



1 / 6 Chevron Chevron IMAGE FROM “TO LIVE AND DINE IN L.A.: A CENTURY OF MENUS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY,” BY JOSH KUN, PUBLISHED BY ANGEL CITY PRESS. The Brown Derby, 1628 N. Vine Street, Hollywood, 1953.

As historical documents go, restaurant menus may seem a little frivolous compared to official records, private letters, or even newspaper and magazine clippings. But, examined in aggregate, menus can reveal more than what kind of food was for sale, at what price, and when. Within them are clues to much larger stories as well: population shifts, environmental changes, technological developments, and cultural transformations. The Rare Books Room at the Los Angeles Public Library contains plenty of landmark documents from the city’s history: an 1835 decree from the Mexican government giving L.A. urban status; a copy of the very first printed description of California. But it is its collection of more than nine thousand restaurant menus, dating from 1875 to the present, that forms the subject of a new book and exhibition, “To Live and Dine in L.A.,” tracing the city’s growth and shifting demographics.

Josh Kun, the book’s editor and the curator of the exhibition, is a seasoned explorer of the library’s dustier filing cabinets. A professor at U.S.C.’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, he had previously mined the library’s vast collection of sheet music, to produce a book and public programs under the title “Songs in the Key of Los Angeles.” When that project came to an end, in 2013, the Library Foundation asked him if he’d be interested in trying his hand at menus. He began sifting through the collection according to geography, working with his students to pin each menu to a restaurant address. After all, he pointed out, the French, who invented both the restaurant and the menu, use the same word, carte, to mean both map and menu.

Kun found that the menus did indeed map the growth of the city, tying together eating habits and urban infrastructure as Los Angeles spread out from its downtown core over the course of the twentieth century. As the automobile rose to dominance in the nineteen-thirties, for example, Wilshire Boulevard became an important artery—and the city’s “first mobile restaurant row,” as reflected in the collection’s earliest drive-in restaurant menus.

The menu map also revealed the year 1965 as a pivotal moment in Angeleno history. Immigration reform, in the form of the Hart-Cellar Act, which removed national quotas, took place at the same time that the Watts uprising was setting the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of South Los Angeles on fire. The library’s menus both reflected and prophesied the city’s resulting transformation. The first Thai restaurant menus join the collection in the late nineteen-sixties, joined by Vietnamese and Cambodian food in the seventies, building toward the contemporary multicultural, multiracial food scene for which Los Angeles is known today. Kun picked up on an even subtler shift: 1965 marked the start of the regionalization of L.A.’s menus, as, for example, “Chinese” restaurants began to characterize their food as Mandarin, Cantonese, or Szechuan. That difference, Kun says, reflects a larger transformation, as immigrant communities began to define their culture on their own terms, “instead of being held captive” by a city that “simply saw them as ‘foreign.’ ”

Meanwhile, the collection boasts an abundance of menus from restaurants in South Los Angeles up until the nineteen-sixties, when its holdings abruptly taper off. This, Kun argues, reveals not only the white flight and subsequent decades of economic disinvestment that have led these neighborhoods, now predominantly African-American, to be classified as “food deserts,” but also the limitations of the archive itself. When he began the project, back in 2013, Kun brought the celebrated Angeleno chef Roy Choi along with him to see the collection. As Kun showed him the lavishly illustrated banquet menus from the eighteen-eighties and nineties—the librarian’s pride and joy—Choi’s response was, “That’s cool, but where did the regular people eat?”

To try to answer that question, Kun ventured outside the library walls, into the obsessive and peculiar world of private menu collectors. There are, he discovered, a handful of major players in the L.A. area. He even attended one of their regular meet-ups, where collectors bring bags full of menus, some to trade and some to show off. A number of them agreed to loan menus to Kun for the book and exhibition, to fill gaps in the library’s own collection. Others, such as the owner of a stash of old Jewish-deli menus, weren’t as forthcoming.

Some holes proved impossible to fill. Kun’s white whale is the menu from the Los Angeles Women’s Saloon and Parlor, in East Hollywood, which opened in 1974 and was, Kun writes in the book, “the first, and last, feminist restaurant in the city.” From the library’s collection, Kun had been able to piece together a history of gender-segregated dining in Los Angeles in the nineteenth century, when many restaurants offered separate, alcohol-free menus for ladies; he had also traced the rise of female cooks and restaurant owners in the nineteen-thirties. A menu from the Women’s Saloon and Parlor would be key to understanding the connection between the city’s culinary and feminist histories. A 1976 Times description of the restaurant offers tantalizing references to omelettes, crab quiche, and vegetarian meatloaf, as well as to an absence of diet drinks (to promote size-acceptance) and grapes and lettuce (to support California farmworkers). But Kun’s searches failed to turn up a surviving menu.

In addition to these meta-narratives of race, gender, and urban development, the menu collection also offers a more straightforward view onto the shifting contents of Angeleno plates. Basil, for instance, first appears on menus in the nineteen-seventies, and before long no self-respecting restaurant was without it; aspic, previously a fine-dining mainstay, vanished around the same time. Kun was surprised to find that today’s emphasis on locally sourced ingredients had a precursor in the city’s very earliest menus. If you go back to the start of the twentieth century, he said, and look at “everyday, working and middle-class lunchroom menus in L.A.—most of them will tell you where everything comes from”: sanddabs from Catalina, chicken from a farm in Pomona. Eating local made sense in an era before the advent of widespread mechanical refrigeration, but listing the sources on the menu was, Kun explained, part of the larger narrative of California as an agricultural Eden—an abundant landscape of sunshine, endless orange groves, and good health. In light of this knowledge, the rise of California Cuisine, with chefs like Wolfgang Puck creating dishes that showcase fresh local produce, can be understood as an extension of the city’s earliest dining trends.

Just as California Cuisine helped to inspire a national farm-to-table movement, Los Angeles’s menus have had an outsized influence on the design of those in the rest of the country. The Lord Menu Company, located in downtown Los Angeles, was once the largest menu-printing company in the country, supplying design and print services to restaurants in the city, as well as to those further afield, in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and beyond. Lord was the first to include full-color food photographs on its menus, for the Bob’s Big Boy chain, in the nineteen-fifties, an innovation that quickly became a staple at fast-food joints, diners, and ethnic restaurants. L.A. menus also tended to be distinctively large—both in physical size, and in the number of dishes offered. This, Kun pointed out, goes against industry-wide menu-writing wisdom, which advises that minimalist menus help keep food costs low.

Despite L.A.’s trademark sprawl, its culinary influence, and the cultural and geographic patterns he has identified in the archive, Kun is reluctant to generalize about what makes a typical Angeleno menu. Instead, it’s precisely the city’s heterogeneity that makes it distinct. “L.A. is a city that has always existed as a collection of multiple desires, multiple histories, multiple pasts, and multiple futures,” he said. “I’d like to think that that is what the menus show us—how hard it is to find a single narrative that captures the city."