‘Taste and Traditions' Review: Marvelous Menus
The quick-response code, or QR code, infiltrated American restaurants in 2020 as we emerged from the Covid-19 lockdowns and began, tentatively, to eat communally again. For diners, the advantage was that the codes were supposedly more hygienic. We simply pointed our phones at the postage-stamp-size hieroglyphs, pulled up the menu and, sometimes, could even place our orders. No need for human contact or touching a potentially contaminated menu.
Originally invented in 1994 to help speed up Japanese car production, QR codes appealed to restaurants because they did away with printing costs and could even help expedite food ordering and delivery, leading to quicker table turnover. However, something was lost in this transition. In 'Tastes and Traditions: A Journey Through Menu History,' Nathalie Cooke elucidates the value of the traditional restaurant menu. More than a list of dishes, it is a medium that can amuse, flatter, educate and tantalize diners, elevating the restaurant experience.
Ms. Cooke's copiously illustrated book is filled with color images of menus both ancient and modern, including a bill of fare made up solely of emojis (from a boundary-pushing 'immersive dining' restaurant in Bangkok). Some of the most over-the-top examples were designed by artists whose illustrations helped prepare diners for the meal to come. One of the earliest, a 1751 menu for a feast at Louis XV's 'country retreat' (read: palace), is bordered with hand-painted vines, musical instruments and little hunters chasing wild boars, signaling that wine, music and game would be part of the meal. The artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's 1896 pre-Christmas menu for Paris's Le Suisse promised a holiday spree with tuxedoed gentlemen drinking champagne and carousing with scantily clad women. As technologies evolved, menus began to include photographs and then, for the ultimate in realism, sculptures of each dish, as in the startlingly accurate food models displayed outside eateries in Japan.
Restaurants have long realized that their menus can serve as advertising. Ms. Cooke, a professor of English at McGill University, includes a 'souvenir menu' from Manhattan's old Shanghai Royal, which the restaurant promised to mail to any address the diner liked. In this case, one Bernie Marlin sent the menu to a pal in 1946 with the enigmatic notation 'First date—home 3:30.'
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