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)

Very cool. Recommend walking through the curated story here

https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/

Related, in a sense: "Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26210774

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.

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.

5k Restaurant Menus, Years 2020-2026: [qr code][qr code][qr code][qr code]

Old menus are weirdly fascinating. They feel like tiny snapshots of daily life.

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...

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.

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.

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

Interesting how little some things have changed.

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

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.

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

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

I absolutely love the data viz on this website, so freaking cool

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

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.

Does anybody have a direct link about the archive they are talking about? I'm having trouble navigating the site tbh.

Not loading for me, empty page (Brave/Windows)

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.)

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

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

So cool

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???

Did you have to submit the title changing 5000 to “5k” ? Saving two characters is that important?