Menu Design in Europe

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Please try again later as the restrictions may be lifted, or contact your service provider if the issue persists. In many instances, the menu elevated dining to an art, reflecting, in turn, its purpose as an essential part of graphic and culinary history to be retained for posterity.

The 1891 menu from Paris's Le Grand Vefour, with its intricate die-cut design, evokes a bustling Belle Epoque bistro, while the 1932 menu from London's Royal Palace Hotel transports you to the bar at a spirited, Jazz Age nightspot. Eighteenth-century England could boast food as good as any on the Continent, but industrialisation and depopulation of the countryside combined to fracture culinary traditions, ushering in the Victorian Age of Indigestion, when quantity had to stand for quality. Skipping forward to the present day, physical menus are competing with soulless lists of food on Deliveroo and the increasing use of QR codes. This visual survey of 200 years of European menu design sweeps from 1800 to 2000, reproducing menu covers and interiors from a wide variety of establishments and occasions: airlines, cabarets, celebratory banquets, ocean liners, New Year's extravaganzas, World's Fairs, and of course, restaurants of nearly every ilk.

The Carlton Restaurant in Wiesbaden, which boasted an elegant Wiener Werkstätte-inspired green and cream design, offered an all-inclusive dinner for four marks fifty, with individual plates mostly at two marks fifty, though what this meant in terms of relative expense is hard to know. As restaurants and dining experiences increased in the 19th century, the need for a more formal presentation of available items resulted in a range of printed menus that could be both extravagant and simple. Gezeigt werden auch die Michelin-Restaurants der Starkoch-Ära und seltene Exemplare wie ein deutsches Militärmenü aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Es erzählt die Geschichte der kontinentalen Küche und bietet zugleich einen umfassenden Überblick über grafische Stile, weshalb sowohl Feinschmecker als auch Designliebhaber auf ihre Kosten kommen.

Three menus from 1945 show simplistic, monotone drawings of soldiers looking over steaming plates of food. Until, many years and pages later, we hit a 70s McDonald’s menu with saturated images of hamburgers and a relaxed, grid-like layout. A series of illustrations by the Belgian artist Charles van Roose for the Compagnie Maritime Belge of figures based on the people of the Belgian Congo are less forgivable and are the nastiest things in the book, until the next page, which features the menu for the Deutsche Arbeitsfront ‘party cruise’ in 1936, adorned with jaunty swastika flags. Heimann is not a snob about them: he includes a 1976 table-mat menu from a McDonald’s in Switzerland, suggesting, with mild passive aggression, that the popularity of American fast food demonstrates the challenge it poses to the ‘culinary superiority of the Continent’. A cultural anthropologist, historian, and an avid collector, he has authored numerous titles on architecture, pop culture, and the history of Los Angeles and Hollywood, including TASCHEN’s Surfing, Los Angeles.There are of course two kinds of menu, though Heimann makes no distinction between them: the restaurant or hotel menu that offers you a choice of meal for which you pay, and the set menu for a formal meal that announces like a theatre programme what you will be given. Politics rarely features so directly in the menus, but food is always revealing of broader cultural attitudes and their occasionally dramatic shifts. The later menus show British food improving as design generally declines in both quantity and quality. The dominance of French cuisine provided the template for the culinary delights that spread throughout (and beyond) the continent.

Die Dominanz der französischen Küche lieferte die Grundlage für die kulinarischen Köstlichkeiten, die sich überall auf dem Kontinent (und darüber hinaus) verbreiteten.One’s heart goes out to the organisers of a dinner in Leeds on behalf of the trade body of funeral directors in December 1919 to celebrate the end of the Great War. Authored by Steven Heller, co-founder and co-chair of the MFA Design programme at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and edited by Jim Heimann, the executive editor of Taschen America, this publication is a “culinary and graphic travelogue through Europe”.