By complete accident of algorithm, I recently discovered that the Hudson Valley’s Culinary Institute of America has a website featuring historic menus, and happily some of them are from local institutions. So here’s one, unfortunately without a specific date, from Schenectady’s Van Curler Hotel. When the Van Curler was opened in 1925, it was a concerted effort by local business interests to upgrade the lodging offerings for what had become an industrial powerhouse of a city that lacked anything like a grand hotel at the time. Located a more restful distance from the trains than the city’s other hotels, still concentrated closer to the recently closed canal and railroad tracks, the Van Curler quickly become the dining and lodging center of civic affairs in the Electric City.
The front of the menu doesn’t even feature an image of the hotel, instead featuring a sign logo for the American Hotels Corporation, which owned or operated quite a number of prominent city hotels around the country. The J. Leslie Kincaid who is listed as the president, was a Syracuse-born lawyer who served in the Assembly and as the state’s Adjutant General prior to this.
It’s always interesting to see what was on offer at what would have been considered a premiere restaurant in the city at the time. It’s less useful to focus on the prices, unless you’re willing to look at what the average household was earning at the same time. Let’s just guess that this was from 1928 – if that’s the case, the average entry wage for common labor (all industries) was 42.8 cents per hour –meaning that lettuce and tomato salad cost a bit more than an hour’s wage. This was, of course, dining for the better off.
Other than turtle soup (or even mock turtle soup), welsh rarebit, and perhaps the salt mackerel, there’s little here that wouldn’t be familiar to us now. As someone who for many years personally thought that chicken and waffles was something made up in a movie, I’m a bit surprised to find it on the menu close to home and years before my time.
The back of the menu features a listing of all the hotels owned and/or operated by The American Hotels Corporation and The United Hotels Company of America. Founded by Frank Alonzo Dudley in Niagara Falls in 1910, locally they owned The Van Curler, The Hendrick Hudson and Troy Hotel in Troy, and The Ten Eyck in Albany.
The menu below, happily, is dated very specifically: Friday, October 14, 1927, with a bit more detail on a number of the items:
And included with that generous listing was a special – South American partridges:
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