§ 01 · Before The Restaurant
“The oldest surviving menu weighs roughly four tonnes.”
Margot, you have spent more time than most people looking at menus. Where does the story actually start?
If you want the earliest surviving artefact that lists what people ate at a specific meal — which is more or less the working definition of a menu — you have to go back to 879 BCE. The Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II had just finished building a new palace at what is now Nimrud, in modern Iraq, and he threw a ten-day banquet to celebrate. He claimed seventy thousand guests attended, which is the kind of number a king tells his stonemasons to record and a sensible historian quietly rounds down. The food list was inscribed on a stone tablet called a stele, and it covered sheep, oxen, fruit, cheese, honey, and an alarming quantity of beer. That stele is, in a useful sense, the world’s oldest menu. It happens to weigh about four tonnes and was designed to be read once and admired forever.
When does the menu become something more like what we recognise today?
The closest ancestor of the modern menu probably emerged in Song Dynasty China, somewhere around 1100 CE, in cities like Kaifeng and Hangzhou. There were already inns and taverns serving food across the world, but in Song urban centres something genuinely new appeared — what one might cautiously call the first true restaurants. Diners arrived expecting to choose from a list of dishes rather than to eat whatever the kitchen happened to have made. An account of Hangzhou at the time records roughly six hundred dishes available across the city’s taverns, teahouses, noodle shops, and fine dining establishments. There were also table service, singing waiters, and a quality-rating system using up to five flags hung outside the building. The minimum of two flags signalled that the establishment offered a written menu rather than a single set meal. That is, more or less, the working blueprint that every restaurant since has followed.
§ 02 · Paris, 1769
“The word menu comes from Latin for ‘something small and detailed’.”
When does Europe catch up?
Much later than people assume, and almost entirely thanks to the French. For most of the eighteenth century, fine dining in Europe was a private matter. The French upper class ate elaborately at home; everyone else ate at communal tables in inns and taverns, with whatever the proprietor felt like cooking that day, often wedged between a drunk and a small-time thief. The first proper Parisian restaurants began appearing in the 1760s, originally serving restorative broth bouillons to people who claimed to be too weak for a full meal — which is where the word restaurant actually comes from, a derivation of the verb meaning to restore. The novelty of the new format was such that a Parisian play in 1769, Arlequin Restaurateur aux Porcherons, included an entire scene devoted to the dramatic reading of a menu, which I imagine played roughly the way a scene in a contemporary play would in which a character reads aloud from their phone’s lock screen. It was that new.
And the word menu itself?
Comes from the Latin minutus, meaning small and detailed. Originally it just meant any brief itemised list of information. It only narrowed to its current meaning of “list of dishes available at a restaurant” in early-nineteenth-century France, as restaurants became common enough to need a dedicated word for the document. Etymology aside, the early French menus were physically simple — single sheets, dense type, decorative engraved borders if the establishment was feeling fancy. The leather-bound, silk-corded restaurant menu we associate with mid-century fine dining is mostly a Victorian invention, made possible by cheaper paper and faster printing.
§ 03 · The American Menu
“A diner in 1859 could order their meat cold, broiled, fried, or stewed. That was the menu.”
Tell us about the American leap.
The pivotal establishment is Delmonico’s in New York, which around the 1830s became the first American restaurant to let diners order individual items rather than committing to a set meal. There is a wonderful account from an 1831 diner who ordered a cornichon thinking it was a small horn of beverage and was surprised when a pickle arrived. The French terminology was new enough in American dining rooms that mistakes of that kind were normal. What I find more interesting, though, is the structural logic of nineteenth-century American menus. They are not organised the way we think of menus today. An 1859 breakfast menu from the Metropolitan Hotel in New York organises its options not by course but by preparation method — cold, broiled, fried, stewed — on the apparent assumption that you were definitely having meat and the only question was how. The Parker House in Boston, in 1858, ran an entire menu category for game, including partridge, prairie grouse, and frog. Other menu items from that period include hamburger eel in jelly, dominos of tongue, and a dish called Squirrels’ Surprise, which I have unfortunately not been able to find a recipe for.
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A menu is, in the end, a piece of typography that has to do a job. The job is the same whether you carve it into stone, set it in metal type, or click a Canva template into shape on a Sunday afternoon.
Margot Ellery
§ 04 · Twentieth-Century Strangeness
“The children’s menu exists because of Prohibition.”
Two strange things happened to the menu in the twentieth century. Walk us through them.
The first is the invention of the children’s menu, which sounds like an obvious thing but is in fact a fairly specific historical event. Before the 1920s, American restaurants did not particularly welcome children, and when children were brought to a restaurant, they ordered from the same menu as their parents. The National Prohibition Act of 1920 changed that almost overnight. Restaurants had lost their alcohol revenue, were scrambling for new income streams, and noticed that families with children were an entirely untapped market. The Waldorf-Astoria was one of the early leaders, introducing a dedicated children’s menu in 1921. The food was, to modern eyes, alarming — broiled lamb chops, flaked chicken on rice, prune whip — because the prevailing nutritional theory held that plain food was good for a child’s development. The shift to grilled cheese, dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, and small portions of pasta took another forty or fifty years.
And the second strange thing?
The blind menu, also called the women’s menu, which is genuinely uncomfortable to read about in 2026. For much of the twentieth century, certain American fine-dining establishments printed two versions of their menu — an identical list of dishes, but one without prices. The price-less version was given to women on a date, on the assumption that the male companion was paying and the woman should not be troubled with cost. There is a particularly memorable 1980 case in Los Angeles in which a businesswoman, Kathleen Bick, took her male business partner to dinner, received the blind menu, was justifiably outraged, and sued the restaurant for discrimination. The case was dropped, the restaurant changed its policy, but it took until well into the 1980s for the practice to die out fully across the American fine-dining scene. The Edmonton Journal in 1982 published a memorable piece by Shirley Hunter on the topic; my favourite line of hers describes the waiter’s reaction when she asked for a menu with prices as more shocked than “if I had asked him to strip to his bare buff in the middle of the dining room.”
§ 05 · The Word Document
“The 1990s did more to democratise menu design than any previous century.”
Let’s come to the technology era. The thing that interests me, and that we cover daily at Printable Menu Lab, is how dramatically the design of small-business menus has shifted in the past forty years. What changed?
Two things, and they happened in sequence. The first was the desktop publishing revolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s — the moment when designing a menu stopped requiring a typesetter and started being something you could do on the computer in the back of the restaurant. The single most consequential product of that era, almost embarrassingly, was Microsoft Word. By the mid-1990s, Microsoft had bundled a basic template library into Word that included restaurant menu layouts. Those templates were not particularly beautiful, and a generation of small-business owners learned graphic design by editing them, badly, on Tuesday afternoons. But for the first time, a cafe owner could update prices on a printed menu in twenty minutes without involving a designer or a printer. That single change probably did more to democratise small-restaurant menu design than anything in the previous two centuries combined.
And the second thing?
The browser-based design platform — the genuinely transformative shift, which arrived with Canva in 2013 and accelerated rapidly through Adobe Express, Visme, and the wider category from about 2018 onward. The leap from Word templates to Canva was not really about the tooling getting more capable; Word in 2010 was already perfectly capable of producing a decent menu. What changed was the design quality of the available templates. Word templates were workmanlike. Canva templates were the work of professional designers, distributed at zero or near-zero marginal cost to anyone with a browser. The aesthetic ceiling for what a small business could plausibly produce on its own rose, dramatically, almost overnight. I have watched cafe owners in 2024 produce menus that would have required a designer with a thousand-pound budget in 2010. The work has not become easier, exactly; the floor has just risen.
Where does AI fit?
Honestly, in a far more limited way than the discourse suggests. AI image generators are useful for producing background graphics, illustrations, and decorative elements that used to require either a stock photo subscription or a custom commission. AI layout tools, the ones promising to generate an entire menu from a text prompt, are still hit-and-miss in 2026. They produce something usable about a third of the time, something almost-usable about half the time, and something that requires complete restart about a sixth of the time. That ratio will probably improve, but I would not bet on AI making the entire menu-design process push-button in the next two or three years. What it will do, and is already doing, is take the most tedious parts of design — finding a background image, generating a decorative ornament, reformatting a block of text — and compress them from minutes into seconds. That kind of incremental compounding matters more than the science-fiction version of the story.
§ 06 · Closing
“The job has not changed. The toolset has.”
If you had to summarise three thousand years of menu design in a single sentence, what would it be?
The job of a menu has not changed in three thousand years. It is to tell a hungry person what they can have, in a way that makes them want it, in a form they can read by whatever light is available in the room they are sitting in. Ashurnasirpal II carved that brief into stone in 879 BCE. A cafe owner in Hackney executes the same brief on a Canva template in 2026. The materials have changed almost beyond recognition. The work itself has not changed at all. Which is a tremendously reassuring thing to remember when one is, as I sometimes am, fretting about whether the next design tool is going to render the craft obsolete. The craft has survived stone tablets, leather binding, lead type, Word templates, and AI image generation. It will survive whatever comes next.
Margot, thank you.
Thank you. Tell the readers to write in with their favourite historical menus — I will publish the best correspondence in a future column.
Reader Questions
Twelve questions on menu history and technology.
What is the oldest surviving menu in the world?
The Banquet Stele of Ashurnasirpal II from 879 BCE, which records the food served at the king’s ten-day inaugural celebration of his palace at Nimrud. It is a four-tonne stone tablet, currently held in major museum collections.
When was the first restaurant?
Modern-style restaurants offering a menu of dishes to individual diners likely emerged in Song Dynasty China around 1100 CE. The European version, where the word “restaurant” comes from, appeared in Paris in the 1760s.
Where does the word “menu” come from?
The Latin minutus, meaning small and detailed. Originally used for any brief itemised list. It narrowed to its current restaurant meaning in early-nineteenth-century France.
When did menus start including prices?
Patchily through the nineteenth century, becoming common only around the turn of the twentieth century and standard by the 1920s. Many fine-dining establishments deliberately omitted prices well into the late twentieth century, particularly on the so-called blind menus given to women diners.
Why did children’s menus appear?
American Prohibition. With the loss of alcohol revenue after 1920, restaurants pursued family diners as a new market. The Waldorf-Astoria introduced a dedicated children’s menu in 1921. Early children’s menus featured plain adult food on the theory that plain food was developmentally appropriate.
What was the first American restaurant to use a menu?
Delmonico’s in New York City, which began offering à la carte ordering around the 1830s. Prior to that, American taverns served whatever was being cooked, at a fixed communal time.
What is a “blind menu”?
A menu without prices, given historically to women on dinner dates in American fine-dining establishments. The practice lasted into the 1980s and is largely extinct today, though some restaurants still use price-less menus tied to which diner booked the reservation.
When did digital menu design tools emerge?
The first wave came with desktop publishing in the late 1980s. Microsoft Word’s template library democratised small-restaurant menu design through the 1990s. The genuinely transformative shift came with browser-based platforms like Canva from 2013 onward.
Can AI design a menu in 2026?
Partially. AI image generators are useful for backgrounds and decorative elements. AI layout tools still produce mixed results — useful as a starting point, rarely a finished design. The technology compresses tedious tasks more than it replaces design judgement.
What psychological tricks do restaurants use on menus?
Removing the dollar or pound sign can increase spending by around eight per cent, according to research from Cornell University. Placing an extravagantly-priced item near the top makes the rest of the menu look reasonable in comparison. Both techniques have been in use since at least the 1990s.
What were Squirrels’ Surprise and hamburger eel in jelly?
Genuine items from nineteenth-century American restaurant menus, alongside dishes like dominos of tongue. We have not located surviving recipes for any of them, which is probably a mercy.
What will menus look like in twenty years?
Best guess: a hybrid of printed and digital, with the printed copy designed in browser-based tools by the restaurant owner, the digital copy synced from the same source, and AI quietly handling the tedious work of resizing, reformatting, and version management. The underlying design judgement remains a human task. That part has not changed in three thousand years and is unlikely to change soon.
Historical material drawn from Rebecca Spang’s scholarship on the origins of the French restaurant, contemporary accounts of Delmonico’s, Song Dynasty travel writing, and contemporary press coverage of twentieth-century menu practices. Printable Menu Lab is editorially independent. No sponsored coverage.