What’s on the Menu, curated by Frank Luca with materials contributed by Vicki Gold Levi, is the current exhibition at the Library of The Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach. There are two sections: The first, as Luca writes in his blog, “examines how restaurant and dinner club owners took advantage of new print technologies and graphic design strategies to create alluring menu covers and printed marketing materials to promote their venues.”
The second, titled Dinner and a Show, focuses on the covers of menus and programs used by restaurant, cabaret and nightclub owners to pack their venues with patrons hungry not only for food, but for entertainment provided by celebrity performers, risqué vaudeville comedians, titillating burlesque dancers and glamorous showgirls.
In selecting from Levi’s wealth of material for the exhibition, Luca was “struck by just how many venues used images of scantily clad showgirls on their promotional pieces as their chief form of appeal.” In the 1930s, many American nightclub owners looked to the Moulin Rouge and other famous Parisian cabarets as a model for attracting customers. The glamorous Chez Paree nightclub opened in the Streeterville neighborhood of Chicago in 1932 and pulled in patrons for more than two-and-a-half decades by offering fine meals served with a side of vaudeville and chorus girl dancing.
Defying the Depression, in the mid-1930s a business conglomerate (including Lou Walters – father of the late Barbara Walters . . . yes that one) created a chain of stylish dinner clubs with venues in Chicago, New York, London and Miami Beach. From Luca: “Taking over the vacant Rainbow Gardens theater on Lawrence Avenue and North Clark Street in Chicago, they commissioned Jules Stein and Corlett Huff to redesign, redecorate and reopen it in the summer of 1934 as the French Casino. Stein, who served as president of the Music Corporation of America, hired Clifford Fischer, the legendary booking agent and producer of the Ambassadeurs theater/restaurant in Paris, to organize, import and tour a French-inspired cabaret floor show (the “Revue Folies Bergere”) as touring entertainment for the clubs”. Ooh la la.
“The popularity of Chicago’s French Casino likely contributed to the proliferation of other French-themed cabaret clubs in this era,” Luca notes—but they may also have been inspired by the release in February 1935 and April 1936 of two Maurice Chevalier films, The Man From the Folies Bergere and Folies Bergere, perpetuating the French cabaret craze in America.