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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.)
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.
I was about to link to the same "What's on the Menu" site, which I remembered being an impressive site for library digitization project years ago, but it was apparently retired in January 2025.
Now [1] redirects to [2], essentially an About page with links to the data.
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.)
Still pretty common at least in places near where oysters are grown, I think. My guess would be also that tastes changed over time as oyster fisheries were overfished and/or polluted by growing cities. There have been numerous waves of oyster collapse on the US east coast over hundreds of years, and places that once had them in incredible abundance now have none (though efforts to restore them have emerged).
There are a variety of parallels in the history of overfishing where a given seafood that was once abundant was then seen as undesirable and served to servants or prisoners (lobster, salmon), but today is somewhat of an expensive delicacy.
The other interesting one is celery. I read an article a bit ago about how salted celery stalks were popular around the early 1900's with all kinds of heirloom varieties being served. Quite a few of the menus I have clicked on have celery listed as an appetizer...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's useless for preventing someone from slipping a pill into the drink.
Works for preventing insects from flying in when sitting outside though.
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...
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/
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
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...
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.
5k Restaurant Menus, Years 2020-2026: [qr code][qr code][qr code][qr code]
That's not the menu, ya silly.
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!
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
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.
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.
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
What nonsense. QR codes exist but seem quite rare around here, it's definitely almost all proper menus.
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/
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!
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.
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.)
Yeah I saw cognac and other spirits on a menu in New York for $3.50 in today's prices.
would be nice to be able to link to an individual menu.
cool collection, just harder to share some specific ones with friends.
Related, in a sense: "Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26210774
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?
This is such an interesting site. And is exactly the kind of curious content which I love seeing.
The dataset of menus and items is all hand labeled and verified at menus.nypl.org.
I was about to link to the same "What's on the Menu" site, which I remembered being an impressive site for library digitization project years ago, but it was apparently retired in January 2025.
Now [1] redirects to [2], essentially an About page with links to the data.
[1]: https://menus.nypl.org
[2]: https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222134751/https://menus.nyp...
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.)
Still pretty common at least in places near where oysters are grown, I think. My guess would be also that tastes changed over time as oyster fisheries were overfished and/or polluted by growing cities. There have been numerous waves of oyster collapse on the US east coast over hundreds of years, and places that once had them in incredible abundance now have none (though efforts to restore them have emerged).
There are a variety of parallels in the history of overfishing where a given seafood that was once abundant was then seen as undesirable and served to servants or prisoners (lobster, salmon), but today is somewhat of an expensive delicacy.
The other interesting one is celery. I read an article a bit ago about how salted celery stalks were popular around the early 1900's with all kinds of heirloom varieties being served. Quite a few of the menus I have clicked on have celery listed as an appetizer...
I would have guessed nutrition, we live an in age of vitamins and fortified foods. You can get a lot of zinc and other metals from clams and oysters.
Yes, oysters used to be extremely cheap and popular (and nutritious); that's probably the main reason.
Old menus are weirdly fascinating. They feel like tiny snapshots of daily life.
It was very slow; I struggled with it.
I absolutely love the data viz on this website, so freaking cool
Not loading for me, empty page (Brave/Windows)
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
Does anybody have a direct link about the archive they are talking about? I'm having trouble navigating the site tbh.
The ice cream flavors are more meaningful those days. Nowadays they have every possible combinations like the weird "green chilly ice creams"
I'd be curious to know what software they are using to display the graph.
It makes API requests to api.soot.com (and the rendered page includes a div with id "soot-publication").
The soot site is a bit vague about their product: https://spiral.soot.com/
I've previously encountered a similar product with much clearer marketing and documentation pages called Zegami: https://zegami.com/
I see everything is CENTS! I was like what on earth who is paying $250 for a ham sandwich???
This might explain my confusion. I went to the inflation calculator to see that $60 scallops in 1917 would be $1700 now and was a bit taken aback.
So cool
Can we appreciate how well it works on mobile?
Did you have to submit the title changing 5000 to “5k” ? Saving two characters is that important?
HN has an 80 character title max length.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40677110