look too out of place at a restaurant today.
9D9dev1 天前
And the other way around too - it sounds like you could have had a very similar dining experience as today. It always amazes me how very little difference there is between past people's lifestyles and ours. I know this on a factual level, but being presented with a tiny peek into the past like this is always very humbling to me.
MAMarkusQ1 天前
I don't think it's safe to deduce that there were few differences from the (perfectly valid) observation that there were many similarities. The problem is that the similarities all exist along shared dimensions (they typically wore two shoes at a time or none, just as we do) but the differences are found along dimensions that are not shared (Does their wireless plan include free roaming? Does your goiter make your cravat chafe?)
So looking back we see the similarities but are often blind to the differences.
COcom2kid1 天前
The first menu I opened had tongue sandwiches and hot beef tea.
So some things have definitely changed!
ESesikich18 小时前
I'm not sure I've even been to a Mexican restaurant that didn't have lengua, and I'm in the Midwest.
COcom2kid18 小时前
Mexican sure, but this was an American restaurant that otherwise had the staples we'd expect today.
And then they had a tongue sandwich!
APapical_dendrite1 天前
A tongue sandwich is still pretty popular in some cultures. My parents and some of their friends served it sometimes when I was growing up.
KIkibwen1 天前
Any respectable city will have a burrito joint somewhere with lengua on the menu.
IBiberator1 天前
Cow tongues are amazing with mashed potatoes amd horseradish sauce! Very well known dish in Central Europe
ONonoesworkacct1 天前
They're a mainstay at my local Japanese and Korean BBQ restaurants.
RIricardobayes1 天前
Unfortunately in Europe printed menus almost entirely disappeared after COVID. Before, leather-clad, elegant, printed menus were commonplace, but nowadays every place just has a QR code.
HAhaunter1 天前
I'm in Europe and never seen a "just has a QR code" menu
ALAl-Khwarizmi1 天前
In Spain what he says is sadly true, maybe like 70% of the restaurants no longer have printed menus.
But of course, saying "in Europe..." is always risky. Europe is very diverse.
RSrsynnott20 小时前
I think this is _ultra_-regional. There certainly are places in Europe where it's more or less the case, but definitely can't be said of Europe as a whole.
_P_puk1 天前
Quite the sweeping statement that contradicts my recent time across a few European countries.
If the primary purpose is a bar that also serves food, yes.
If it's proper dining. No
SHshermantanktop1 天前
You apparently go to a different type of restaurant than I do. The typical Roman pizza joint or Florentine trattoria or Berlin beer hall rarely had leather-clad menus. And I haven’t seen that many QR codes.
But QR codes are not awesome, I agree. They are more hygienic, less wasteful of paper, and easier to update. But I don’t want to use my phone when I am out with others.
DIdistances1 天前
What nonsense. QR codes exist but seem quite rare around here, it's definitely almost all proper menus.
NONooneAtAll31 天前
5k Restaurant Menus, Years 2020-2026: [qr code][qr code][qr code][qr code]
XAxandrius1 天前
That's not the menu, ya silly.
ZDzdc11 天前
Interesting how little some things have changed.
The prices, on the other hand, seem quite cheap--even after converting to 2026 dollars.
MAMarkusQ1 天前
I think it depends on which you look at. Some of them seemed cheep, others seemed pricey, which was likely correlated with other aspects (how posh/swank the restaurant, how "captured" the clientele, etc.)
LOlopsotronic17 小时前
Refrigeration and freezer cars completely inverted a lot of prices in the late 19th through the early 20th century.
Coming home from the Appalachian Trail I stayed at the Inn at St. John's in Portland ME, waiting for my flight home. The Inn had an antique framed menu from Delmonico's Restaurant in New York, from 1834. The price inversion was occasionally quite shocking- on that menu I noted roast chicken was twice as much as roast mutton, for example.
Let's see if I can dig up my old trail journal . . .
Delmonico's Restaurant
494 Pearl St
Cup of Tea or Coffee-.01
Bowl of Same- .02
Crullers-.11
Soup- .02
Fried or stewed Liver- .02
Hash- .03
Pies- .04
Beef or Mutton Stew- .04
Corned Beef & Cabbage- .04
Pig's Head & Cabbage- .04
Sausage & Cabbage -.04
Knuckle & Cabbage- .04
Fried Fish- .04
Beef Steak- .04
Pork Chops- .04
Pork & Beans -.04 (What the hell? I mean, pork and beans?)
Sausages- .04
Puddings- .04 (The pudding of this time was probably more like a rindless sausage than anything we think of as pudding, and could be made from blood, innards, brains, what-have-you)
Liver & Bacon - .05
Roast Beef or Veal- .05
Roast Mutton- .05
Veal Cutlet- .05
Chicken Stew- .05
Fried Eggs- .05 (I have no idea where this price comes from, although I think the lack of refrigeration in 1834 might have made eggs a bit more of a luxury then than now, and it's also probable that a fried egg in 1834 was more something like a Scotch Egg than sunnyside up)
Ham & Eggs- .10
Hamburger Steak- .10 (Big spender! Again, a hamburger must have been something different in 1834)
Roast Chicken- .10
MAMarkusQ15 小时前
I think fried eggs were pretty similar in the 1830s Maine to what we have today; I suspect transportation was most of the issue, as eggs would be significantly less efficient to transport than, say, a side of beef.
Hamburger steak was steak, chopped seasoned and reformed, which added a labor step though it allowed for the use of trimmings. 10¢ in 1837 would be roughly $4 today, so that doesn't seem too out of line.
The big difference is that fish and seafood is cheap.
FOforgotusername61 天前
Yeah I saw cognac and other spirits on a menu in New York for $3.50 in today's prices.
ONonionisafruit1 天前
Tapping doesn't work on a macbook with tap to click. To see a menu I have to do a full click instead of a tap. In the several years I've had tap to click set I don't think I've ever run across a web page where tapping doesn't work like a click.
CHcheema331 天前
Navigation was quiet confusing to me on my Macbook as well. If the topic was not so interesting I would have left in complete frustration instead of deciding to fight the interface.
AKakamaka1 天前
It crashed my browser twice on mobile, so I just gave up.
JRjrochkind11 天前
I just immediately went with the arrow keys on my MacBook.
CJcjrp1 天前
Funny to see Marmite on a menu for a (presumably) fancy NYC restaurant
https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/assets/menus/474586....
SHshawnz1 天前
Related, in a sense: "Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26210774
MGmgkimsal1 天前
would be nice to be able to link to an individual menu.
cool collection, just harder to share some specific ones with friends.
AAAaronNewcomer1 天前
I recently bought about ~50 19th century menus from France for special dinners to go along with a project I was working on. Was looking for specific meals.
There are so many on ebay and delcampe and I think people used to make these and save these special event menus much more than we do today.
I have been to a handful of tech dinners recently that have had them though so maybe it is coming back!
MAmanbash1 天前
I am curious which of these places still exist today, as some menus depict the building. It would've be nice to have additional historical information.
JLjll291 天前
...or are even in the hands of the same family?
JRjrochkind11 天前
I want to know if this was hand-coded or what; would love a re-usable template to make exhibitions like this! Very good online display of digitized materials with interpretative journey.
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Anyone interested in this might also like the tidbit that in Germany, they used to, and still count beer consumed as pencil strikes on the beer paper mat. Altering the number by the guest is legally considered forgery and the disappearance of the beer mat is also punishable by law. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierdeckel#Urkundencharakter (in German, English wiki doesn't have this info)
Beer mat = "coaster" for the curious. I was originally thinking a paper tablecloth. It was pretty straightforward to understand via browser translation of the wikipedia article, thanks!
In Brazil they have a little pad they leave on the table next to the napkins
This is exactly the first thing I thought of considering the influence of Germany in Brazil culture especially in the south like Curitiba.
at dim sum, you stack up the little empty plates.
And alligator pears are avocados!
TIL!
> In some breweries and countries, the beer mat placed on the glass signals to the waiter that the guest does not want to drink any more beer. Interesting. I’ve always seen this as a signal that a person was stepping away, but coming back. The person would cover it while going to the bathroom, in part so it isn’t as trivial for someone to slip something in their drink. Implying that they intend to keep drinking it once they return. I’d be interested to know where it means that the guest doesn’t want any more beer.
In traditional Cologne brewery bars where they serve the local light beer (in small glasses of 200 ml) the waiter replaces empty glasses with full ones without asking. Unless you put the coaster on top. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6lsch_(beer)#Serving
All over Germany, and it's been around much much longer than the fear of having something slipped in your drink.
To be fair, in the summer you need to make sure the wasps don’t slip themselves into your drink.
Yes, I believe it stems from the tankards having lids back in the day, which is due to the belief that plague-ridden flies could fly into your beer, and also against "night air". Interestingly some Germans still believe "moving air" (well, draft) is unhealthy, especially from an AC, and the cold air is what makes you sick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
It's useless for preventing someone from slipping a pill into the drink. Works for preventing insects from flying in when sitting outside though.
I have always seen this a a signal that the drinker doesn't want drowned wasps in their beer.
The wasps drown. The hornets just drop in for a sip, and then fly off.
In Málaga, Andalusia, Spain there is churinguito (a seafood place next to the beach) that doesn't really have a menu after 9pm. Waiters just walk in the dining area with a plate in hand and yell the name of the fish/seafood for peoole to ask for it. Each fish has a different kind of plate with a different price. When you ask for the bill, they just do the sum according to the plates left on the table. They had to cement the dining area because people used to bury the plates in the beach sand.
Also in Spain, specially in the Basque country, you pick pintxos from the counter and at the end they just count the "skewers" left on the plate.
This is also how conveyor-belt sushi restaurants near me calculate your bill - the plates are different colors, and each color has a price associated with it.
My grandfather told me that it was deemed time to stop drinking when you couldn't see over the pile of coasters.
In the Netherlands that person would be considered an eetpiraat (food pirate) or flessentrekker (bottle puller). Those are terms used in court. https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/resultaat?zoekterm=Flessen... https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/resultaat?zoekterm=Eetpira...
If you’re ever in NYC, many of the hole-in-the-wall takeout Chinese restaurants have awesome 2000s era menu aesthetics. Word art, clip art Lamborghinis next to the takeout number, all kinds of coloring. I love them.
As a foodie, I love this. In many respects, menus don’t seem to have drastically changed over the past 175ish years but it looks like a “Boiled” category was common early on, which I assume was because boiled foods were popular and/or easy for restaurants to make in bulk.
Boiled would have included braised -- but there were meats that you grilled, because they were young and tender, and meats that you "boiled" to break down the collagen because they were mature and tough. Nowadays we rarely consume animals of that age, but then they often did so for economic reasons.
> menus don’t seem to have drastically changed over the past 175ish After looking at a dozen of the ones from the Boston area I have to say that my sampling disagrees with yours. Turtle, Sweetbreads, Venison, Mutton are all things that would get a foodie OUT to eat today and seem to have been much more common then. Also much of what I am seeing as "boiled" is going to range from "poached" (salmon) to "braised" (some of the tougher organ meats). Stumbling across a "boiled" chicken, served with rice and cucumbers in an 1800's menu made me jump to "Hainanese chicken rice". That preparation seems exotic to the modern American style but might not be as alien 100 years ago (Flavoring aside).
Presumably eating in a place that had printed menu was a middle/upper class thing which would be a pretty small proportion of the population. So it’s probably not exactly fair comparing with more casual modern restaurants.
> printed menu was a middle/upper class Distinctly and many of the menu's I looked at were from private events. But mutton was fairly common then and has fallen out of fashion in the US. Venison went from "common" (1800) to rare (by 1900 we at all of them). Early restrictions on hunting were around deer. The same with Turtle soup and mock turtle soup. Interestingly the mock version was made with calf's head. Apparently this was a texture thing (Im guessing high gelatin content in the head). The interface into the data is, well, shameful. It would be nice if one could pull up hotel menus (rather than private events) by year. From browsing Boston menus it was interesting to see the early ones (for dining not event) be limited and the later ones (1907) look more like a cheese cake factory or diner (a bit of everything). Im guessing this has to do with the availability of industiral refrigeration (made not harvested ice) coming into use.
One massive change is that there is almost no ethnic food on these menus (unless you include French). I looked at some of the LA menus and there were zero Asian, Mexican, or Italian dishes. It's impossible to imagine today that you could look at a bunch of hotel restaurant menus in LA and not find at least some dishes that were inspired by those cultures.
If you wanted Chinese fits in the 1800s, you went to a "chop suey" shop in Chinatown.
*food
[deleted]
I noticed the prominence of celery, which might surprise a modern diner. I had reason some years ago to look into this and the history is interesting. Celery was at one time difficult to cultivate, growing only in select marshlands. In the absence of refrigeration it was also difficult to transport to city diners, so was considered a delicacy. This also lead to the production of specific table items intended to display celery such as the vase shown in the menus above. https://slicesofbluesky.com/celery-restaurant-menus/
The second chapter of the included tour [1] is about celery: "In fact, it's the fourth most common item among the Buttolph Collection menus, after coffee, tea, and olives." [1] https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/
For those seeking another, historically oriented commentary I would recommend https://www.theamericanmenu.com/. The author makes note of significant, famous restaurants like Delmonico's in NYC, current events of the time, and also culinary trends and menu images.
Good stuff man, thank you!
Very cool. Recommend walking through the curated story here first then exploring the menu visualization https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/
Thanks! I've made that the top link and put the collection link in the toptext. Could go either way really...
Whomever finds great enjoyment in reading this may also enjoy Jan Whitaker's blog 'Restaurant-ing through History'. [1] They are an old-school blogger with a particular interest in American restaurants, and enjoys email correspondence as well. [1] https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/
Excellent link, thank you!
Really cool. I have A Treasury of Great Recipes by Mary and Vincent Price and it is similar. It has recipes from all the restaurants that they went to all over the world but every section has a menu from one of the restaurants that gave a recipe for that section, which is the real charm of the book. Interesting to see how little has changed except the prices...
Ha! I have a signed (after a talk in undergrad) copy for my mother that I gave to her. I guess my dad didn't want it after she passed away so it survived the fire at his house many years later. Lots of classic restaurants. Many of which are no longer with us and, to be honest, many of which I wouldn't eat in today.
Many of these, from the mid 1800’s, would have been printed on a press with metal letters. A modern open font that might match the style is Old Standard TT. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Old%2BStandard%2BTT I was curious how these were made back then and what modern fonts might look best.
Must have been super weird working with such low absolute prices. If the food cost for your sando is 5c, your first step is a 20% margin. I imagine that had a decent influence on the dishes themselves.
Interesting, these really old menus would not look too out of place at a restaurant today.
And the other way around too - it sounds like you could have had a very similar dining experience as today. It always amazes me how very little difference there is between past people's lifestyles and ours. I know this on a factual level, but being presented with a tiny peek into the past like this is always very humbling to me.
I don't think it's safe to deduce that there were few differences from the (perfectly valid) observation that there were many similarities. The problem is that the similarities all exist along shared dimensions (they typically wore two shoes at a time or none, just as we do) but the differences are found along dimensions that are not shared (Does their wireless plan include free roaming? Does your goiter make your cravat chafe?) So looking back we see the similarities but are often blind to the differences.
The first menu I opened had tongue sandwiches and hot beef tea. So some things have definitely changed!
I'm not sure I've even been to a Mexican restaurant that didn't have lengua, and I'm in the Midwest.
Mexican sure, but this was an American restaurant that otherwise had the staples we'd expect today. And then they had a tongue sandwich!
A tongue sandwich is still pretty popular in some cultures. My parents and some of their friends served it sometimes when I was growing up.
Any respectable city will have a burrito joint somewhere with lengua on the menu.
Cow tongues are amazing with mashed potatoes amd horseradish sauce! Very well known dish in Central Europe
They're a mainstay at my local Japanese and Korean BBQ restaurants.
Unfortunately in Europe printed menus almost entirely disappeared after COVID. Before, leather-clad, elegant, printed menus were commonplace, but nowadays every place just has a QR code.
I'm in Europe and never seen a "just has a QR code" menu
In Spain what he says is sadly true, maybe like 70% of the restaurants no longer have printed menus. But of course, saying "in Europe..." is always risky. Europe is very diverse.
I think this is _ultra_-regional. There certainly are places in Europe where it's more or less the case, but definitely can't be said of Europe as a whole.
Quite the sweeping statement that contradicts my recent time across a few European countries. If the primary purpose is a bar that also serves food, yes. If it's proper dining. No
You apparently go to a different type of restaurant than I do. The typical Roman pizza joint or Florentine trattoria or Berlin beer hall rarely had leather-clad menus. And I haven’t seen that many QR codes. But QR codes are not awesome, I agree. They are more hygienic, less wasteful of paper, and easier to update. But I don’t want to use my phone when I am out with others.
What nonsense. QR codes exist but seem quite rare around here, it's definitely almost all proper menus.
5k Restaurant Menus, Years 2020-2026: [qr code][qr code][qr code][qr code]
That's not the menu, ya silly.
Interesting how little some things have changed. The prices, on the other hand, seem quite cheap--even after converting to 2026 dollars.
I think it depends on which you look at. Some of them seemed cheep, others seemed pricey, which was likely correlated with other aspects (how posh/swank the restaurant, how "captured" the clientele, etc.)
Refrigeration and freezer cars completely inverted a lot of prices in the late 19th through the early 20th century. Coming home from the Appalachian Trail I stayed at the Inn at St. John's in Portland ME, waiting for my flight home. The Inn had an antique framed menu from Delmonico's Restaurant in New York, from 1834. The price inversion was occasionally quite shocking- on that menu I noted roast chicken was twice as much as roast mutton, for example. Let's see if I can dig up my old trail journal . . . Delmonico's Restaurant 494 Pearl St Cup of Tea or Coffee-.01 Bowl of Same- .02 Crullers-.11 Soup- .02 Fried or stewed Liver- .02 Hash- .03 Pies- .04 Beef or Mutton Stew- .04 Corned Beef & Cabbage- .04 Pig's Head & Cabbage- .04 Sausage & Cabbage -.04 Knuckle & Cabbage- .04 Fried Fish- .04 Beef Steak- .04 Pork Chops- .04 Pork & Beans -.04 (What the hell? I mean, pork and beans?) Sausages- .04 Puddings- .04 (The pudding of this time was probably more like a rindless sausage than anything we think of as pudding, and could be made from blood, innards, brains, what-have-you) Liver & Bacon - .05 Roast Beef or Veal- .05 Roast Mutton- .05 Veal Cutlet- .05 Chicken Stew- .05 Fried Eggs- .05 (I have no idea where this price comes from, although I think the lack of refrigeration in 1834 might have made eggs a bit more of a luxury then than now, and it's also probable that a fried egg in 1834 was more something like a Scotch Egg than sunnyside up) Ham & Eggs- .10 Hamburger Steak- .10 (Big spender! Again, a hamburger must have been something different in 1834) Roast Chicken- .10
I think fried eggs were pretty similar in the 1830s Maine to what we have today; I suspect transportation was most of the issue, as eggs would be significantly less efficient to transport than, say, a side of beef. Hamburger steak was steak, chopped seasoned and reformed, which added a labor step though it allowed for the use of trimmings. 10¢ in 1837 would be roughly $4 today, so that doesn't seem too out of line. The big difference is that fish and seafood is cheap.
Yeah I saw cognac and other spirits on a menu in New York for $3.50 in today's prices.
Tapping doesn't work on a macbook with tap to click. To see a menu I have to do a full click instead of a tap. In the several years I've had tap to click set I don't think I've ever run across a web page where tapping doesn't work like a click.
Navigation was quiet confusing to me on my Macbook as well. If the topic was not so interesting I would have left in complete frustration instead of deciding to fight the interface.
It crashed my browser twice on mobile, so I just gave up.
I just immediately went with the arrow keys on my MacBook.
Funny to see Marmite on a menu for a (presumably) fancy NYC restaurant https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/assets/menus/474586....
Related, in a sense: "Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26210774
would be nice to be able to link to an individual menu. cool collection, just harder to share some specific ones with friends.
I recently bought about ~50 19th century menus from France for special dinners to go along with a project I was working on. Was looking for specific meals. There are so many on ebay and delcampe and I think people used to make these and save these special event menus much more than we do today. I have been to a handful of tech dinners recently that have had them though so maybe it is coming back!
I am curious which of these places still exist today, as some menus depict the building. It would've be nice to have additional historical information.
...or are even in the hands of the same family?
I want to know if this was hand-coded or what; would love a re-usable template to make exhibitions like this! Very good online display of digitized materials with interpretative journey.