We’ll go out on a limb here and assert that everyone reading Menu Design in America has read at least parts of at least one restaurant menu, which is all the background you need to deal with the subject matter presented in this large coffee-table book featuring reproductions of food and drink menus from restaurants, bars, nightclubs, events, and special venues (The Graf Zeppelin Hindenburg, anyone?) from the mid-1800s through 1985. One page presents a reproduction of offerings at a “Dinner Given by the Legislature of the State of New-York to Hon. Abraham Lincoln, President Elect and Suite, at Delaware House, Monday, Feb. 18, 1861,” an eight-course affair from soup, fish, and releves (whatever they are; the category here includes saddle of venison), through pastry & confectionery and dessert.

Aside from the historical trip you take viewing the listings of vintage food on offer, we’re talking about all kinds of food here, so don’t flip through this book on an empty stomach. You might get angry there’s no time machine included to place you and a charming dining companion behind menus at a joint like circa 1931 Oakland, Calif.’s Sea Cave, which states “Fish caught at 5 a.m. served here the same day,” and presents, in tightly packed typography, “Eastern” oysters done 19 different ways (plus “California or Olympia” oysters 14 different ways), 14 kinds of omelettes, and nine kinds of potatoes: French Fried, Cottage Fried, Lyonnaise, Shoestring, Long Branch, Au Gratin, Hashed Browned, American Fried, and O’Brien, drool. Or let’s have some “Supper a la Carte” at the Rainbow Grill on the 65th floor of the Rockefeller Center in 1936, for an order of “Supreme of Chicken Jeannette.” We have no idea what that is but we’re sad we can’t have any, you know? We want to focus on the art and graphic design, and then our hungry eyes fall on the words “Creamed Capon on Buttered Noodles,” which they were serving at the Pump Room at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago, Ill., in 1945. Seriously, “Buttered Noodles,” growl. Speaking of missing a meal, artists and graphic designers have long been part of a symbiotic relationship with restaurants, not simply because at one time or another many artists and graphic designers have been hungry and may have traded their aesthetic and practical services for a series of square meals at a sit-down restaurant, but because, as writer and renowned art director Steven Heller states in the book,

As restaurants increased in number as more people could afford to eat out, and as eating out became more than a mere necessity of life, but also an integral American entertainment, the menu evolved into an essential tool, art form and commercial brand. The tool is obvious—what you see is what you can get. The art is more of an extravagance, yet as printing processes (e.g., color, die-cuts, embossing, complex bindings, etc.) progressed, experiments and novelties were routinely introduced. . . . the graphic voice, particularly when either boisterous or quiet, contributed to an establishment’s allure and mythology. The function of a menu is clear, but for many they were also the equivalent of luggage labels or dance cards, evidence of a gustatory journey or culinary tripping the light fantastic.

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