Can You Tell When This Restaurant Menu Was Published?
It’s easy as pie.
Between 1900 and 1924, Frank E. Buttolph collected 25,000 restaurant menus for the New York Public Library. Nowadays the collection houses 45,000, about a quarter of which are available online. You’re about to see a small sliver of them. For this installment of our weekly quiz, we’re asking you to guess the age of 10 American menus, ranging in vintage from the 1900s to the 2000s. Some are from very fancy restaurants, others from humble diners. Many are from New York City and the surrounding area. See if you can tell the decades apart by their food and their fonts—and their prices.