The single-card dinner menu

About this document

The five-page menu reduced to a single card: appetizers, then the Bohemian kitchen. Everything American has been cut.

One page, archived on 25 November 2011.

Card menus like this one get reprinted often and survive rarely; what is legible in the capture is transcribed above, and nothing has been filled in from the other editions to make it look complete.

What a card menu is for

A folded four or five page menu is printed in a run and lives in the dining room for years. A single card is printed in hundreds, sits on the table, gets wet, and is thrown away. Restaurants use them for the part of the offer that changes: an appetizer list, a specials board, a section the kitchen is testing.

This one carries the appetizers and the Bohemian entrées and nothing else. The continental list with its schnitzels, the broiler, the fish and the takeaway counter that fill the five-page menu are all absent. Read against that document, the card is not a smaller menu so much as a different object doing a narrower job.

The four appetizers

Sautéed duck livers and onions at ten dollars, smažený sýr at nine, potato pancakes at seven, and a smoked sausage platter at nine. Three of those four are Czech pub food carried onto a restaurant list, which is what makes the list interesting.

Smažený sýr is a thick slab of Edam or a similar semi-hard cheese, breaded and deep fried, served with tartar sauce. In the Czech lands it is the standard vegetarian option in every pub in the country, and it is eaten as a main course with potatoes, not as a starter. Putting it among the appetizers at nine dollars is an American framing of a Czech staple.

The potato pancakes are bramboráky: grated raw potato, garlic, marjoram, flour and egg, fried thin and crisp. The card notes sour cream or apple sauce on request, which is the Central European service rather than the Czech one, where marjoram and garlic in the batter usually make a condiment unnecessary. The duck livers would have arrived on topinka, fried bread rubbed with garlic, as they do on the fuller menu.

Why cards rarely survive

Nothing about a table card is built to last. It is not kept by the house once it is superseded, it is not collected, and the version that happens to exist as a file is whichever one was on the website when somebody saved a copy. One page survives from this one, recorded in November 2011, and part of that page is not legible.

Reading a partial document

What is transcribed above is what can be read. Nothing has been filled in from the other editions to make the card look complete, and no prices have been carried across from a neighbouring year. That leaves a short page, which is the honest outcome: a document with a hole in it is more useful than a document with a guess in it.

Reading a card also means accepting what it cannot settle. A single sheet gives no indication of what else was available that evening, whether the Bohemian entrées ran to thirteen dishes as they had in 2003, or whether the kitchen was already contracting. The card is a fragment of one night in one dining room, and it is treated here as exactly that.

A card with four readable lines is still evidence. It confirms that the appetizer section existed as a separate printed object in 2011, that the duck livers were still on it at that date, and that the prices had moved: seven dollars for potato pancakes here against two dollars each on the 2015 card, which is a different portion rather than a different price.

The four appetizer prices are legible and are reproduced exactly. They are historical figures from 2011 and mean nothing today except as a record of what the kitchen charged.

All six menus