The later dinner menu

About this document

The last menu archived before the restaurant closed. Two columns of prices — à la carte and complete dinner — a business lunch at eight dollars, and an appetizer that had not been on any earlier card.

Two pages, archived on 5 March 2015 — the latest menu that survives, and the closest thing we have to how the kitchen was operating at the end.

The CzechMex goulash taco is worth stopping on. Goulash on a house-made tortilla, three dollars, listed without comment among the appetizers: a Bohemian kitchen in a town that had become largely Mexican-American, working out loud.

Two prices for the same dish

The useful thing on this card is the second column. Roast pork loin is sixteen dollars a la carte and eleven as a complete dinner, and the same five-dollar gap runs down the whole list: breaded pork tenderloin, roast chicken, chicken paprika, Pilsner goulash, svíčková, koprová, smoked sausage, smoked butt, sekaná. Only the duckling and the in-house butchered ribs break the pattern, and both are priced a la carte only.

A complete dinner brought a cup of homemade soup or a salad, two compliments and dessert. Bought separately those would cost more than five dollars anywhere, which means the card is not offering a discount so much as steering. The house wanted the table to take the full meal, and set the a la carte price high enough that almost nobody would.

Kitchens that cook slowly price this way for a reason. A dining room whose signature dishes are braises and roasts cannot flex its portions to demand; it cooks a quantity in the morning and sells it or does not. Bundling soup, sides and dessert into one number makes the covers predictable, and predictable covers are what a long-cooking kitchen needs to survive.

What a compliment was

Compliment is the house word for a side dish, and it appears on no other Czech-American menu in quite that form. Two came with a complete dinner and each one after that was two dollars. Ten were listed: bread dumplings, potato dumplings, sauerkraut, sweet and sour cabbage, boiled potatoes, mashed potatoes, potato salad, mixed vegetables, green beans and fries.

That list is the whole restaurant in ten lines. The first six belong to a Bohemian table without qualification. Potato salad sits in both traditions at once. Mixed vegetables, green beans and fries belong to an American one, and they are there because by the 2010s a share of the room expected them. Nobody announced the change; it arrived as four entries at the bottom of a side list.

A weekend lunch, not a weekday one

The business lunch ran Friday and Saturday only, half past eleven to half past four, at eight dollars, with coffee and dessert charged separately. Twelve dishes were available on it, including a Friday fish fry that appears nowhere else on the card.

Weekday lunch trade comes from people who work nearby. A lunch service that only opens at the weekend is feeding people who made a journey, and that is a different business with a different risk attached to it. By this point the dining room was a destination, no longer a local, which is the shape most long-lived ethnic restaurants take shortly before the end.

What had gone since 2003

Set against the five-page menu, this card is a subtraction. The three Wiener schnitzels are gone. So is the broiler section with its T-bone and its filet medallions, the fish list, and the printed takeaway counter. The soups, by contrast, have gained: liver dumpling and beef noodle are named on the card instead of left to the day.

What survived is the Bohemian core, almost intact, plus ribs and duck. A kitchen shedding half its range and keeping all of one part of it is not failing at random. It is deciding what it is.

All six menus