5k menus from the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection (1880-1920)

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

by xbryanx • 24 days ago

417 108 24 days ago

pudding.cool

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

cs702• 24 days ago

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

9dev• 24 days ago

And the other way around too - it sounds like you could have had a very similar dining experience as today. It always amazes me how very little difference there is between past people's lifestyles and ours. I know this on a factual level, but being presented with a tiny peek into the past like this is always very humbling to me.

MarkusQ3• 24 days ago

I don't think it's safe to deduce that there were few differences from the (perfectly valid) observation that there were many similarities. The problem is that the similarities all exist along shared dimensions (they typically wore two shoes at a time or none, just as we do) but the differences are found along dimensions that are not shared (Does their wireless plan include free roaming? Does your goiter make your cravat chafe?)

So looking back we see the similarities but are often blind to the differences.

ricardobayes3• 24 days ago

Unfortunately in Europe printed menus almost entirely disappeared after COVID. Before, leather-clad, elegant, printed menus were commonplace, but nowadays every place just has a QR code.

_puk• 24 days ago

Quite the sweeping statement that contradicts my recent time across a few European countries.

If the primary purpose is a bar that also serves food, yes.

If it's proper dining. No

haunter• 24 days ago

I'm in Europe and never seen a "just has a QR code" menu

shermantanktop• 24 days ago

You apparently go to a different type of restaurant than I do. The typical Roman pizza joint or Florentine trattoria or Berlin beer hall rarely had leather-clad menus. And I haven’t seen that many QR codes.

But QR codes are not awesome, I agree. They are more hygienic, less wasteful of paper, and easier to update. But I don’t want to use my phone when I am out with others.

distances• 24 days ago

What nonsense. QR codes exist but seem quite rare around here, it's definitely almost all proper menus.

com2kid2• 24 days ago

The first menu I opened had tongue sandwiches and hot beef tea.

So some things have definitely changed!

apical_dendrite2• 24 days ago

A tongue sandwich is still pretty popular in some cultures. My parents and some of their friends served it sometimes when I was growing up.

iberator• 24 days ago

Cow tongues are amazing with mashed potatoes amd horseradish sauce! Very well known dish in Central Europe

esikich• 23 days ago

I'm not sure I've even been to a Mexican restaurant that didn't have lengua, and I'm in the Midwest.

manbash• 24 days ago

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.

jll29• 24 days ago

...or are even in the hands of the same family?

codetiger• 24 days ago

The ice cream flavors are more meaningful those days. Nowadays they have every possible combinations like the weird "green chilly ice creams"

valleyer• 24 days ago

Yeah, god forbid we explore new things as a species.

pwillia7• 24 days ago

I see everything is CENTS! I was like what on earth who is paying $250 for a ham sandwich???

llbbdd• 24 days ago

This might explain my confusion. I went to the inflation calculator to see that $60 scallops in 1917 would be $1700 now and was a bit taken aback.

HardwareLust3• 24 days ago

Won't be long before we are at this rate.

fhdkweig• 24 days ago

dupe (kinda), Yesterday, 9 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674244

daemonologist• 24 days ago

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.)

anarticle• 24 days ago

I would have guessed nutrition, we live an in age of vitamins and fortified foods. You can get a lot of zinc and other metals from clams and oysters.

npinsker• 24 days ago

Yes, oysters used to be extremely cheap and popular (and nutritious); that's probably the main reason.

macNchz• 24 days ago

Still pretty common at least in places near where oysters are grown, I think. My guess would be also that tastes changed over time as oyster fisheries were overfished and/or polluted by growing cities. There have been numerous waves of oyster collapse on the US east coast over hundreds of years, and places that once had them in incredible abundance now have none (though efforts to restore them have emerged).

There are a variety of parallels in the history of overfishing where a given seafood that was once abundant was then seen as undesirable and served to servants or prisoners (lobster, salmon), but today is somewhat of an expensive delicacy.

BashiBazouk2• 24 days ago

The other interesting one is celery. I read an article a bit ago about how salted celery stalks were popular around the early 1900's with all kinds of heirloom varieties being served. Quite a few of the menus I have clicked on have celery listed as an appetizer...

mgkimsal• 24 days ago

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

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

codazoda• 24 days ago

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.

BashiBazouk2• 24 days ago

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...

ghaff• 23 days ago

Ha! I have a signed (after a talk in undergrad) copy for my mother that I gave to her. I guess my dad didn't want it after she passed away so it survived the fire at his house many years later.

Lots of classic restaurants. Many of which are no longer with us and, to be honest, many of which I wouldn't eat in today.

jonahx• 24 days ago

Very cool site, but I had to leave when my mac laptop started burning my thighs...

longos• 24 days ago

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.

HardwareLust3• 24 days ago

Good stuff man, thank you!

ricardobayes3• 24 days ago

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)

rconti2• 24 days ago

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!

iterateoften• 24 days ago

In Brazil they have a little pad they leave on the table next to the napkins

riordan3• 24 days ago

And alligator pears are avocados!

al_borland• 24 days ago

In some breweries and countries, the beer mat placed on the glass signals to the waiter that the guest does not want to drink any more beer.

Interesting. I’ve always seen this as a signal that a person was stepping away, but coming back. The person would cover it while going to the bathroom, in part so it isn’t as trivial for someone to slip something in their drink. Implying that they intend to keep drinking it once they return.

I’d be interested to know where it means that the guest doesn’t want any more beer.

gnatolf• 24 days ago

All over Germany, and it's been around much much longer than the fear of having something slipped in your drink.

dismalaf• 24 days ago

It's useless for preventing someone from slipping a pill into the drink.

Works for preventing insects from flying in when sitting outside though.

fhars• 24 days ago

I have always seen this a a signal that the drinker doesn't want drowned wasps in their beer.

shellfishgene• 24 days ago

In traditional Cologne brewery bars where they serve the local light beer (in small glasses of 200 ml) the waiter replaces empty glasses with full ones without asking. Unless you put the coaster on top. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6lsch_(beer)#Serving

retired• 24 days ago

In the Netherlands that person would be considered an eetpiraat (food pirate) or flessentrekker (bottle puller). Those are terms used in court.

https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/resultaat?zoekterm=Flessen...

https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/resultaat?zoekterm=Eetpira...

prmoustache• 24 days ago

In Málaga, Andalusia, Spain there is churinguito (a seafood place next to the beach) that doesn't really have a menu after 9pm. Waiters just walk in the dining area with a plate in hand and yell the name of the fish/seafood for peoole to ask for it. Each fish has a different kind of plate with a different price. When you ask for the bill, they just do the sum according to the plates left on the table.

They had to cement the dining area because people used to bury the plates in the beach sand.

outime• 24 days ago

Also in Spain, specially in the Basque country, you pick pintxos from the counter and at the end they just count the "skewers" left on the plate.

hendersonreed• 24 days ago

This is also how conveyor-belt sushi restaurants near me calculate your bill - the plates are different colors, and each color has a price associated with it.

CurtMonash• 24 days ago

My grandfather told me that it was deemed time to stop drinking when you couldn't see over the pile of coasters.

wxw• 24 days ago

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.

temporallobe• 24 days ago

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.

apical_dendrite2• 24 days ago

One massive change is that there is almost no ethnic food on these menus (unless you include French). I looked at some of the LA menus and there were zero Asian, Mexican, or Italian dishes. It's impossible to imagine today that you could look at a bunch of hotel restaurant menus in LA and not find at least some dishes that were inspired by those cultures.

Exoristos3• 24 days ago

If you wanted Chinese fits in the 1800s, you went to a "chop suey" shop in Chinatown.

zer00eyz2• 24 days ago

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 of the tougher organ meats). Stumbling across a "boiled" chicken, served with rice and cucumbers in an 1800's menu made me jump to "Hainanese chicken rice". That preparation seems exotic to the modern American style but might not be as alien 100 years ago (Flavoring aside).

wqaatwt• 24 days ago

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.

Exoristos3• 24 days ago

Boiled would have included braised -- but there were meats that you grilled, because they were young and tender, and meats that you "boiled" to break down the collagen because they were mature and tough. Nowadays we rarely consume animals of that age, but then they often did so for economic reasons.

okutan• 24 days ago

It was very slow; I struggled with it.

zdc1• 24 days ago

Interesting how little some things have changed.

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

MarkusQ3• 24 days ago

I think it depends on which you look at. Some of them seemed cheep, others seemed pricey, which was likely correlated with other aspects (how posh/swank the restaurant, how "captured" the clientele, etc.)

lopsotronic• 23 days ago

Refrigeration and freezer cars completely inverted a lot of prices in the late 19th through the early 20th century.

Coming home from the Appalachian Trail I stayed at the Inn at St. John's in Portland ME, waiting for my flight home. The Inn had an antique framed menu from Delmonico's Restaurant in New York, from 1834. The price inversion was occasionally quite shocking- on that menu I noted roast chicken was twice as much as roast mutton, for example.

Let's see if I can dig up my old trail journal . . .

    Delmonico's Restaurant
    494 Pearl St
    
    Cup of Tea or Coffee-.01
    Bowl of Same- .02
    Crullers-.11
    Soup- .02
    Fried or stewed Liver- .02
    Hash- .03
    Pies- .04
    Beef or Mutton Stew- .04
    Corned Beef & Cabbage- .04
    Pig's Head & Cabbage- .04
    Sausage & Cabbage -.04
    Knuckle & Cabbage- .04
    Fried Fish- .04
    Beef Steak- .04
    Pork Chops- .04
    Pork & Beans -.04 (What the hell? I mean, pork and beans?)
    Sausages- .04
    Puddings- .04 (The pudding of this time was probably more like a rindless sausage than anything we think of as pudding, and could be made from blood, innards, brains,     what-have-you)
    Liver & Bacon - .05
    Roast Beef or Veal- .05
    Roast Mutton- .05
    Veal Cutlet- .05
    Chicken Stew- .05
    Fried Eggs- .05 (I have no idea where this price comes from, although I think the lack of refrigeration in 1834 might have made eggs a bit more of a luxury then than now, and     it's also probable that a fried egg in 1834 was more something like a Scotch Egg than sunnyside up)
    Ham & Eggs- .10
    Hamburger Steak- .10 (Big spender! Again, a hamburger must have been something different in 1834)
    Roast Chicken- .10

forgotusername6• 24 days ago

Yeah I saw cognac and other spirits on a menu in New York for $3.50 in today's prices.

dinarphatak• 24 days ago

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

kaneda26• 24 days ago

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

jamessb2• 24 days ago

It makes API requests to api.soot.com (and the rendered page includes a div with id "soot-publication").

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/

onionisafruit• 24 days ago

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.

cheema33• 24 days ago

Navigation was quiet confusing to me on my Macbook as well. If the topic was not so interesting I would have left in complete frustration instead of deciding to fight the interface.

akamaka• 24 days ago

It crashed my browser twice on mobile, so I just gave up.

jrochkind12• 24 days ago

I just immediately went with the arrow keys on my MacBook.

dostick• 24 days ago

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

toomuchtodo• 24 days ago

HN has an 80 character title max length.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40677110

lovegrenoble• 24 days ago

So cool

XCSme• 24 days ago

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

NooneAtAll3• 24 days ago

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

xandrius• 24 days ago

That's not the menu, ya silly.

kdawag• 24 days ago

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

bflesch• 24 days ago

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

jaffa2• 24 days ago

you can click through on this site, then on the menu click through to the actual resource

monkeydust• 24 days ago

Very cool. Recommend walking through the curated story here first then exploring the menu visualization

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

dang• 24 days ago

Thanks! I've made that the top link and put the collection link in the toptext. Could go either way really...

murats• 24 days ago

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

shawnz• 24 days ago

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

agilek• 24 days ago

Can we appreciate how well it works on mobile?

AaronNewcomer• 24 days ago

I recently bought about ~50 19th century menus from France for special dinners to go along with a project I was working on. Was looking for specific meals.

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!

riordan3• 24 days ago

The dataset of menus and items is all hand labeled and verified at menus.nypl.org.

jamessb2• 24 days ago

I was about to link to the same "What's on the Menu" site, which I remembered being an impressive site for library digitization project years ago, but it was apparently retired in January 2025.

Now [1] redirects to [2], essentially an About page with links to the data.

[1] https://menus.nypl.org

[2] https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20241222134751/https://menus.nyp...

riordan3• 24 days ago

To be fair we were done transcribing and double verifying in about 2015. We’d get a batch of new menus from the imaging team, tweet it and no matter the size it’d be gone in about an hour.

greyb• 24 days ago

Whomever finds great enjoyment in reading this may also enjoy Jan Whitaker's blog 'Restaurant-ing through History'. [1] They are an old-school blogger with a particular interest in American restaurants, and enjoys email correspondence as well.

[1] https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/

HardwareLust3• 24 days ago

Excellent link, thank you!

pcrh• 24 days ago

I noticed the prominence of celery, which might surprise a modern diner. I had reason some years ago to look into this and the history is interesting. Celery was at one time difficult to cultivate, growing only in select marshlands. In the absence of refrigeration it was also difficult to transport to city diners, so was considered a delicacy.

This also lead to the production of specific table items intended to display celery such as the vase shown in the menus above.

https://slicesofbluesky.com/celery-restaurant-menus/

throwaway89201• 24 days ago

The second chapter of the included tour [1] is about celery: "In fact, it's the fourth most common item among the Buttolph Collection menus, after coffee, tea, and olives."

[1] https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/

bag_boy• 24 days ago

Wow! I had never heard of pooding.cool - what an awesome site.

xbryanx• 24 days ago

The prevalence of green turtle soup was surprising. I assumed this was a reference to a flavor or style…but nope, it’s just green turtle meat.

goosejuice• 24 days ago

Must have been super weird working with such low absolute prices. If the food cost for your sando is 5c, your first step is a 20% margin. I imagine that had a decent influence on the dishes themselves.

jrochkind12• 24 days ago

I want to know if this was hand-coded or what; would love a re-usable template to make exhibitions like this! Very good online display of digitized materials with interpretative journey.

cjrp• 24 days ago

Funny to see Marmite on a menu for a (presumably) fancy NYC restaurant https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/assets/menus/474586....

Theodores• 24 days ago

I happen to need the inspo, some of the decorative details 'need' the SVG treatment.

The tools we have shape our graphic design and sometimes a look back through history, when they had different tools, provides a rich seam of inspiration. Thanks for the post!

5k menus from the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection (1880-1920)

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