At the end of each meal, you’ll find me tucking the menu into my purse. I usually ask for permission. When the server says, “I’ll just leave a menu here for the table,” I respond, “May I keep one… forever?”
There are rules. I’m not a thief. I won’t try to squirrel away a laminated menu, or anything permanently tucked in a leather portfolio; I seize upon the paper ones that will get tossed at the end of the night. Some restaurants present you with a paper menu at the end of a meal, like Jônt in D.C., and Provenance in Society Hill. If a restaurant has just opened, I’ll ask the chef to autograph it. I welcome the wine stains and grease smears: They’re evidence of a good time.
An old menu yanks a past dinner into the present. Recalling a meal without one can feel like listening to a song without the written lyrics present — which is, of course, generally fine when it comes to music. (Did Soulja Boy sing “snacks on deck” or “stacks on deck”? Was that oregano or thyme? Pink peppercorn or cardamom?) Rather than poorly lit Instagram photos or the hazy memory of a full belly years later, I have the lyrics in front of me.
The wall in my home office is filled with dozens of framed menus, spanning meals on five continents. Some are there for their design, like a recent one from soon-to-open Tapori in D.C., when it was hosted at La’ Shukran; the stylized camel and man holding a tray of naan on his head are fabulous. Mexico City’s paper menu game is particularly strong. Some are to mark collaborations and one-off dinners that will never happen again. Others are trophies, the heads and hides of extinct beasts, like the final menu from wd~50; one of Amass in Copenhagen’s final bows; and the menu from when Iluka of Copenhagen collaborated with Reverie in D.C., before an electrical fire gutted it.
There are menus for openings and closings (and reopenings, from when the dining world surged back after the pandemic). In the nearly four years since Inquirer contributor Sarah Maiellano reported on mine and several others’ menu walls, there have been so many new spots (like Moon Rabbit, its menu signed by chef Kevin Tien) and shuttered places (both mine and the restaurants of my husband, Ari Miller. I texted a photo of Tabachoy’s signed and now-framed opening menu on my wall to Chance Anies, who had once been a cook at my restaurant, Poi Dog. “I’ve finally made it!” he responded.
My collection shows how Philly’s dining scene has evolved in the last decade and a half — less New American, more personal, and a lot (shell)fishier. I still save menus that don’t make it onto the wall. On my desk, I keep a clipboard of ones that are “in play.” If I’m writing about a trend — say, about gamtae — I’m looking at menus with the dates I dined at the restaurants scribbled in the corner. Once I’m done, they go into a shoebox.
This past week, my husband and I went through the shoeboxes I’ve accumulated over the last 15 years. I first put the wall together when I was living alone, so I took down some menus — dinners I’ve had with exes, for instance — to make room. Much of our dining life is now shared, and making room for his own box of menus was like combining kitchen utensils.
We set new parameters for the wall: No menus that brought back bad memories. Most of them should be meals we had together. Prime wall real estate, at eye level, should go to the restaurants we both sorely missed.
Many are from dinners where one of us served as a chef — in my case, Poi Dog x Rooster Soup Co., Poi Dog x Mission Cantina Tacolab, and my two-month-long residence at Jose Garces’ Volver in the Kimmel Center, which marked a wild era of figuring out what to do with my life after closing my restaurant. (It also helped me raise money to start a sauce business, also named Poi Dog.)
The collaboration menus that Ari and I wrote together — like a dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s re/Asian during his chef residency in Bahrain — represent how our culinary experiences have become, through our relationship, evermore entwined.
In fact, most of the new menus that we put up are from dinners that were cornerstones of our courtship. There’s Neighborhood in Hong Kong, when we were finally released from the city’s restrictive COVID-era quarantine on a trip when Ari first met my extended family in December 2022. We added the menu from Batard on the night we brought together different sets of our friends in New York for the first time, and from Omar Tate’s residency at Stone Barns, which was also the last time we took a family trip with Tokyo, the dog who had been Ari’s companion for 17 years. There are also menus from the Basta in Tel Aviv, where Ari used to work, and where we brought more friends together to meet for the first time in 2023, mere weeks before war broke out.
So much of our lives happen around meals, and these menus can be more vivid than photographs. They’re tangible documents, the ideas of dishes funneled into a few, sometimes poetic lines on a page. “The menu represents something that we went for, or something that we worked for,” Ari said. “We don’t relate to a photo from a meal in the same way.”
There are some voids. Omakase experiences typically don’t offer menus. There’s nothing of one of Poi Dog’s finest collaborations, a Hawaiian lu’au stew with coconut pasta cooked for Feastival in 2017 with Marc Vetri — menus weren’t printed, and the sign was a little too big for me to stuff in my purse. The meals that were too stressful did not make the cut; hauling everything you need to serve 150 people dinner in the middle of a field is a lot of work, and I didn’t want a daily reminder of every farm dinner we cooked.
I left room for the wall to grow. I hung the frames far closer together than before. The wall has 47 menus on it, with room for at least a dozen more. I’ve made space for new experiences. Menus can get switched out. If a friend opens a restaurant I love, chances are that menu will not linger in my shoebox, but get framed immediately.
Mostly, menus represent times shared. They mark carefully planned nights, a jaunt to somewhere far away, to a place that perhaps you might never return. And even if you can physically go back to that restaurant, it will never again be exactly like it was on that night.