On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the nearly 150-year-old Grolier Club occupies a grand 1917 building. It’s an invitation-only society for bibliophiles. The club’s membership includes nearly 800 people and its exhibition spaces are open to the public, but the interior still seems frozen in time. Now on display in its ground-floor library, hundreds of old menus rest in lighted display cases.
Henry Voigt, member of the Grolier Club, organized A Century of Restaurants: American History on Menus 1841-1941, on view until July 29, from his personal collection of more than 10,000 historic menus. The exhibit tells a succinct history of the American white upper classes in a textbook-style narration of history divided into themes such as “Railroads, Beach Resorts, and the Old West”, “Prosperity in the Gilded Age” and “The Great Depression and Recovery.” The meticulously curated show, which sheds light on how restaurants speak to broader societal and political forces, also includes a handful of bizarre gems.
The menus became widespread in the United States in the 1840s, when hotels appeared along the new network of railroad tracks. Prior to this, inns offered customers a limited selection of home-cooked meals. The birth of menus, Voigt explained, marked the first time diners had a choice of what they wanted to eat, and they also changed the way people thought about food — diners could anticipate and wait with looking forward to a specific meal. As evidenced by the show, these meals included such delicacies as turtle, “dummy turtle” (a mixture of brain and organ meat that Voigt described as “gelatinous”) and game birds, including including geese.
“These dishes defined class,” Voigt said. Hyperallergic. “They were revered not only for their taste, but also for what they represented.”
“It’s not food, it’s entertainment,” Voigt continued, explaining a theory that the menu is just a “prop” in the restaurant’s performance. This experience – one in which strangers perform hospitality – would have been new to these 19th-century guests.
One of Voigt’s favorite objects is wedged in the next display case. It’s an 1861 menu from Taylor’s Saloon, one of the first restaurants to allow women without a male companion. (Voigt said this restaurant “amazed Europeans” who visited it.) The menu is 28 pages and includes advertisements for Barnum’s Circus and Tiffany’s, and its bound exterior is encrusted with mother-of-pearl.
“They had great ice cream,” Voigt said in a dig into the quality of the food. “You are there, you are seen.” He called it an “ambitious restaurant”. (It was even included in one of Horatio Alger’s books on capitalist pornography “rags to riches”.)
The “aspirational” quality of this restaurant appears as a surprising theme throughout the Grolier Club show. The menus represent restaurants with much more exorbitant prices than affordable ones.
“Hardware gets scarce as you go down the economic ladder,” Voigt responded to this observation. He said people save menus to remember special occasions or sentimental events such as first dates, but for the next generation they don’t have the same meaning. Some of the menus are for small personal special events, including one of the show’s best works: a celebration of “JB Corn” (a nickname for whiskey) on the eve of Prohibition.
The ban brings the show into focus – there is a clear “before” and “after”. After the 1920s, high-end menus featuring obscure specialties disappeared, and instead restaurant and barbecue ephemera began to make their way into storefronts.
The effect appears as a vast democratization of the restaurant business, amplified when drive-ins started selling burgers for pennies. A few decades earlier, Chinese immigrants began to open restaurants and Greek immigrants began to build what became the classic American restaurant. Both businesses were affordable to many Americans, and by mid-century Chinese restaurants and eateries were popping up in small towns across America.
However, the show pays more homage to novelties or beautifully decorated works. The Great Depression storefront features plenty of menus with eye-catching artwork that looks like it was made to be saved.
“Who’s going to save a penny from a menu when you’re depressed? Voigt asked. (There are a few utility items, however, including a penny menu and a cafeteria map.)
As for “fine dining,” Voigt believed the form rebounded after Prohibition in the early 1980s. Americans were traveling more, but they were also discovering new cuisines at home. Accessible cooks like Julia Child began to promote “fancy” French cooking as a realistic possibility for home chefs.
“These are unlikely survivors,” Voigt said of the menus. As anyone in New York could tell, especially after the onset of the pandemic, restaurants are closing all the time, shutting down spaces where people lived their daily lives and also experienced important times.
“Restaurants, they disappear without a trace,” Voigt said. “They just evaporate.”
