The menus nobody kept
Five counters closed on Calder Street, and not one of them kept a menu. We went looking anyway. Part three of The Last Diners.
1 min readThe Last Diners, part 3
When a counter closes, the stools go to auction, the griddle goes to a nephew, and the menu goes in the trash. Nobody thinks a menu is history until there are none left.
We wanted to know what Calder Street ate in 1990. So Sam, who spent eleven years reading planning files for a living, went to the archive. Ruth went to the people.
The archive
The city archive has the Blue Plate's license, two complaints about the Lantern's exhaust fan and a photograph of Marco's from 1978 with the menu board just out of focus. It has no menus. Food, the archivist explained, was never the city's business.
The people
The people had more. Teodor Vance remembers that the Harbor Grill did a fish fry on Fridays and nothing else worth mentioning. Agnes, who drives the 3, has a Blue Plate matchbook with the prices of tea and toast on the back. A woman who answered our callout sent a photograph of her parents' wedding lunch at Marco's, with the menu propped against the sugar.
From these and a dozen other scraps we rebuilt four of the five menus. The fifth, the bus station stall, left nothing at all. Everyone remembers it. Nobody remembers what it sold.
What we learned
Breakfast on Calder Street in 1990 cost about what a coffee costs now. The menus were short. The portions, everyone agrees, were not.
Next week, in the last part, we sit at Rosa's for last call.
Ruth Calloway
Editor · Food
Ruth started Dispatch in 2021 from a table at Rosa's. She writes about food and the people who make it, and edits everyone else.
