The shift on restaurant tables has been quiet: paper out, QR codes in, and a menu that can now track what each customer likes. But the sharpest fight over a menu was never about technology. It was about a white card with no prices on it, handed to a woman in West Hollywood in July 1980.
Kathleen Bick had taken her business partner, Larry Becker, to dinner at L’Orangerie, a temple of Old World French elegance run by Parisian emigres Virginie and Gerrard Ferry. Becker’s menu was green and listed prices. Bick’s was white and listed none, on the assumption that the man would pay and the woman need not trouble herself. The veal medallion ran $26 before tax, roughly $82 in today’s money, a figure her menu kept to itself. The two set the menus aside and walked out hungry.
Attorney Gloria Allred telephoned the restaurant for the pair and asked owner Virginie Ferry why the policy existed. “Because a woman is a woman is a woman.” That, Allred recalled, was the answer, prompting her reply: “What does that mean, what does that mean, what does that mean?” The restaurant called it the French way and refused to change.
So Allred and her clients went to court. They charged L’Orangerie with discrimination under California’s Civil Rights Act, sought at least $250 in statutory damages and a permanent injunction against the dual menus, and asked the state alcohol authority to revisit the restaurant’s liquor licence. Allred saw a policy that had “denigrated women and perpetuated negative stereotypes about them. Since when was it a restaurant’s job to decide who would be financially responsible for a meal?” Bick, for her part, told papers the white menu left her “humiliated and incensed.” Meals, Allred liked to note, were “paid for with community property.”
The owners defended the custom as “a tradition done in the same spirit as lighting a cigarette or standing up when she enters the room.” Letters to the Los Angeles Times initially sided with the restaurant. Then came the stunt that flipped it: Allred and her clients set a spoof table, linen cloth, gold plates, rose in a vase, right outside the restaurant, and the coverage went national. L’Orangerie kept its price-free menus but stopped assuming the treated guest was the woman. The case never reached a verdict; it was dropped in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The restaurant itself closed in 2006, after 29 years.
The menu’s longer story is older and stranger than any lawsuit. The oldest extant example is a stone tablet from a feast thrown by the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II around 879 B.C., for roughly 70,000 guests over nearly a week and a half, though it commemorates food rather than offering a choice. The true ordering menu emerged in China’s Song dynasty in the early 12th century, as travelers between Hangzhou and Kaifeng met unfamiliar regional dishes; by the 13th century, one scholar recorded a tavern where “a menu was handed to customers, from which they could choose the dishes they wanted.” Western menus evolved alongside French restaurants in the late 18th century, and Delmonico’s in New York had them by the 1830s.
Ladies’ menus, for the record, were never standard in the United States; a 1927 column mocked one New York spot for the affectation, and a 1966 Fodor’s guide flagged Orsini’s for the practice. What’s changing now is the medium again: QR codes, born in 1990s Japan and adopted during the pandemic, let restaurants track item sales and individual preferences. Watch this space. Who sees the price, and who does not, is still the whole game.
Sources
- The Court Case That Killed the 'Ladies Menu' (Atlas Obscura, Natasha Frost)
- The Unexpectedly Ancient Origins Of Restaurant Menus (Tasting Table, Chris Sands)
