In a restaurant, a menu is a list of food and beverage items available for customers to order. Menus may be presented à la carte, in which individual dishes are listed separately and priced individually, or as table d'hôte, where a fixed sequence of courses is offered for a set price. Menus can be displayed in several formats. They are commonly printed on paper and provided to diners at the table, but may also appear on display boards inside the establishment, outside the restaurant to attract passersby, or on digital screens. Since the late 1990s, many restaurants have also made their menus available online. Menus are also used at formal events outside restaurants, such as weddings, banquets, and ceremonial dinners. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, printed menus were frequently produced for private dinner parties and social gatherings in homes, which was one of the earliest uses of printed menus in Europe.
History
Menus, as lists of prepared foods, have been discovered dating back to the Song dynasty in China. In the larger cities of the time, merchants found a way to cater to busy customers who had little time or energy to prepare an evening meal. The variation in Chinese cuisine from different regions led caterers to create a list or menu for their patrons. The word "menu", like much of the terminology of cuisine, is French in origin. It ultimately derives from Latin "minutus", something made small; in French, it came to be applied to a detailed list or résumé of any kind. The original menus that offered consumers choices were prepared on a small chalkboard, in French a carte; so foods chosen from a bill of fare are described as "à la carte", "according to the board". The earliest European menus, several of which survive from 1751 onwards, appear to have been for the relatively intimate and informal soupers intimes ("intimate suppers") given by King Louis XV at the Château de Choisy for between 31 and 36 guests. Several seem to have been placed on the table, listing four courses, each with several dishes, plus dessert. During the second half of the 18th century, and especially after the French Revolution in 1789, they spread to restaurants. Before then, eating establishments or tables d'hôte served dishes chosen by the chef or proprietors. Customers ate what the house was serving that day, as in contemporary banquets or buffets, and meals were served from a common table. The establishment of restaurants and restaurant menus allowed customers to choose from a list of unseen dishes, which were produced to order according to the customer's selection. A table d'hôte establishment charged its customers a fixed price; the menu allowed customers to spend as much or as little money as they chose.
Price-less Menus for private functions, pre-paid meals and the like do not have prices. In normal restaurants, there are two types of menus without prices that were mostly used until the 1970s and 1980s: the "blind menu" and the "women's menu". These menus contained all of the same items as the regular menu, except that the prices were not listed. The "blind menu" was distributed to guests at business meals where the hosts did not want the diners to see the prices, or to any type of dinner where the host felt that having the prices not listed would make the guests feel more comfortable ordering. Until the early 1980s, some high-end restaurants had two menus divided by gender: a regular menu with the prices listed for men and a second menu for women, which did not have the prices listed (it was called the "ladies' menu"), so that the female diner would not know the prices of the items. In 1980, Kathleen Bick took a male business partner out to dinner at L'Orangerie in West Hollywood; after Bick got a women's menu without prices and her guest got the menu with prices, Bick hired lawyer Gloria Allred to file a discrimination lawsuit, on the grounds that the women's menu went against the California Civil Rights Act. Bick stated that getting a women's menu without prices left her feeling "humiliated and incensed". The owners of the restaurant defended the practice, saying it was done as a courtesy, like the way men would stand up when a woman enters the room. Even though the lawsuit was dropped, the restaurant ended its gender-based menu policy. While price-less menus for women generally disappeared after the 1980s, in 2010, restaurant critic Tracey MacLeod reported that Le Gavroche in London, England, still had a price-less women's menu for women who ate at tables booked by men, with tables booked by women getting regular menus.
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