Evening on the Farm

This 1948 lunch menu was used in Grand Canyon’s El Tovar Hotel, which was owned by Santa Fe and leased to Fred Harvey. The menu has seven entrées that appear on both the a la carte and table d’hôte sides, including haddock; bacon and eggs; lamb stew; pot roast; turkey a la king; Thuringer sausage; and a cold plate. Table d’hôte adds 50 cents to the price of a meal; multiply prices by eleven to get today’s dollars.

Click image to download a 1.0-MB PDF of this menu.

The cover painting, explains the back, was by Nebraska-born artist Dale Nichols (1904-1995). Like most Santa Fe/Fred Harvey artists, he studied art at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, an early name for the Art Institute of Chicago. The blurb on the back of the menu describes his style as “down-to-earth superrealism,” but a couple of decades later superrealism would come to mean paintings that are practically indistinguishable from photographs. I haven’t been able to find a formal name for his painting style, so I’ll just call it Midwestern landscape style.


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