Guide to the Menu Collection,
1851-[ca. 1900]

The core of the collection was assembled by Oscar Tschirky (1866-1943), known throughout the world as Oscar of the Waldorf. As maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, from 1893 to 1943, he began a lifelong hobby of collecting menus, some of which were for functions he himself arranged, but most of which were of historical, gastronomic, or artistic importance. Upon his death, his menu collection, papers, and personal memorabilia were donated to Cornell University. The Hotel School Library has continued to add to the collection.

A collection of over 10,000 menus, providing evidence of the manners, mores, and food habits of earlier times.

Many menus include prints or half-tones of historic people and places. They may also include featured speakers, detail organizational leadership, and provide biographical sketches of the famous and infamous, including Theodore Roosevelt, Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Oscar Hammerstein. They may dramatize historical events, such as a "luncheon to the California Promotion Committee on the occasion of the resumption of the hotel business in the burned district after the earthquake and fire on 18 April 1906"; the opening of the first tunnels of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company under the Hudson River; and a dinner in honor of Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot. Prohibition era menus indicated the availability of spirits to their clientele by tucking a small insert into the spine cord of the menu.

Also menus collected by Charles N. Pinco.

Also, menus collected by Ruth Wood Green from hotels and nightclubs in the 1940s.