The Royal York Hotel

When Canadian Pacific opened Toronto’s Royal York Hotel in 1929, it was the largest hotel in the British Empire with 1,048 rooms. This dining car menu, which was used on a 1938 American Express “Banner Tour of the West,” says that the hotel somehow managed to grow to 1,200 rooms by that year.

Click image to download a 1.3-MB PDF of this menu.

Dated July 5, 1938, the menu offered a choice of salmon Hollandaise, roast lamb, chicken pot pie, or pineapple fritter along with the usual soup, salad, potatoes, vegetable, dessert, and beverage. Whoever collected this menu was apparently an attractive young woman as a Mike Bryce wrote his address in Portsmouth, Virginia for her to remember and someone else autographed the menu with the message, “To a swell gal with a swell brand of toilet water, all’s forgiven.”


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