Food history via menus

Restaurant critic Ruth Reichl has seen her share of menus. During her stints writing for a variety of newspapers and magazines, she dined in some of the finest establishments in the U.S. During her career as critic – from the 1970s to 1990s – she couldn’t capture what was listed on the menu by pulling out a cell phone and snapping a photo. Instead, she took the menus home (whether the restaurant allowed it or not), and used them to refresh her memory when she was writing her columns. What began as a way to remember the meals transformed into a curiosity of what menus have to say about their time.

Reichl amassed dozens of boxes of restaurant menus during her career, and she has them all stored in the basement of her home in Spencertown, New York. “I’ve always thought of menus as amazing artifacts,” Reichl told Taste Cooking. “You watch trends come and go. You see ingredients come and go. You watch the impact of immigration law. You see the impact of certain restaurateurs.”

In addition to what the menus have printed on them, Reichl has added another layer to the story by the notes she scribbled beside the dishes she was eating. She pulled out a few of the menus from the 70s to the late 80s and recounted the meals she had at various Bay Area restaurants during that time. “With the Greens menu, the first thing I notice is $18 for a full meal. Wow. This was probably the first serious gourmet vegetarian restaurant that was seriously wonderful,” she says of Deborah Madison’s restaurant.

The several thousand menus in her collection are mostly from the time she spent as a restaurant critic, but she also picked up vintage menus along the way. If you are interested in seeing any of these menus, Reichl has started to post many of these menus to her Instagram account.