The beverage list

About this document

A single card. The interesting half is at the bottom: a draught list that is almost entirely Czech, in a Chicago suburb, in 2012.

One page, archived on 12 March 2012. Five captures of this file survive.

A house beer and two Moravian wines on a suburban American list is not a marketing decision. It is a supply chain, and it says the restaurant was still importing seriously eighty years in.

A Czech draught list in an American suburb

Seven taps, five dollars for the half litre and three for the small, and the first four are Czech. Pilsner heads the list, then Krušovice Imperial and Krušovice Černé, then Czechvar. The two that are not Czech are Franziskaner, a Bavarian wheat beer, and Gösser Dunkel, an Austrian dark lager. There is no American draught on the card at all.

Czechvar is the name Budějovický Budvar sells under in North America, because the older name was already spoken for there. A suburban restaurant carrying it in 2012 was going through an import chain, where a regional distributor would have been the easier route, and Krušovice on draught in two styles is a further step in the same direction. Žatec, in the bottle list, is named for the town at the centre of the Saaz hop region, which is the hop that defines the whole style.

Selling beer by the half litre instead of by the pint is its own small statement. A pint is 473 millilitres and a half litre is 500, so the measure is metric, European and slightly larger than what the rest of the town poured.

Two Moravian wines

Six house wines by the glass at four dollars and eighteen the carafe, in the range any American restaurant of the period offered. Then, separately, two Moravian wines at five dollars the glass and eighteen the bottle, listed under a Blue Hills heading: Green Veltliner, given its Czech name Veltlínské zelené, and Lemberger, given as Frankovka.

Both are southern Moravian grapes. Veltlínské zelené is the same variety Austria sells as Grüner Veltliner, dry, peppery and made for food. Frankovka is Blaufränkisch, light red and sharp with acid, which is why it survives a plate of roast pork and cabbage where a heavier red would not. Giving each one its Czech name first and its export name second tells you which half of the room the card was written for.

The house beer

One line on the draught list reads simply Klas house beer, at three dollars the pint. A house beer is either contract brewed to a specification or a relabelled local product, and a single card cannot say which. What it does say is that the restaurant thought it worth having its name on a tap handle eighty years after it opened, which is not the behaviour of a business that had stopped investing.

What a one-page list leaves out

The bottle list is the one place where the card looks like everywhere else. Miller Genuine Draft, Miller High Life and Miller Lite at three dollars, Corona at four, and then Žatec at five, sitting at the end of the row at nearly twice the price of the American lagers beside it. A restaurant that stocks all four is not choosing between two audiences. It is serving both at the same tables.

There are no cocktails, no spirits and no coffee drinks here, and the bottled list is five lines long. The dinner menus of the same period carry their own beer sections, so this card was probably not the only drinks document in circulation. What survives is one page, and the transcription above stops where the page does.

All six menus