The Klas Restaurant Menu Archive — Historical Bohemian Dinner Menus

Reading every Klas Restaurant menu as one Bohemian dinner archive

Put in order, the six documents describe a kitchen adjusting. Each Klas Restaurant menu in this archive is a dated snapshot, not a summary. The 2006 edition is printed in two languages, English and Czech, as a matched pair. The 2003 dinner menu is the widest: five pages, a Bohemian core, a continental list with three schnitzels, a broiler section, a fish list and a takeaway counter. By 2015 the card has contracted to two pages, the American half has largely gone, and the prices are quoted twice — à la carte and complete dinner — because the complete dinner was what people were actually buying.

The one addition in that whole span is the most telling item on any Klas menu: a CzechMex goulash taco, three dollars, on the house's own tortilla, listed among the appetizers without a word of explanation. Cicero had become a largely Mexican-American town around a Bohemian dining room, and the kitchen put that on the card instead of in a press release.

The banquet card is a different document again. It reads like a contract — four hours of the hall, seventy-five dollars for each hour after that, deposits half-refundable up to sixty days out — and its appetizer list gives the audience away: chlebíčky and rohlíčky, glossed in English for the minority of guests who would have needed it.

Read one at a time, a Klas Restaurant menu is a snapshot of a single season. Read as a run, the six become something closer to a ledger of decisions.

The part that never moved

Across nine years and six documents one block of the menu is essentially unchanged. Roast loin of pork, roast duckling, svíčková, koprová, Pilsner goulash, breaded pork tenderloin, chicken paprika, roast chicken. The same eight dishes, in roughly the same order, on the 2006 card and on the 2015 card, while the continental list, the broiler, the fish section and the printed takeaway counter all appear and then go. A kitchen that sheds half its range and keeps one part intact is not drifting. It is choosing.

What six documents do not cover

These are the menus that happened to exist as files on a website, which is a particular and accidental sample. No daily specials board survives, and a restaurant of this kind would have run one. No breakfast or weekday lunch card is here. Neither is a full wine and spirits list: the beverage page that survives is a single sheet, while the dinner menus carry their own beer sections, so at least one more drinks document was probably in circulation.

The interior tours the restaurant hosted are gone as well. They were built in Flash, which no browser has run since 2020, and nothing readable is left of them. An absence in this set is not evidence that something never existed; it usually means it was never a file.

Where this historical archive came from

Every Klas Restaurant menu in this archive was recorded from the restaurant's own website. The transcriptions on these pages are ours; the original files are not hosted in the public edition. Local research previews may display rendered pages for comparison. A capture date is the date the file was archived, not the date the menu was printed — where a menu carries its own date, it is given separately.

What the dishes were

Questions people ask

How many Klas menus survive?

Six distinct documents, running from a capture in June 2006 to one in March 2015. Together they cover the last decade of the kitchen, plus the 2003 dinner menu that stayed in circulation for years.

Are these the original files?

No. The transcriptions on these pages are ours. The original PDFs were recovered from saved copies of the restaurant’s former website and are not republished here; rights to them were never ours to give away.

Why are the prices so low?

Because they are historical. The 2003 dinner menu put roast loin of pork at 10.95 and a T-bone at 16.95. They are reproduced because they are part of the document, not as any kind of offer.

Why does a capture date differ from a printing date?

A capture date is when a web archive saved the file. A menu may have been in use for years before that and for years afterwards. Where a document carries its own date — the 2003 copyright line on the five-page menu — it is given separately.

Which menu should I read first?

The Bohemian and American dinner menu. It is the fullest, it is the one search engines indexed for a decade, and it is the document behind most of what people remember about the food.