The banquet menu

About this document

What the banquet rooms served. It reads less like a menu than like a contract, because that is what a banquet card is.

One page, archived on 27 December 2013. Children between four and ten were 11.45 including tax and gratuity; deposits were half-refundable up to sixty days before the event.

The appetizer list is the giveaway. Chlebíčky and rohlíčky are what a Czech household puts out for a party, and they appear here under their own names with an English gloss — for a room booked, more often than not, by somebody who already knew what they were.

A banquet card is a contract

This single page prices an event, and not a meal. Two entrées came to twenty-three dollars a head and three to twenty-five, tax and gratuity included, which is the unusual part: most banquet quotes of the period were given before tax and service, so a guest comparing halls would have found this number higher and the final bill lower.

The hall came with the food for four hours, and each additional hour was seventy-five dollars. Children between four and ten were eleven dollars forty-five, again all in. Deposits were refundable by half up to sixty days before the date. Those four figures are the whole commercial substance of the document, and they are more informative than any entrée list.

Sixty days is a long cancellation window for a suburban hall, and half refundable is generous within it. A room that books far ahead can afford to be generous about the far end of the calendar, because a wedding cancelled two months out can usually be resold.

What the twenty-three dollars covered

Homemade rye bread and butter came first, then a choice of soup and a tossed salad with three dressings, then one potato, one vegetable and two compliments alongside the entrées, then coffee or tea and a dessert. Six soups were offered, and three of them are Czech household soups before they are banquet ones: beef noodle, chicken noodle and liver dumpling, next to chicken rice, cream of chicken and cream of broccoli.

The entrée list carried supplements instead of separate prices. Roast pork, baked ham, roast chicken and breaded pork tenderloin were included; roast duck and barbecue back ribs added two dollars; fried chicken, smoked butt and smoked Polish sausage added one. Pricing a duck at a two-dollar supplement instead of leaving it off the list is a decision about what a banquet room is for.

Chlebíčky and rohlíčky

The appetizer list is where the card stops being generic. Mini potato pancakes, vegetable and fruit trays, and then two items under their Czech names with a short English gloss attached: chlebíčky, described as open-face party sandwiches, and rohlíčky, described as cheese spread on baguette.

Chlebíčky are what a Czech household puts out when people are coming over. A slice of white bread, a potato salad base, then ham or egg or salami arranged on top with a pickle. They are party food in the most domestic sense, and they are not restaurant food anywhere in Bohemia. A banquet card that offers them is a card written for guests who would recognise them without the gloss, with the gloss added for the minority who would not.

Why the hall mattered

A banquet room earns differently from a dining room. It sells a fixed number of covers weeks in advance, at a known price, with a known menu, and it does it on the days a restaurant is otherwise quietest. For a building with six rooms and a kitchen geared to slow cooking, that predictability is not a sideline. It is the part of the week that pays for the rest.

All six menus