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5k menus from the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection (1880-1920)
https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-collection/ https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-collection/
- zdc1 3mo agoInteresting how little some things have changed. The prices, on the other hand, seem quite cheap--even after converting to 2026 dollars.
- MarkusQ 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoRefrigeration 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
- MarkusQ 3mo agoI think fried eggs were pretty similar in the 1830s Maine to what we have today; I suspect transportation was most of the issue, as eggs would be significantly less efficient to transport than, say, a side of beef. Hamburger steak was steak, chopped seasoned and reformed, which added a labor step though it allowed for the use of trimmings. 10¢ in 1837 would be roughly $4 today, so that doesn't seem too out of line. The big difference is that fish and seafood is cheap.
- forgotusername6 3mo agoYeah I saw cognac and other spirits on a menu in New York for $3.50 in today's prices.
- cs702 3mo agoInteresting, these really old menus would not look too out of place at a restaurant today.
- 9dev 3mo agoAnd 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.
- MarkusQ 3mo agoI 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.
- ricardobayes 3mo agoUnfortunately 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.
- manbash 3mo agoI 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 3mo ago...or are even in the hands of the same family?
- codetiger 3mo agoThe ice cream flavors are more meaningful those days. Nowadays they have every possible combinations like the weird "green chilly ice creams"
- valleyer 3mo agoYeah, god forbid we explore new things as a species.
- pwillia7 3mo agoI see everything is CENTS! I was like what on earth who is paying $250 for a ham sandwich???
- llbbdd 3mo agoThis 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.
- HardwareLust 3mo agoWon't be long before we are at this rate.
- fhdkweig 3mo agodupe (kinda), Yesterday, 9 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674244
- daemonologist 3mo agoInteresting 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoYes, oysters used to be extremely cheap and popular (and nutritious); that's probably the main reason.
- jambalaya8 3mo agoOysters helped prevent goiter due to their high iodine content.
- macNchz 3mo agoStill 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.
- BashiBazouk 3mo agoThe 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 3mo agowould be nice to be able to link to an individual menu. cool collection, just harder to share some specific ones with friends.
- codazoda 3mo agoMany 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 https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Old%2BStandard%2BTT I was curious how these were made back then and what modern fonts might look best.
- BashiBazouk 3mo agoReally 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 3mo agoHa! 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 3mo agoVery cool site, but I had to leave when my mac laptop started burning my thighs...
- longos 3mo agoFor those seeking another, historically oriented commentary I would recommend https://www.theamericanmenu.com/ 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.
- HardwareLust 3mo agoGood stuff man, thank you!
- ricardobayes 3mo agoAnyone 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 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierdeckel#Urkundencharakter (in German, English wiki doesn't have this info)
- rconti 3mo agoBeer 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 3mo agoIn Brazil they have a little pad they leave on the table next to the napkins
- dataviz1000 3mo agoThis is exactly the first thing I thought of considering the influence of Germany in Brazil culture especially in the south like Curitiba.
- fsckboy 3mo agoat dim sum, you stack up the little empty plates.
- riordan 3mo agoAnd alligator pears are avocados!
- rconti 3mo agoTIL!
- 3mo ago
- wxw 3mo agoIf 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 3mo agoAs 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_dendrite 3mo agoOne 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.
- ArchieScrivener 3mo ago[dead]
- Exoristos 3mo agoIf you wanted Chinese fits in the 1800s, you went to a "chop suey" shop in Chinatown.
- Exoristos 3mo ago*food
- zer00eyz 3mo 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).
- okutan 3mo agoIt was very slow; I struggled with it.
- dinarphatak 3mo agoThis is such an interesting site. And is exactly the kind of curious content which I love seeing.
- kaneda26 3mo agoI'd be curious to know what software they are using to display the graph.
- jamessb 3mo agoIt 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/ https://spiral.soot.com/ I've previously encountered a similar product with much clearer marketing and documentation pages called Zegami: https://zegami.com/ https://zegami.com/
- dostick 3mo agoDid you have to submit the title changing 5000 to “5k” ? Saving two characters is that important?
- toomuchtodo 3mo agoHN has an 80 character title max length. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40677110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40677110
- onionisafruit 3mo agoTapping 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 3mo agoNavigation 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 3mo agoIt crashed my browser twice on mobile, so I just gave up.
- jrochkind1 3mo agoI just immediately went with the arrow keys on my MacBook.
- lovegrenoble 3mo agoSo cool
- XCSme 3mo agoNot loading for me, empty page (Brave/Windows)
- NooneAtAll3 3mo ago5k Restaurant Menus, Years 2020-2026: [qr code][qr code][qr code][qr code]
- xandrius 3mo agoThat's not the menu, ya silly.
- kdawag 3mo agoI absolutely love the data viz on this website, so freaking cool
- bflesch 3mo agoDoes anybody have a direct link about the archive they are talking about? I'm having trouble navigating the site tbh.
- jaffa2 3mo agoyou can click through on this site, then on the menu click through to the actual resource
- monkeydust 3mo agoVery cool. Recommend walking through the curated story here first then exploring the menu visualization https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/ https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/
- dang 3mo agoThanks! I've made that the top link and put the collection link in the toptext. Could go either way really...
- murats 3mo agoOld menus are weirdly fascinating. They feel like tiny snapshots of daily life.
- shawnz 3mo agoRelated, in a sense: "Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26210774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26210774
- agilek 3mo agoCan we appreciate how well it works on mobile?
- AaronNewcomer 3mo agoI 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!
- riordan 3mo agoThe dataset of menus and items is all hand labeled and verified at menus.nypl.org.
- jamessb 3mo agoI 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 https://menus.nypl.org [2]: https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222134751/https://menus.nypl.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241222134751/https://menus.nyp...
- riordan 3mo agoTo 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 3mo agoWhomever 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/ https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/
- HardwareLust 3mo agoExcellent link, thank you!
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- pcrh 3mo agoI 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/ https://slicesofbluesky.com/celery-restaurant-menus/
- throwaway89201 3mo agoThe 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/ https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/
- bag_boy 3mo agoWow! I had never heard of pooding.cool - what an awesome site.
- xbryanx 3mo agoThe 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 3mo agoMust 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.
- jrochkind1 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoFunny to see Marmite on a menu for a (presumably) fancy NYC restaurant https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/assets/menus/474586.webp https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/assets/menus/474586....
- Theodores 3mo agoI 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!