How Ladies’ Menus Brought Gender to the Table
Menu from L'Orangerie, Menu Collection. Los Angeles Public Library Special Collections.
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| On a Thursday evening in July 1980, Kathleen Bick and Larry Becker walked into L’Orangerie, an upscale French restaurant in Los Angeles. The two were business partners who’d had some success, so the dinner was to be a celebratory one, her treat. They were handed menus. |
The restaurant was expensive, but how expensive, Bick didn’t know, because her menu did not include any prices. Becker’s menu, on the other hand, did. They learned that when men and women dined together, the restaurant gave men menus with prices; women, menus without. According to a discrimination lawsuit Gloria Allred later filed on Bick and Becker’s behalf, this policy ‘caused each of them severe humiliation’, so much so that they left.
When Allred asked L’Orangerie why it had separate menus, Virginie Ferry, who owned the restaurant with her husband Gerard, ironically invoked Gertrude Stein: ‘Because a woman is a woman is a woman.’
Allred’s response: ‘What does that mean, what does that mean, what does that mean?’
Menus serve a fundamental, utilitarian role at restaurants: They inform diners of the kitchen’s offerings. But menus also contain so much more. They can embody a history of gender expectations at the dining table, as they did at L’Orangerie. They can also represent what happens when the law intervenes to question those expectations.
The unpriced menu Bick received is often called a ladies’ menu, because while technically intended for the guests of whomever was hosting (and paying for) the meal, restaurants generally assumed in parties of men and women, women were guests, and men the hosts. L’Orangerie’s menus weren’t the first to be the subject of intense debate; three years earlier, the Los Angeles Times (LA Times) had investigated ladies’ menus at another French restaurant called Bernard’s. The food and beverage director defended the practice as innocuous: ‘It’s just a matter of haute cuisine and savoir faire, not women’s lib.’ Though women did receive unpriced menus by default, he suggested they were not sexist because, ‘Male or female, the host gets the priced menu.’ Another restaurant owner was more blunt: ‘You never show a lady the price of what she orders. A lady is a lady and should not be involved in prices.’
When the paper returned to the issue to cover Allred’s lawsuit, Gerard Ferry defended L’Orangerie’s practice on similar grounds: ‘It’s done in the same spirit as lighting a woman’s cigarette, or standing up when she enters a room.’
This spirit, of course, would come to haunt Ferry in the form of Allred's lawsuit. Ladies’ menus seem to have originated in mid 19th century Europe, when few upper-class women entered fine dining establishments alone. Instead, they were expected to accompanied by male companions who would pay their way. As the 1860 The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness put it, ‘When with a lady you must pay her expenses as well as your own; if she offers to share the expense, decline unless she insists upon it.’ That culture was replicated in the U.S.; it was believed upper-class women needed male protection in public spaces, and in these spaces, women also generally refrained from handling money. As historian Paul Freedman explains, fine dining restaurants from the late 19th to early 20th century were considered male domains where men dealt with finances.
But Prohibition changed restaurant culture. Without income from selling wine and spirits, many fine dining spaces closed, while casual eateries became more popular. Relationships between men and women in public spaces relaxed, and it became more acceptable for women to make financial transactions in public. Still, there was some anxiety about the evolving gender roles. In 1922, two years after the start of Prohibition, Emily Post published her seminal Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home and noted though women can host a meal, they should take care to not embarrass her gentlemen guests: ‘having the check presented to a hostess when gentlemen are among her guests is more unpleasant’ than vice versa. (Post’s advice: prepay or sign the check away from the table.)
More interesting, perhaps, is that Post evidently did not find it charming to be given an unpriced menu. Her 1927 edition explicitly warns readers of the practice: ‘A few of the highest priced restaurants in Paris and elsewhere love to present you with a bill-of-fare without prices printed on it. You can always hand it back, if you choose to, and say, “Bring me the menu with prices.”’
This suggestion would be repeated in Post’s revised editions until about 1960. Similar advice reappeared in 1978, when Amy Vanderbilt wrote in her etiquette book: ‘The restaurants that give a menu with prices only to the host are becoming rarer. Most guests would really like to know how much things cost so they do not overspend.’
This was true even in Europe, where, as the LA Times noted in its 1980 coverage of L’Orangerie’s lawsuit, ‘The custom is bending gradually to women’s liberation.’
In The Rituals of Dinner, Margaret Visser writes, ‘Since manners are rituals and therefore conservative – part of their purpose is always conservation – they change slowly if at all, and usually in the face of long and widespread unwillingness.’ This perhaps explains why, despite decades of etiquette books not finding them very gentlemanly and the rise of ‘womens’ lib’, ladies’ menus weren’t out of fashion by the early 1980s. And why, of four reader letters the LA Times published in response to Allred’s lawsuit, three sided with L’Orangerie. One wrote: ‘Once again, those who wish to “free” us are trying to impose their own standards on a quite unwilling majority[.]’
‘Once again.’ Presumably, the writer was exhausted from the 1970s, in which the U.S. saw the height of second wave feminism; a record number of women entering the workforce; feminists opening restaurants that challenged patriarchal models of dining; the passage of the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which banned discrimination in lending; and, in California, spouses being granted equal rights to manage and control marital community property. Previous law had vested sole control with the husband.
It was within this landscape that Allred filed her suit. Yet it was not a given that she would succeed. Allred sued L’Orangerie under California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act but, as the Cornell Hospital and Restaurant Administration Quarterly pointed out at the time, courts up until then had interpreted the statute only in narrower situations where a business allegedly discriminated by denying someone a service or an opportunity. In his demurrer to Allred’s complaint, Ferry argued that there was no discrimination that night at L'Orangerie, because Bick wasn’t denied anything. She could have received a priced menu, had she just asked.
The litigation went on for almost a year, but before the court could hear the case, the parties settled. The restaurant agreed to simply ask diners whether they’d prefer a priced or unpriced menu. Notably, Bernard’s, which was not a party to the suit, volunteered to do the same. Which was just as well: In 1985, the Supreme Court of California held that the statute does apply when a business’s policy results in unequal treatment.
I first came across one of L’Orangerie’s unpriced menus at the Los Angeles Public Library, which houses an extensive menu collection. The restaurant was celebrated for its opulent 18th century French aesthetic, but its menu is more understated: a folded, laminated white cover jacket with the restaurant’s name and logo, and a two-page menu inside that lists the dishes in French with English translations underneath (‘Les Oeufs au Caviar/Eggs with Caviar’). Each dish is followed by a line of dots. The library doesn’t have this menu’s priced counterpart, but it does have other, later menus from the restaurant where the dots lead to the dish’s price (the eggs were $15). In the ladies’ menu, the dots just…trail off like an incomplete thought.
The library also has a few menus from Bernard’s. Its 1981 menu features a lovely line drawing of a platter of fish, some fruit, and a cake. Inside, the menu is a few pages longer than L’Orangerie’s. The lamb in tarragon sauce was $16, but Bick wouldn’t have known it. She would, though, have had a hint as to the cost of the specialties of the day: Those were ‘based on market price’, the same language used on the priced menu. Ironically, that phrase makes the lack of prices elsewhere even more obvious, as if the menu is not yet complete.
I suppose that’s one more indignity of these ladies’ menus: They don’t even honor the internal logic of menu construction. In other menus that don’t include prices — some of the earliest printed menus, for example, or a few of the banquet or cafeteria menus in the library’s collection — you may wonder how much the asparagus was, but the menus’ designs don’t suggest prices have been omitted in error. These ladies’ menus, though, don’t read as intentionally unpriced; rather, it's clear the men’s reading experience was prioritised, even if that left the ladies’ version a little less legible.
It's tempting to think of ladies’ menus as outdated, but they have kept their currency. Although Allred’s lawsuit surely served as a deterrent, at least one restaurant in the U.S. apparently still distributes them. And based on Instagram comments when I posted about L’Orangerie’s ladies’ menu, they still have their supporters. I was surprised by this, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been. I don’t want to suggest all the supporters prefer earlier, less equitable times, but ladies’ menus, and the gender structure they rely on, fit in neatly into the contemporary world of tradwives who idealise traditional gender roles. The danger, of course, is that giving up economic power in exchange for financial stability – as those gender roles require – isn’t really a fair exchange; within that transaction are unaccounted losses in her political and individual powers. So while it might be nice to be oblivious to a restaurant’s dinner prices, ceding the right to even see them, because chivalry? It’s a trap. It’s a trap, it’s a trap.