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In 879 BCE, Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II hosted a grand celebration to mark the completion of his newly-built palace in what is now Nimrud. This monumental feast, attended by thousands from across the region, stretched over an impressive 10 days.
During the festivities, guests enjoyed an abundance of wine, sheep, oxen, fruit, cheese, and honey. To preserve the memory of this extravagant event, King Ashurnasirpal II ordered a detailed description of the banquet to be inscribed onto a large stone tablet known as a stele.
According to the inscription, 69,574 guests were present, though this number might have been an exaggerated claim. The list of foods served at the feast makes the Banquet Stele one of the oldest surviving examples of a menu. Thankfully, menus have evolved considerably from the massive 4-ton stone tablets of Ancient Mesopotamia—though the Cheesecake Factory might beg to differ.
The Evolution of the Menu
The Chinese were possibly the first to adopt a menu system similar to what we recognize today. During the Song Dynasty, around 1100 CE, early forms of modern restaurants began to spring up in cities like Kaifeng and Hangzhou. Unlike inns where guests ate whatever the kitchen was preparing, these new establishments gave customers the option to choose from a list of dishes.
The variety of options was extensive. A writer from Hangzhou at the time described a staggering 600 dishes available across taverns, teahouses, noodle shops, and upscale restaurants. Other innovations included table service, waiters who sang, and perhaps even the beginnings of a rating system. Rather than stars, restaurant owners displayed up to five flags outside their establishments to signal the quality of the food within. A single flag indicated a limited menu, while two or more flags marked restaurants offering a more extensive selection.
Although French cuisine is often synonymous with fine dining, restaurants were not a part of French culture for much of the 18th century. Elite meals were typically reserved for private homes, and the only dining out options were inns and taverns where everyone ate the same meal at a communal table. True restaurants only began appearing in France by the late 1700s. As historian Rebecca Spang notes, this idea was still so new in 1769 that a play titled *Arlequin Restaurateur aux Porcherons* dramatized the moment of reading a menu.
We also owe France the term *menu*. Deriving from the Latin *minutus*, meaning small or detailed, the word originally referred to any short list of items. It wasn’t until the rise of restaurants in 19th-century France that it evolved to represent the list of dishes offered by a restaurant.
In the 1830s, Delmonico’s in New York City became the first restaurant to offer customers the option to choose individual items from a menu. One visitor in 1831 recalled his confusion with the French terms, particularly when he ordered a *cornichon*. Expecting a small drink, he was instead surprised when pickles were served. The menu also featured an extensive selection of meats, a common feature in American restaurant menus throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Rather than organizing their offerings into categories like appetizers, entrees, and desserts, a 1859 breakfast menu from New York's Metropolitan Hotel featured sections dedicated to various preparations of meat. Diners could choose their animal protein cold, broiled, fried, or stewed. A similar menu from the famous Parker House in Boston, published a year earlier, had an entire section devoted to game meats such as partridge, prairie grouse, and frog. Some other curious menu items from this time period included 'hamburger eel in jelly,' 'dominos of tongue,' and 'Squirrels' Surprise.'
Tricks of the Menu Trade
Menus have evolved significantly in the last century, and some of these changes are not immediately apparent. Many contemporary menus employ psychological strategies designed to subtly influence the behavior of customers without their awareness.
If you’ve ever noticed that prices on menus often lack a dollar sign, this is likely a deliberate decision to make spending money feel less painful. A study from Cornell University found that omitting the dollar sign could increase average spending by 8.15 percent.
Even the way a menu is arranged can affect a customer’s choices. By placing an expensive item near the top of the page, restaurants create the illusion that the other options are more reasonably priced in comparison.
Kids' and Women's Menus
Today, many dining establishments cater to younger patrons with dedicated kids' menus, but this wasn’t always the case. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, children were rarely welcomed in restaurants, and when they did dine out, they were expected to select from the same menu as their adult companions.
This began to shift with the National Prohibition Act of 1920. With the loss of alcohol sales, American restaurants sought new sources of income, prompting some to create menus aimed at younger customers—a previously untapped demographic.
The Waldorf-Astoria took the lead in 1921 by introducing a children's menu, offering options like broiled lamb chops, flaked chicken over boiled rice, and prune whip. At the time, simple foods were believed to be beneficial for a child’s development. It would be decades before the kids' menu evolved to include favorites like grilled cheese and dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets.
Children weren't the only group to benefit from tailored menus. For much of the last century, certain high-end restaurants offered separate menus for women. These menus featured the same dishes as the regular menu, but without listed prices, allowing women to order freely without the concern of the bill, which was assumed to be covered by the male companion.
This led to some uncomfortable moments. In 1980, Kathleen Bick dined with her male business partner, Larry Becker, at a restaurant in Los Angeles, where she was handed a menu that omitted the prices. Bick felt insulted by the unequal treatment, prompting her and Becker to sue the restaurant for discrimination. They enlisted Gloria Allred, one of the most well-known feminist lawyers of the time, to represent them. The case was ultimately dropped, but the restaurant agreed to stop the discriminatory practice.
In a 1982 article for the Edmonton Journal, Shirley Hunter expressed her desire to see certain restaurant pretensions, like menus without prices, vanish. She recalled how the waiter reacted when she asked for a menu with prices: “The water couldn’t have registered more shock if I had asked him to strip to his bare buff in the middle of the dining room.”
Some restaurants still offer 'blind' menus today, but the practice is meant to depend on who made the reservation rather than the gender of the diner.
The Emergence of the Secret Menu
Many restaurants have a secret menu, offering dishes not advertised to the general public. At Chipotle, for example, you can ask for a Quesarito, which is a burrito wrapped in a cheese quesadilla. At McDonald’s, ordering a “Land, Sea, and Air Burger” will get you a sandwich with a beef patty, a chicken patty, and a fish fillet.
While Starbucks doesn’t have an official secret menu, baristas are happy to craft nearly any drink you request, as long as the necessary ingredients are available. That’s how unique concoctions like the Ghostbusters Frappuccino—a Grande Vanilla Bean Frappe with raspberry syrup and strawberry puree—came into existence.
Menus may sometimes reinforce outdated gender roles or subtly encourage overspending, but they played a key role in making dining more accessible when they were first introduced centuries ago. So, the next time you find yourself taking forever to decide on lunch, remember that you have options—and at least you’re not choosing between prune whip and Squirrels’ Surprise.
This story has been adapted from an episode of Food History on YouTube.
