5k Restaurant Menus, Years 1880-1920

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)

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.

Interesting how little some things have changed.

The prices, on the other hand, seem quite cheap--even after converting to 2026 dollars.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Interesting, these really old menus would not look too out of place at a restaurant today.

This is such an interesting site. And is exactly the kind of curious content which I love seeing.

would be nice to be able to link to an individual menu.

cool collection, just harder to share some specific ones with friends.

Interesting that many of them lead with clams or oysters. (Perhaps this is still a thing at high-end restaurants, but to have them listed so frequently and prominently is completely foreign to me.)

I'd be curious to know what software they are using to display the graph.

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.

It was very slow; I struggled with it.

Very cool site, but I had to leave when my mac laptop started burning my thighs...

dupe (kinda), Yesterday, 9 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674244

The ice cream flavors are more meaningful those days. Nowadays they have every possible combinations like the weird "green chilly ice creams"

I see everything is CENTS! I was like what on earth who is paying $250 for a ham sandwich???