This fabulous menu cover, in shades of blue that seem to shimmer, is from New Orleans' famous Hotel Monteleone. For more than a hundred years, the hotel has been offering hospitality to its guests and this post-Prohibition bar menu is both lovely to look at and interesting to read. The menu offers flips, egg nogs and fizzes. There are more than 50 types of whiskeys and a handsome selection of gins, liqueurs and cordials.
Dated to the 1930s, the menu advertises "The New Cocktail Lounge and Bar," probably opened in honor of the fact that everyone could safely buy and sell alcohol again. This menu pre-dates the hotel's famous revolving Carousel Bar, which was installed in 1949.
Antonio Monteleone, a Sicilian shoemaker, founded the hotel in 1880. From modest beginnings, the property has undergone many expansions but is still owned today by the Monteleones. It remains one of the last, great family-owned hotels in the United States.
Because of its literary connections –the hotel has been mentioned in many novels by southern writers and Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote stayed here – it was designated as an official literary landmark by the Friends of The Library Association.
