This post is presented in conjunction with HNOC's 2024 Food Forum: New Orleans Restaurants through History, presented by Chef Paul Prudhomme's Magic Seasoning Blends on Saturday, November 9. Learn more and register

The Historic New Orleans Collection houses a diverse restaurant menu collection spanning over a century, offering insights into the evolution of New Orleans cuisine and dining culture. This collection, acquired through donations, purchases, and gifts, offers a unique view into culinary history, showing how restaurants use them to convey their own culture to customers through menus—both the dishes served and the physical items on which their offerings are listed.

Many Louisiana restaurants use menu design and contents to engulf newcomers in the lore of the area. From menus, diners can learn about the history of regional cuisine and the places that cuisine comes from. But that history is not always neutral.

The Cabin Restaurant menu. (HNOC, 2024.0138.103)

The Cabin Restaurant was located in Burnside, a small town in Ascension Parish, south of Baton Rouge. Opened in 1973 by Al Robert, the Cabin sat on the grounds of Monroe Plantation and prided itself on preserving the region’s local cuisine and farming history of River Road, a 70-mile stretch of territory that runs along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. River Road is famed for its plantations—and for its role in the transportation of enslaved people. 

Alongside fried seafood and jambalaya, the menu offers guests a history of the location. As the menu explains, the Cabin was so named because it actually was a building where enslaved people lived—a reference to the outdated term “slave cabins.” The menu’s description romanticizes the location, explaining that the structure was one of the 10 such dwellings at Monroe Plantation and may have been imported from the Welham and Helvetia plantations.

The note at bottom right of the menu reads “In an atmosphere so true to yesterday, we invite you to enjoy the warm, friendly service” and food.

Who does this story cater to? Enslaved people are central to what the menu calls “an aura of authenticity and realism” and to the regional history on which the restaurant capitalizes, but there is no recognition of the brutal and dehumanizing system under which they lived. In the menu’s narrative, the substandard living conditions and “ancient newspaper fixed to the wall with a mixture of flour and water” become quaint kitsch. By romanticizing its location in former enslaved dwellings, the Cabin’s preservation narrative caters to a nostalgic view of the antebellum South that may not resonate with the descendants of the enslaved, raising questions about whom such preservation truly serves.

(Caribbean Room menu, 1962–1963. HNOC, 1974.25.29.156)

Another restaurant represented in HNOC’s menu collection is the Caribbean Room, which also incorporated regional history and culture into its branding. The restaurant operated in the Pontchartrain Hotel from the 1930s until 1994 and was known for its romantic atmosphere and luxurious ambiance, featuring pink color schemes among wood paneling.

Diners at the Caribbean Room enjoyed dishes deeply rooted in Creole cooking, thanks to chefs like Louis Evans. During his 18-years of service at the Caribbean Room, Evans gained a reputation as one of the nation’s most creative, skilled Creole chefs and became the first Black chef to be admitted to the Honorable Order of the Golden Toque.

The Caribbean Room’s print menu incorporated cultural references from beyond Louisiana, with fictional Caribbean symbols (above) and a drawing of a Caribbean dancer. It also included information about the restaurant’s décor, especially the Dwight Marfield murals that adorned the dining room walls and other parts of the hotel. A “public note of thanks” from David L. Cohn to Lyle Aschaffenburg, proprietor of the Ponchartrain Hotel, compares New Orleans to a “subtly fascinating woman: one who conceals, not to mystify, but to beguile.” Aschaffenburg, Cohn says, is “an oldime New Orleanian [who] disdains the vulgar notion that you and you and you are not to be trusted... to live with the beautiful fragile.” Instead, guests of the Caribbean Room were invited to be immersed in a luxurious dining experience that celebrated and reinforced the cultural richness of New Orleans.

This menu from Café Degas includes a page dedicated to the biography of the restaurant’s namesake and his time in New Orleans as well as his 1873 painting A Cotton Office in New Orleans. (Café Degas menu. HNOC, gift of Robert Morton, 94-718-RL)

The menu from Chez Pastor highlights Acadian heritage. (Chez Pastor menu. HNOC, gift of Richard and Rima Collin, 93-404-RL.102)

The Historic New Orleans Collection’s diverse menu archive serves as a testament to south Louisiana’s evolving culinary landscape, revealing how restaurants not only preserve but also communicate cultural heritage through their menus. The archive provides an opportunity to think about menus as tools of preservation, and to remember that while cultural preservation is crucial, the approach and intention behind it are equally important in shaping how history is remembered and shared.