In many instances, the menu elevated dining to an art, reflecting, in turn, its purpose as an essential part of graphic and culinary history to be retained for posterity. The occasion was, Heimann says, ‘a quasi-canonisation … complete with prayers, chants and a banquet’. Congress Tart sounds unappealing and it is unclear what the Haversnack café in London had in mind in 1966 in its offer of ‘Fruit Disc’ for 1/6d. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. With over 6 million of the world’s best eBooks to choose from, Kobo offers you a whole world of reading.

The Carlton Restaurant in Wiesbaden, which boasted an elegant Wiener Werkstätte-inspired green and cream design, offered an all-inclusive dinner for four marks fifty, with individual plates mostly at two marks fifty, though what this meant in terms of relative expense is hard to know. The designers start to take themselves less seriously and as French cuisine begins to lose its vice-like grip on the culinary world, styles and approaches become more varied. This civilised ‘in-between’, often a sorbet, was intended to ‘cleanse the palate’ after the main course and to prepare the digestive system for the onslaught of the grand finale. Politics rarely features so directly in the menus, but food is always revealing of broader cultural attitudes and their occasionally dramatic shifts. England enjoyed a brief moment at the forefront of gastronomic fashion around 1900 with the introduction of ‘five o’clock tea’, an Edwardian craze that soon spread abroad and was on offer in 1903 at the Casino San-Sebastian in Spain.

Die Dominanz der französischen Küche lieferte die Grundlage für die kulinarischen Köstlichkeiten, die sich überall auf dem Kontinent (und darüber hinaus) verbreiteten.

Unfortunately the state of contemporary menu design has been simplified or eliminated due to QR codes,” he begins. A series of illustrations by the Belgian artist Charles van Roose for the Compagnie Maritime Belge of figures based on the people of the Belgian Congo are less forgivable and are the nastiest things in the book, until the next page, which features the menu for the Deutsche Arbeitsfront ‘party cruise’ in 1936, adorned with jaunty swastika flags. Until, many years and pages later, we hit a 70s McDonald’s menu with saturated images of hamburgers and a relaxed, grid-like layout.There are occasional brief contextual notes by the editors, both of whom have worked extensively in the world of design. A long menu may be high class, as at La Tour d’Argent, where it is the product of a kitchen full of expert chefs and fresh ingredients. Starting with the 19th century, the book offers up some early examples of menu design, just as the very idea of a restaurant menu was beginning to grow in popularity across the continent.

Europe's reputation as the center of the culinary world is confirmed with this expansive array of restaurant menus from across the continent. Meanwhile at the Hôtels Splendide, Royal and Excelsior in Aix-les-Bains the same illustrative style creates a mood of icy chic: the impossibly tall, triangular diners, with snake hips and shoulders as wide as Wallis Simpson’s, gesture languidly and give the impression of people much too smart to eat. On the opposite side of the design spectrum, the menu for the mid-century Lasserre restaurant expresses a surrealistic simplicity.The restaurant menu, however, holds many pitfalls for those too young or socially awkward to ask questions. A 1936 ‘diner de gala’ on board the Motorliner Kungsholm, a ship of the Swedish American Line, is one of the most joyous menus, with an outdoorsy looking young woman astride a leaping fish, and a man lounging under a palm tree on the horizon, all conjured up in a deceptively simple arrangement of areas of flat colour.