A restaurant's menu is the only document it publishes every single day. Reviews appear once; photographs go stale; websites are rewritten without ceremony. But the menu is written by the kitchen, for one evening, and it states exactly what that kitchen believed in on that date. Preserved properly, a run of menus is the most honest history a restaurant will ever have.
Cartelier exists to keep that history. This is our guidance for creating menus that history can use.
Put the date on the menu
At the bottom, in small type: the service date. Not a season, not "Summer" — the date.
A dated menu turns a beautiful object into a record. It lets anyone, years later, say this is what was served on that night — when the soft-shell crabs arrived, when the tomato plate appeared and when it left, when a dish changed its name. An undated menu forces archivists to guess from file names and metadata, and honest archives don't guess. When a date isn't printed, we record where our best evidence came from — and "the document itself" is the evidence that never argues back.
List the people involved
Below the date: who ran the room and the stove. Executive chef, chef de cuisine, pastry chef, general manager, sommelier, beverage director — whoever carried that service.
Menus are how careers are documented. A cook's years at a restaurant are often invisible in public records until they become an executive chef somewhere else; a printed line on a nightly menu is frequently the only contemporaneous evidence of who was where, when. On Cartelier, personnel printed on preserved menus become part of each person's documented history — service by service, venue by venue.
One menu per service, changed as often as you like
Print the dinner menu for tonight. If brunch is different, print brunch. If the tasting menu and the vegetarian tasting run side by side, they are two documents, each with its own title.
Restaurants sometimes hesitate to change a printed menu because "the menu" feels permanent. It isn't — and shouldn't be. The version that matters is the one that's true tonight. An archive handles change gracefully when each version is dated; it's the undated, silently-edited PDF that erases its own history.
The format we recommend
Husk Charleston does this as well as anyone, and their menus are the model we point to:
- A fresh menu for each service, published daily — dinner, brunch, bar — each one its own document.
- The service date printed on the menu itself.
- The people responsible listed by name and role, right on the page.
- Notes and disclaimers kept as notes — never confused with the food.
The result, in our archive, is a near-continuous daily record of a working American kitchen: dozens of dated services in a single summer, each attributable to the people who cooked it. That's not marketing collateral. That's a primary source.
Why this matters
Menus are how the history of restaurants gets written — there is almost no other source. The great archives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century dining exist because someone kept the printed menus; everything scholars know about how people ate flows from those collections. The restaurants of this decade will be studied the same way, but only if tonight's menu survives with its date and its names attached.
So: date the bottom of the page, list the people who did the work, and let each service stand as its own document. Your future historians — and ours — will thank you.
Cartelier preserves menus with their source, capture date, and a cryptographic hash of the original document. If you'd like your restaurant's menus preserved, [get in touch](https://www.cartelier.io/about) or claim your venue.