Mountain Monarchs Lunch Menu

Dated February, 1944, this menu is the earliest I’ve found in Rio Grande’s series of menus with color photos pasted on the front cover. This cover photo is, I’m afraid, less than inspiring. Why is there a fence in the foreground? Why are the mountains so far away when the Rio Grande was the main Colorado railroad that actually went “through the mountains, not around them”?

Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this menu.

The backs of this series of menus usually have lengthy captions describing the cover photo. This one isn’t so lengthy because most of the back is devoted to bragging about how efficient the Rio Grande has been during the war years, hauling more freight and passengers despite having less equipment than a few years before.

Reflecting wartime rationing, the menu has fewer items than would have been found on a prewar or immediately postwar menu. There are just three table d’hôte entrées: fish, chicken, and pork chops, and even then an asterisk says that some other “available meat” might have to substitute for the pork chops. The a la carte side at least has trout, but beyond that entrées are limited to a few sandwiches, salads, and “eggs, any style.”


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