71–80 of 111 posts
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!
5k Restaurant Menus, Years 2020-2026: [qr code][qr code][qr code][qr code]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The dataset of menus and items is all hand labeled and verified at menus.nypl.org.
Now [1] redirects to [2], essentially an About page with links to the data.
[2]: https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222134751/https://menus.nyp...
I see everything is CENTS! I was like what on earth who is paying $250 for a ham sandwich???
I'd be curious to know what software they are using to display the graph.
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/