Antique Parisian Restaurant Menu, Handwritten Déjeuner Bill of Fare, Café de Paris–Fouquet's Maisons, Art Nouveau Gilt, Framed, c. 1925–1928

The Piece

A single day's lunch in Paris, written out by hand a century ago and never meant to survive it. The sheet is printed stock — MENU in gold Art Nouveau lettering under a spray of wisteria and laurel — and everything else is manuscript: a full déjeuner in a fluent French service hand, from escargots de Bourgogne and jambon de Bayonne down through the poissons (truite Grenobloise, raie au beurre noir, homard Thermidor at 18 francs), the entrées, the rôtis, a garden of April vegetables led by asperges nouvelles, and a closing column of desserts — coupe Melba, cœur à la crème, plum pudding. One entrée is struck through in pencil: eighty-sixed before the afternoon was out. At the foot, the gold imprint that places it: Paris — Mêmes Maisons — Café de Paris, Pré Catelan, Armenonville, Fouquet's. Framed in an ebonized wood frame with honest wear, wire intact, on a scrolled iron easel.

History & Provenance

In the 1920s these four names were the summit of Parisian dining under one management — the Café de Paris on the avenue de l'Opéra, the Pré Catelan and Armenonville in the Bois de Boulogne, and Fouquet's on the Champs-Élysées, the only one still serving today. Menus like this were written fresh for every service, priced in francs in the margin, duplicated for the dining room, and thrown away at closing. The date reads 28 April, later 1920s — Paris between the wars, the Paris of Hemingway's moveable feast, ordering écrevisses à la nage while the asparagus was new. The menu is bilingual in one telling line — "Lamb chop grillé aux flageolets" — written for a dining room full of Americans and English at the height of the expatriate decade. Printed banquet menus from this era survive in numbers; the handwritten daily working documents, struck-through dishes and all, mostly did not.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Hang it in a kitchen, a bar, a dining room, and it does what no reproduction French poster can: it was there. Every name on the page was cooked and served on a spring day in the twenties; somebody ordered the homard Thermidor and somebody was told the mutton was finished. It reads endlessly — guests find the crossed-out dish, the three-franc coffee, the asparagus of the season — and its soft sepia and gold sit beautifully against dark walls, marble, brass, linen. For anyone who loves food, France, or paper that survived against the odds, this is the real thing