What’s on the menu? Food, drink and a window into history, art and culture

If you dined at La Toundra restaurant during Expo 67 in Montreal’s Canadian Pavilion, you would have been presented with a curious menu.

Printed in both English and French, its dishes painted a picture of Canada’s mostly European origins, with some American flavour, including roast beef, maple cured ham and tourtière. 

But other dishes were described in neither French nor English. Many of them were Indigenous in name, albeit imprecisely translated: Ojibway Kee Wee Sen, Bannock Tartlets and something only listed as “Inuk favourites.”

“This menu was essentially positioning Canada in relation to an Indigenous past and an Indigenous origin story. And I thought that’s quite extraordinary,” said Nathalie Cooke, author of Tastes and Traditions, A Journey Through Menu History.

But you don’t have to be a La Toundra patron from 1967 to get a good story out of a menu. Whether printed out, scrawled on a chalkboard or scanned via QR code, menus are more than just a tool to order food, Cooke argues; they can in fact be a window into the history, economics and even cultural identity of the time in which they were made.

“They look like trivial, throwaway objects and pieces of ephemera. But in actual fact, they’re unbelievably valuable in terms of the kinds of information they contain,” Cooke told The Sunday Magazine‘s Piya Chattopadhyay.

Origins in the mid-1700s

The modern restaurant menu can probably be traced to the mid-1700s, according to Cooke, when French royalty threw opulent dinners that included simple handwritten lists of all the foods on offer.

After the French Revolution disposed of the royals, cooks worked in food businesses for the commoners. What were once souvenirs of a royal visit, then, became a symbol of the freedom to choose what you wanted to eat.

Cooke says menus provide an insight that even hefty cookbooks lack: “We get a sense not only of what [people] were eating, but typically they have these wonderful additional pieces of information, like a specific date, or even a location.”

A record of immigrant history

They can contain so much information, in fact, that Koby Song-Nichols, a PhD candidate in history and food studies at the University of Toronto, developed a four-point strategy to study the thousands of menus the school’s libraries have archived.

 It entails surveying: 

1. Basic information, like dishes and prices.
2. The history of a restaurant or its owners, in a small blurb.
3. Notes scribbled by servers to mark popular dishes.
4. A cross-menu comparison of how cuisines were presented in different restaurants in different places or times.

Song-Nichols’s studies focus on Chinese American and Chinese Canadian food history: how those communities built connections through food, and how the dishes on offer changed over time.

For example, menus from the 1950s and ’60s show how the Chinese diaspora catered to Western tastes, Cooke notes. She mentions as an example chop suey, a takeout staple that didn’t originate in China and is believed to have been developed by Chinese Americans. More “authentic” dishes would be added as Chinese immigrants became more settled in the West.

Song-Nichols says the menus fill in crucial parts in their communities’ histories, when few working immigrants had the time or inclination to write down their personal stories.

Adjusting to North America

Harley J. Spiller, an American collector, began gathering menus while living in New York around the 1980s. His collection, now spanning over 12,000 — most of them from Chinese restaurants in the area — is the largest in U of T’s archives.

U of T archivist John Yokowlski says Spiller valued the menus as art objects.

For example, menus from Toronto’s Chinatown over the decades would include instructions on how to use chopsticks, said Yokowlski, or even Canadian flags sitting next to Chinese writing or art, “to kind of maybe appeal to Canadians who were not Chinese.”

Sometimes, the menus hint at the challenges Chinese immigrants faced when settling in North America, says Ann Hui, Canadian author of Chop Suey Nation. Hui travelled across Canada to piece together the history of chop suey-style Chinese food in this country; part of her research also included a stop at the Spiller collection. 

“I remember one menu, for instance, talked about the food safety and hygiene standards of the restaurant, which I thought was really telling,” she said. “You know, there were a lot of fears about the cleanliness of Chinese food.”

Art, design, marketing

Sometimes, a menu’s art is part of a larger story.

In early 20th-century France, for example, you might find menus with illustrations by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, or Pablo Picasso — complete with their signatures.

Likely long before they became famous, many artists helped decorate the menus for restaurants they often patronized. “They were, to a certain extent, singing for their supper,” Cooke said.

There’s no telling if menus today are made by the Picassos of tomorrow, but for now, visual designers like Edmonton-based Jake Belke do their best to make sure they represent the restaurant’s brand and identity from top to bottom.

When designing the menu for a local tiki bar, he used bold text, bright colours and drawings of the drinks to evoke a casual vibe most people already associate with that type of bar, which would be totally out of place at a high-end, fine dining restaurant.

“For tiki stuff specifically, that’s kind of something that’s already understood by a lot of people,” he said. “So it’s a bit of a cheat code.” 

Layout is also important; menus are “very strategic marketing documents” after all, said Cooke. 

The most important drinks or dishes might get placed in the top-right or top-left corners of a two-page menu, as the eye tends to scan it in a “reverse-Z” path right as you open it.

In the case of the Honi Honi Tiki Lounge, its signature eponymous cocktail is at the top-left, “A1 slot on the grid,” said Belke.

Whether it’s as nebulous as Canada’s national identity, or relatively simple as a bar’s personal branding, menus are an integral part of people’s stories, as much as the food they describe.

As Cooke writes in Tastes and Traditions, “Menus offer us concrete traces, testimony of the stories we told — through our food choices — about who we were and who we aspired to be.”