Astor House: What's For Dinner?

While researching details for some of the articles here I've been stumbling over a few scans of menus for the Astor House restaurants. There are enough of them to warrant their own post.

It's not clear at this point where the food was served, as there were several possible dining locations - the bar downstairs closest to the Garden Bridge had for some time a buffet and probably also always offered food to order. Then there is the large restaurant upstairs with its fans and glass ceiling which was available for three meals a day, and in addition there were also several private dining rooms plus two banquet rooms. There is also a reference to a "Grill Room" as a second restaurant on the premises.

All through the early 1900s the Astor House seems to have served mostly French cuisine and from the occasional mention in newspapers it seems to have been held in high regard in Shanghai.

Let's take a look at what's for dinner or tiffin over the years... starting with 1904.

Here we have the oldest menu I've been able to locate - from November 18th, 1904. This one came together with a very large wine list not matched by any of the later menus.

The overall theme is solidly French inspired western cuisine as one might find it in a nice restaurant in London or New York with a selection of entrees. The "Salmi of Teal" made me stop short for a moment, but this must surely be a typo - a salmi of veal is a veal roast that had been sliced and then reheated in a sauce.

The Chicken à la Chasseur is sautéed chicken served in a rich sauce containing mushrooms, tomatoes, onions or shallots and wine.

Dinner - I guess a course of Soup, choice of Entree, Roast, Vegetables and Desert - cost $1.50. In 1904 the US Dollar was widely accepted in Shanghai, but Mexican Dollars and Chinese Yuan (both tied to the US Dollar via silver exchange rates) were also in use. If we assume this is a US Dollar price, than dinner would have cost around $50 in today's money. Clearly a very nice meal!

This menu is from April 25th 1906 and was probably a fixed meal card for an event dinner in the banquet hall. It offers a choice of three entrees, two bird roasts (woodcock and turkey), salad and desert. The strawberry parfait feels a little early in the season in April - maybe they imported strawberries from further south.

Next we have a dinner menu from June 17th 1906, which has a neat photo triptych design that was probably printed first in bulk with a blank space on the side for the daily menu print run. The photos here are all look like they are landscape scenes from along Soochow Creek outside of Shanghai.

The menu is solidly in the French category, but the language has been toned down compared to the 1904 effort. The Cabinet Pudding is not something I had heard before - it's steamed version of what we'd call a bread pudding nowadays with maybe a few more decorative fruit and heavy with eggs and cream.

The price has gone up quite dramatically since 1904 - dinner is now $2, which translates inflation adjusted to about $75 nowadays.

In a strange coincidence we do have a tiffin (lunch) menu for just the next day, June 18th, 1906. It has the same layout as the menu from the day before, but with different photos for the triptych that offer a rare glimpse into areas of the Astor House.

The top photo is the main banquet hall set up with rows of round tables for a dining event. The middle photo is a very rare look at the garden across from the lobby entrance on the bank of Soochow Creek, which will make space for the Russian Consulate ten years later. The bottom photo is something that looks like a smoking lounge, which must be upstairs in the east wing along Astor Road.

Tiffin costs $1.50 in 1906, so that is roughly $50 in today's money.

Only a year later the fancy design of the menus is gone again, replaced with a much simpler card, here for dinner on May 7th, 1907. The price for dinner stayed the same since the year before.

To pick one dish I was unfamiliar with, Roastbeef Garni is roastbeef topped with a herb mixture consisting mostly of oregano, thyme, clove and orange peel. The more you know.

Four years later on December 14th 1911, the Astor House advertises its restaurant outright as Restaurant Francais. The menu is back to a full sheet, with a wider selection of dishes in both French and English in side-by-side columns.

The price for dinner has gone down dramatically, to now $1.25, which would be $44 in 2026 dollars.

As far as the food is concerned, Solferino Soup is typically a tomato soup with chunks of veggies, beans and potentially meat in it. Sounds pretty tasty, actually.

We jump ahead ten years to April 27th, 1921, to one of the worst crimes against typography I've ever encountered. This is an event menu from most likely a dinner banquet and many of the guests must have starved while trying to decipher this menu set in the font family "Apocalypto Gothic".

As far as unusually named food, "Saratoga Chips" is what potato chips were called in the late 1800s - and apparently into the 1920s - as they were supposedly invented in Saratoga.

It's May 4th 1927, and we are sitting down for dinner in the Grill Room. I imagine this restaurant to be a little more intimate, darker and a bit smoky. Perfect for a quiet meal among friends or lovers.

The menu is now back to narrow card stock with an internationalized French-inspired selection of food. The price has gone back up - $3.50 would be around $67 dollars today.

If you are as ignorant of fine food as me - Rissoles of Turkey Perigourdine are turkey burger patties with French herbs. But what I'd really love to try is the Moka Cake.

We are back in the Astor House for tiffin one year later on July 27th of 1928. The menu is now making a big distinction between hot and cold dishes and there are some special rules for dinner hours at the bottom - Wednesdays and Saturdays were horse racing days, and diners were pouring in hungry by 7:30pm.

The food generally seems to be a bit on the heavy side. No prices for any of the food... if you need to ask, it's probably too expensive for you. The only thing with a price is quite something: A tall glass of iced tea sets you back 40 cents - that's around $7.50 in 2026 money.

We've seen this menu card from April 2nd 1932 before - it was a special tiffin for the passengers of the S.S. Resolute on their stop in Shanghai. Special lunch in one of the banquet rooms, no prices. Apple Pie Chantilly still sounds worth the round the world trip.

Our last menu is from July 14th, 1936. The tiffin price has been remarkably stable over the years - now at $2, roughly $48 today. The design is interesting with a rather daring border and the logo of the Hong Kong Shanghai Hotels group presented boldly.

The food is noticeably simpler, only vaguely hidden by the French names. Shanghai was in an uneasy peace with regular murders and random shootings in the streets. Food was available, but I imagine deliveries of food from the farms out of town were limited as the routes into the city were not safe.

One clue to the limited food supply: A special at the bottom features Honey Dew Melon for $1 per portion - that's $24 in 2026!

That's all the Astor House menus I could find online, but I'm sure there are lots more in collections. I will add more menus to this page as I find them.

But for now, Bon Appétit!