A man walks into a restaurant and sits down expectantly, but instead of a charming server bearing a menu, there’s a QR code glued to the table. With a sigh, he gets out his phone. . . . This depressing dystopian scene has become an increasingly frequent reality since COVID‑19, but however hygienic and handy QR codes may be, they will never inspire a book as thoughtful and rich as Tastes and Traditions, an investigation of the aesthetic and cultural semiotics of the printed menu.

Menus aren’t always necessary. We can assemble an excellent breakfast from the buffet in a hotel dining room without a written guide, and we can choose the lunch we want from the passing carts in a dim sum restaurant. Half the fun of dining omakase in a high-end Japanese establishment is the mystery of what’s coming next. But normally when we go out to eat, a menu makes a useful contribution to the occasion, not just by telling us what food is available and how much it costs but also by providing culinary context to the dishes we select — with bonus marks if the document is visually appealing, humorous, or otherwise interesting in its own right. And that is only the beginning. Once its primary job is done, an old menu becomes a historical artifact: the souvenir of a specific meal, perhaps, or a broader reflection of the tastes, prejudices, and requirements of the society of the day.

An English literature professor at McGill University, Nathalie Cooke is an expert at detecting nuances of meaning and historical resonance in the written word. Having set out her thesis that an old menu can tell “the belated reader” much more than simply what was once for dinner, she organizes her material according to half a dozen themes, each one explored through a generous number of examples. Cooke is a skillful curator, and her carefully chosen, clever juxtapositions prevent her book from being a mere list or catalogue. The first chapter, for instance, considers the design and visual appeal of menus, taking us from handwritten and painted mementoes of elaborate feasts hosted by Louis XV in the 1750s to a modern Bangkok restaurant’s bill of fare composed entirely of emoji. En route, we encounter cards designed by Toulouse-Lautrec and Albert Robida, the gorgeous offerings of luxury ocean liners, and the mixed-media assemblages of the 1960s artist-chef Daniel Spoerri’s “New Realism.”

Try our signature cabbage can-can!

Tom Chitty

With 190 illustrations, Tastes and Traditions allows us to see almost every menu Cooke discusses (though some of the fine print requires a magnifying glass). There is a strong temptation to flip through the pages as image after image catches the eye, because it is distractingly beautiful, amusing, or just plain weird. But Cooke’s text is equally engaging. She discusses menus as intentional keepsakes and as manifestations of cultural exchange; she considers those for kids (and their parents) and examines changes in notions of dietary health. As Cooke points out, her own “twenty-first-century, Canadian perspective” often causes her to question details that would not have raised an eyebrow when a menu was originally created: the casual racism inherent in cartoon stereotypes of Black and Indigenous cultures, Coca‑Cola as a nutritious panacea, the offer of post-prandial cigarettes or cigars encouraging customers to smoke.

Cooke saves many of her most interesting discoveries for her final chapter, entitled “Riddle Me This: Menus That Intrigue.” Here we find eighteenth-century English “Enigmatic Bills of Fare” and nineteenth-century American “Conundrum Suppers,” both designed to entertain dinner guests by disguising the names of dishes as riddles to be solved. “The First Temptation in a Small Blast of Wind,” for example, was an apple puff. Such deliberate acts of obfuscation lead Cooke into a consideration of the persistence of “menu French” on English and American cartes du jour, “inhibiting all but those diners familiar with ‘la langue de Molière’ from understanding and visualizing dishes clearly.” From there, she offers a lengthy analysis of Alchemist, the revered restaurant in Copenhagen created by the visionary chef Rasmus Munk. Dinner there consists of up to fifty courses and can last five or six hours, involving live music, video, and theatre. Munk’s food is frequently camouflaged as something else or used as provocative metaphor. Ironically, while customers have access to a massive wine list, presented on a digital tablet, Alchemist has no menu. The restaurant’s inclusion in this book, therefore, comes as a surprise and serves to underline another oddity: the conspicuous absence of chefs in Tastes and Traditions. Although understandable while Cooke is dealing with earlier centuries, when kitchens were staffed by anonymous artisans, it feels like an omission when she turns to modern times. Today’s great chefs are rightfully considered artists, and the menus they create are their personal manifestos. Only Heston Blumenthal, the owner-chef of the Fat Duck, in England, is given his due, when Cooke zeroes in on the references to children’s literature in his self-referential, retrospective “Anthology Menus.”

Then again, it’s hard to criticize a book for sustaining a rigorously tight focus on its stated subject: not food or restaurants, chefs or restaurateurs, but menus themselves, those “invitations to flights of the imagination” and the discreet information that can be found in their words and images, if one knows where to look.

“This exploration was driven by four central questions,” Cooke writes in her conclusion. “What is a menu? What does it contain? What does it do? And why does it matter? I hope that if this book only begins to provide some answers to these questions, it will compel you to investigate the terrain of menus further.” That’s a timely suggestion in the age of the smartphone, not just because of the proliferation of QR codes but also because those who might wish to keep a memento of a meal no longer need to beg or steal a menu from the restaurant: they just take photographs of the food. Future historians may find themselves faced with a problematic lack of source material, but, then again, menus have always been fragile items. In the words of the renowned American menu collector Henry Voigt, who contributes two examples to this book, “As with other types of ephemera, part of their appeal lies within the notion of their improbable survival.” Readers may find themselves more inclined to cherish the bill of fare next time they eat out — or at least to give it more than a cursory glance.

James Chatto is a restaurant critic, author, and food and wine writer. His new book, Acquired Tastes: The Lives and Recipes of Eight Culinary Ambassadors, comes out next year.