The largest single archive of historic printed menus in the world, built between 1899 and 1924 by a New York Public Library cataloguer named Frank E. Buttolph. Who she was, what is inside, and why it survived.
Designing a Speakeasy Bar Wall with Vintage Menus
A practical playbook for bar owners and designers: how to build a single-statement, three-piece, or chronological menu wall that reads as curated rather than themed.
A Christmas Dinner at the Hotel Metropole, 1898
On Christmas Day 1898, the Hotel Metropole printed an illustrated menu that captures the moment American hotel hospitality became theater. The menu’s front cover depicts a winter coaching scene; inside, the dinner runs nine courses and twenty pages of holiday extras. This is what a luxury Christmas dinner looked like at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Imperial Hotel Tokyo, 1900: A Menu Between Two Worlds
Long before the famous Frank Lloyd Wright building of 1923, the Imperial Hotel of Tokyo was already the meeting point of Imperial Japan and the Western elite. Its printed menus — bilingual in Japanese and English, with delicate typography in two scripts — are a singular category of pre-WWII transpacific ephemera. We have ten of them, dated 1900.
A Cunard Breakfast in 1896: What Did First-Class Eat at Sea?
On a February morning in 1896, the Cunard liner Pavonia was steaming east across the North Atlantic. In the first-class dining saloon, stewards were laying out a breakfast that would have impressed any London club. The printed menu survives — and it tells a remarkable story about how the Edwardian elite started their day at sea.
The Golden Age of Ocean Liner Dining, 1880–1930
How dining at sea became theatre: a history of transatlantic and royal-line menus from Cunard’s 1881 Servia to White Star’s last Art Deco Olympic in 1934.