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Your Price: $ 24.95
Item Number: MU121
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Circa: 1957
Condition: Near Mint
Restaurant Name: Toffenetti Restaurants
Locations: Chicago, at the Greyhound and Eight in Chicago’s Loop; New York, 43rd St. & Broadway; St. Petersburg FL in the New Toffenetti Hotel.
Date: December 6, 1957
Artwork: This 1950s menu featured a cover extolling the virtues of the restaurant’s Genuine Idaho Baked Potatoes. Several stapled-on Specials sheets are attached.
History Founded by Tyrolean immigrant DarioToffenetti (1889-1962), who got his start in the U.S. selling baked potatoes at a Wisconsin mining camp and eventually opened his first restaurant in Chicago. He was a genius at marketing, advertising heavily and taking care to create interesting menus.
After winning catering contracts for the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 and the NY World's Fair in 1939, he outbid Louis B. Mayer for a premiere spot in Times Square and designed a two-story, glass-fronted modern building, with an escalator and open stainless steel kitchen. This became a destination restaurant -- it is said to have served 8,500 people on the day it opened in 1940. There, Toffenetti became famous for his Old Fashioned Louisiana Strawberry Shortcake, ‘topped with pure, velvety whipped cream like puffs of snow.’
Toffenetti’s menu items featured elaborate descriptors: Ham was ‘Hot Roast Sugar Cured Ham cut from healthy young hogs grown in the sunshine on beautifully rolling Wisconsin farms, where corn, barley, milk and acorns are unstintingly fed to them, producing that silken meat rich in wonderful flavor.’ His potatoes were ‘bulging beauties, grown in the ashes of extinct volcanoes, scrubbed and washed, then baked in a whirlwind of tempestuous fire until the shell crackles with brittleness.’
Size: 8.25 by 12 inches.
Description: Back cover features cocktails, mixed drinks, beer and ale, plus a section for egg dishes, vegetables and potatoes and delicious sandwiches on fresh bread or toast. Other usual fare included Broiled Cuban Lobster Tails ($2.15), Broiled Tender Lamb Chops ($2.65), and Italian Spaghetti a la Toffenetti, 85 cents. It’s an astonishingly-complete menu!
Features and Specials: One specials sheet announces the ‘Grand Idaho Festival’ offering a whole baked potato for 30 cents; strawberry peach shortcake 55 cents; golden pumpkin pie 40 cents; baked Wenatchee pie 35 cents, hot apple or mince pie 35 cents and half Florida grapefruit 20 cents. Pure browned ham hash was 85 cents; baked halibut steak $1.65. On the front, another sheet suggests ‘Ocean fresh oysters from Shelter Island’ in various forms ranging from 65 cents to $1.75. ‘Just yesterday at the break of dawn, glad was their heart as they joyfully played, deep in the water of Gardiner Bay …’
Condition: The menu is near mint condition with few signs of use and no abuse. There are no tears or stains. There is only very minor edge wear.
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