March 17, 1910 · Norddeutscher Lloyd, Bremen · Dinner à la Carte
À la carte dinner allowed passengers to order individual dishes rather than progressing through the fixed multi-course menu. This was particularly popular among first-class passengers travelling for shorter durations who did not wish to invest two hours in the full table d’hôte.
The cover illustration shows a young couple in stylised eighteenth-century court dress dancing — the woman in panniered gown, the man in breeches and powdered hair. The visual reference to the ancien régime ballroom was a nostalgic gesture: NDL was associating its à la carte service with the elegance of eighteenth-century European courts.
By 1910 NDL had reached the peak of its Edwardian-era fleet expansion. The introduction of à la carte dinner service was a response to competition from Cunard’s Lusitania and Mauretania (launched 1907), which had offered passengers menu choice rather than fixed courses.
Visual style: Art Nouveau illustration of a young couple in eighteenth-century dress dancing.
What you receive
- Three print sizes: 8×10, 11×14, 16×20 inches (300 DPI, ready for any home printer or framing shop).
- Two versions of each size: a pure print (no added text) and a museum print (with a small caption: restaurant or ship, year, and source).
- A 1–2 page PDF with the menu’s historical context.
- One ZIP file, instantly downloadable after checkout.
About the source
This menu is preserved in the Buttolph Collection of Menus at The New York Public Library and is in the public domain in the United States. The Menu Press has curated, digitally restored, and reformatted the work for modern printing.
