page_title: Menu
section_title: Paper
hierarchical_section_title: Menu / Types / Paper
caption_attribution_description: English: 1857 menu for City Hotel, New Orleans. Includes engraved illustration of hotel building, formerly on the corner of Camp &amp; Common Streets. Menus from hotels, restaurants, and steamboats in the 1850s and 60s. The name R. S. MORSE, Proprietor, is prominently displayed at the top of this menu.
context_page_description: In the restaurant, a menu is a list of food and beverages offered to customers and the prices. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-established sequence of courses is offered. Menus may be printed on paper sheets provided to the diners, put on a large poster or display board inside the establishment, displayed outside the restaurant, or put on a digital screen. Since the late 1990s, some restaurants have put their menus online.
  Menus are also often a feature of very formal meals other than in restaurants, for example at weddings. In the 19th and 20th centuries printed menus were often used for society dinner-parties in homes; indeed this was their original use in Europe.
context_section_description: Menus vary in length and detail depending on the type of restaurant. The simplest hand-held menus are printed on a single sheet of paper, though menus with multiple pages or "views" are common. In some cafeteria-style restaurants and chain restaurants, a single-page menu may double as a disposable placemat. To protect a menu from spills and wear, it may be protected by heat-sealed vinyl page protectors, lamination or menu covers. Restaurants consider their positioning in the marketplace (e.g. fine dining, fast food, informal) in deciding which style of menu to use.
  Some restaurants use a single menu as the sole source of information about the food for customers, but in other cases, the main menu is supplemented by ancillary menus, such as:
  An appetizer menu (nachos, chips and salsa, vegetables and dip, etc.)
  A wine list
  A liquor and mixed drinks menu
  A beer list
  A dessert menu (which may also include a list of tea and coffee options)
  Some restaurants use only text in their menus. In other cases, restaurants include illustrations and photos, either of the dishes or of an element of the culture which is associated with the restaurant. For instance a Lebanese kebab restaurant might decorate its menu with photos of Lebanese mountains and beaches. Particularly with the ancillary menu types, the menu may be provided in alternative formats, because these menus (other than wine lists) tend to be much shorter than food menus. For example, an appetizer menu or a dessert menu may be displayed on a folded paper table tent, a hard plastic table stand, a flipchart style wooden "table stand", or even, in the case of a pizza restaurant with a limited wine selection, a wine list glued to an empty bottle.
  Take-out restaurants often leave paper menus in the lobbies and doorsteps of nearby homes as advertisements. The first to do so may have been New York City's Empire Szechuan chain, founded in 1976. The chain and other restaurants' aggressive menu distribution in the Upper West Side of Manhattan caused the "Menu Wars" of the 1990s, including invasions of Empire Szechuan by the "Menu Vigilantes", the revoking of its cafe license, several lawsuits, and physical attacks on menu distributors.
caption: City Hotel, New Orleans restaurant menu (December 8, 1857)
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