The American Menu

San Francisco,  1900-1908  By 1900, Chinese restaurants were beginning to attract American-born middle-class diners. This shift occurred gr...

1881-2023 Everybody loves Italian food. Yet the idea of a single Italian cuisine took time to coalesce, if it ever really has. Even after It...

1902-1909 A little over two decades ago, staffers for an incoming president searched for White House menus from the turn of the last century...

1878-1978 “Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist,” observed English writer G. K. Chesterton. Nevertheless, music...

The South and West  April 14 – May 15, 1891   In the spring of 1891, two years after being in office, President Benjamin Harrison embarked o...

Oakland,  ca. 1880 Novelist Gertrude Stein returned to the United States in 1934 after a 30-year absence. While crisscrossing the cou...

Marin County, California 1928-1940 One of the most intriguing things about old menus from San Quentin State Prison is that they were...

1924-19 38 “The American seaplanes are in Calcutta,” the papers in India reported on June 27, 1924. Four U.S. Army planes had arrived a...

San Francisco,  1918  This gathering in San Francisco in 1918 celebrated the 6oth birthday of Jean Baptiste Pon, one of the founders ...

San Francisco,  1881  The Occidental in San Francisco was “Heaven on the half shell,” according to Mark Twain who described the daily ...

San Francisco, 1862 Christmas in San Francisco in 1862 was “a most lovely day,” according to botanist William Brewer. 1 “The city see...

San Francisco,  1908  Interfoliata is the technical term for items found between the pages of a book. These unexpected discoveries can...

San Francisco,  1923  When menus are printed for a small get-together, they often reflect the underlying values of an individual or gr...

San Francisco,  1920-1923 When I first saw this photograph, there was something intriguing about the scene that I couldn’t put my fin...

San Francisco,  1853 In late 1852, the clipper Golden Eagle embarked on her maiden voyage from Boston to California.1 While rounding Ca...

Washington, D.C. & San Francisco Christmas, 1890 Two menus from Christmas Day in 1890 reflect regional differences in cuisine at a...

San Francisco,  1940 Working from drawings of ordinary restaurants in New York, Edward Hopper painted Tables for Ladies in his stud...