Christmas menus | Restaurant-ing through history

Tag Archives: Christmas menus

December 19, 2023 · 2:26 pm

Christmases past

Christmas, like Thanksgiving, is hard to write about on a blog about restaurants. I’ve tried my best to imagine topics over the years. This is the year to take a break and recycle them! The oldest one goes back to 2009, but it’s as good as ever. [above: the Log Cabin, Holyoke MA, as it once was]

Christmas Feasting
Saddle of antelope for Christmas? Not for me. Couldn’t Santa use antelope to pull his sleigh in a pinch?

Christmas dinner in a restaurant again?
A person could do a lot worse than having dinner at Conway’s Bon Ton in 1891. Only 25 cents, with 6 roasts and deserts galore.

Holiday banquets for the newsies
The newsboys had a hard life and this was the one day of the year they could celebrate – and get enough to eat!

Christmas dinner in the desert
Who would choose to celebrate Christmas at a restaurant in the desert called the Christmas Tree Inn? Actually, I don’t know the answer to that.

Chinese for Christmas
Chinese restaurant owners in New York City were eager to please their Jewish customers, so much so that at least one was kosher as early as 1907.

Dinner in Miami
Were there more restaurants serving Christmas dinner in Miami than in most cities? Maybe so.

I am wishing for happy holidays for all of my wonderful readers!

6 Comments

Filed under food

Tagged as Christmas dinner, Christmas menus, restaurants on Christmas Day

December 20, 2012 · 5:18 pm

Christmas dinner in a restaurant, again?

I suspect that a lot of people living in the Wild West in the 1880s and 1890s had little choice but to eat their holiday dinners in restaurants. The majority of the residents of western mining and ranching towns were males living in “hotels” which were nothing but crude rooming houses with a saloon, pool hall, and none-too-fine restaurant attached.

John W. Conway ran such a place in Santa Fe NM, but judging from the spread he laid out for Christmas in 1891, he was making a generous effort to please his guests with a delicious meal. On this particular day he served a genuine feast for only 25 cents, the price of an everyday dinner.

Just down San Francisco street, Will Burton offered a more refined, pared-down dinner. Judging from the menu, the 50-cent meal might well have equaled one served in more sophisticated big city restaurants. Unlike John Conway’s, his dinner began with oysters and featured fish and game courses. And there was no Pork and Beans or Cornstarch Pudding on Will’s menu.

Will, aka Billy, had lived for a time in San Francisco where he may have acquired elite tastes. He hosted game dinners, kept vintage French wines in his cellar, and poured expensive Scotch whisky. He opened this restaurant in Santa Fe on Thanksgiving of 1891 but, alas, by the next spring he was ruined and reduced to running the short order department at Conway’s Bon Ton.

Regarding the first menu, I am left wondering what Nellie Bly pudding might be. Under Relishes on the same menu, German pickles were, I think, pickled green tomatoes with onions and green peppers. Chow Chow was a mixture of pickled vegetables. On Billy’s menu, Velouté Sauce, of meat stock, and creamed flour and butter, is incorrectly spelled. “A. D. Coffee” is short for after dinner coffee. Both menus use the French meaning of entree, a side dish usually of smaller cuts or chopped meat or fowl.

I find it interesting that Christmas dinner menus in most of the restaurants I looked at from the second half of the 20th century were far less elaborate than these.